by Bryan Camp
Aching and straining at the bindings that held her together, Renai didn’t realize they’d reached their destination until the ghouls tipped her upright and let her slide to the ground. She stayed on her feet, but she was so tightly restrained by their dead hands that they might as well have held her overhead. Thankfully, she was able to move her head, so she could see where the ghouls had brought them.
The ghouls had crowded together onto a raised wooden walkway, the flat, open area broken up at regular intervals by waist-high structures that revealed themselves, after a few moments of peering into the darkness, to be picnic tables. The crowd of ghouls surrounding them were so still and silent that Renai could hear the murmur of insects in the oaks and cypress trees sprawling overhead, the soft swish and drip of water beneath the boards at their feet, and the buzz and mutter of the crowds enjoying the festivities, way too far off to be of any help. Regal was being held to Renai’s left, blood streaming from her nose, Leon to Renai’s right, his shirt torn and his breath coming in shallow gasps, like it hurt him to breathe.
Lights sparked to life, revealing a squat one-story building with a wooden overhang and a sign featuring a man in a ridiculous chef’s hat stirring a pot, the words CYPRESS KNEE CAFE in two different fonts. Renai knew, then, where they were, and huffed out a laugh in spite of herself. Even if they managed to get away from the ghouls holding them, they’d have to use the walkways in and out of this place to get out. Either that, or go over the railing and fuck with the gators roaming the duckweed-filled waters of the Louisiana Swamp Exhibit.
The man who called himself Jack Elderflower sat at one of the tables on the far side of the cafe’s dining area. He wore a green T-shirt with NEUTRAL GROUND SIDE written on it in gold letters, jeans so dark a blue that they had to be brand-new, and a pair of flip-flops. He smiled and gave them a casual half-wave, his ass on the table and his feet on the bench, just a casual bro waiting for his peeps to show. Renai half expected him to offer them a beer.
“So glad you all could make it,” he said. “These guys are great at following orders, but they are absolute shit at polite dinner conversation.” He made a grabbing you-there-come-here gesture that Renai could easily picture him doing at a waiter, and two of the ghouls stepped forward. One handed him Regal’s flame-throwing bat; the other held Leon’s trumpet. “Oh, and you brought gifts. How thoughtful. I look forward to taking these little trinkets apart and seeing how they work.” He tipped a wink in their direction. “Sort of my thing, you know.”
Elderflower set the bat down on the table and hopped up, revealing a bound and gagged Opal Brennan lying on the table behind him. She was unconscious, but her chest rose and fell. From what Renai could see, she hadn’t been harmed. Elderflower walked toward them slowly, one hand cupping his elbow, the other tapping a finger against his lips, as if he were debating what to do with the three of them. This whole experience, being bound and helpless in the dead of night, reminded Renai of the night five years ago when she’d faced Cross and Criminel in Audubon Park with Jude Dubuisson’s Essence rattling around in her mind. There was something important about that night, something she needed to remember.
Smiling at her with a warmth that didn’t touch his empty, soulless eyes, Elderflower peeled the amputated ghoul’s hand away from Renai’s mouth and let it fall with a thump to the wood floor. “You and I have much to discuss,” he said.
“I have your coin,” Renai said, blurting it out as soon as the thought occurred to her. “It’s right here in one of my jacket pockets.”
Elderflower’s brow furrowed in confusion for a moment. “Ah,” he said, his face uncreasing, “the coin of Destiny I asked you to bring me.” He wrinkled his nose in an exaggerated gesture of distaste. “Never had much use for one of those, not even my own. You want to know the secret to immortality? The heart of all alchemical study?” He leaned in, so close she learned that Regal was right about his breath smelling like shit. “You step off the wheel of luck and destiny,” he whispered in her ear, a forced intimacy that made her shudder.
He leaned back and grinned at her, mistook her revulsion for something else. “I burned out every scrap of Fortune from my soul centuries ago. It’s what enables me to demonstrate free will, while the rest of you pull the yoke and obey every tug of the reins. I am what you might be, were you able to cast off the shackles of the gods.” He held up a finger, a teacher emphasizing a point to an inattentive student. “What I truly needed was something that would convince you to carry that stone around so I could keep an eye on you.”
Though she’d suspected this very thing, the truth still tasted bitter in Renai’s mouth. “So you’ve been working for that skank Cordelia all along.”
He reached out and tapped the tip of Renai’s nose with his knuckle. “You’re starting to get it! But, skank, really? Discordia is a goddess of primordial night, show a little respect.”
“If she’s so divine,” Renai said, “what’s she using a scrub like you for?” Despite the fact that it obviously pained him, Leon laughed behind the hand of the ghoul restraining him. Regal muttered something and, knowing Renai wouldn’t understand her, winked to show her support.
“As with everything else, Renaissance Raines, you’ve gotten it wrong. Discordia is not using me, I am using her. You see, everything we told you was the truth. There’s a storm coming.”
Renai’s stomach clenched when he said that. Hurricane season would end in a month, but everyone in the city knew how powerful a late hurricane could be. Some part of her fear must have shown on her face, because Elderflower waved at her, like he was shooing away a gnat.
“No,” he said, “no mere temporary collision of wind and flood. The destruction she will awaken is stronger than that little twist of magic you’ve got living inside of you, more devastating than any hurricane. The kind of storm that will sweep clean the face of the Earth. If I’m going to survive it, and I have every intention of doing so, then I’m going to have to see what’s coming. No amount of stolen destiny will accomplish that. For that sort of prescience”—he aimed a thumb at the unconscious woman lying on the table behind him—“you need the eyes of an oracle.” Elderflower’s tone left absolutely no doubt. He meant it literally. Opal wasn’t just the bait to lure Renai here, she was the fee for his service to Cordelia.
That realization tipped the scales in Renai’s internal struggle, and as the rage filled her, so did the spirit’s power. She let the winds come pouring out of her, their passage a different kind of strain on the strings binding her separate selves together, a pain that was almost pleasurable in its sharp sting. She let the tempest’s power build, the wind making the ghouls sway and stagger for balance, and—
Felt the power pour out of her faster than she intended, faster than it had ever gone before. Elderflower bared his teeth in a gesture that was far more snarl than smile. He held up a hand to show her the brass and iron ring that circled his index finger, a signet inscribed with the Seal of Solomon—a hexagram encircled and inscribed with the words of binding that the ancient king had used to command spirits, djinn, and demons—that glowed bright red as it absorbed the storm spirit. Renai tried to grasp hold of it, to stem its rush out of her, but it was too late. The last shreds of the spirit that had lived inside of her since her resurrection went spilling out of her and into Jack Elderflower’s ring.
“And, that’s checkmate,” he said, rubbing his hands together in obnoxious glee. “Though, really, I feel like I’ve been playing chess while you three have been playing checkers. It was all right there in front of you. There’s only one reason we’d need that boy to carry the revolver for us. Only one place we could be sending him. And you never—”
He sighed and fell silent, hands on his hips. “Nothing to add? No threats to make, no mercy to beg for? I have to admit I was hoping for a little more stimulating conversation than this. It’s not like I can let these two speak”—he aimed a finger at Regal and the other at Leon—“one of them being the Voice of New Orleans,
and the other being a vicious cunt from whose mouth I never want to hear another word.” Regal shouted something into the corpse hand of her own ghoul, the words muffled but the meaning clear. That thought triggered Renai’s memory of the fight against the loa in Audubon Park, where she’d learned a potent magical word from the mind of Jude Dubuisson, the same word she’d heard Regal shout earlier that day when they’d fought a ruin animated by spirits.
“I don’t know much about checkers or chess,” Renai said.
Elderflower’s face fell, and his eyes lids fluttered in disgust. “No, see, it was a metaphor—”
“Because the game my family always played was Hearts,” she said, smiling at him, knowing that this wouldn’t work if she didn’t believe it would work. “And in my house, you never gloated until the last card was played, or else you got hit with the bitch.” And then she shouted the word in that strange, unknown language that she and Regal had both learned from a fortune god, the magic word whose power Regal had bound into the wood grain of a miniature baseball bat like it was a magic wand.
The word that meant burn.
Liquid fire came spewing out of the end of Regal’s baseball bat, arcing across the wooden picnic tables and the wooden floor of the raised walkway and landing at the feet of a handful of ghouls, none of whom possessed the self-awareness to back away from the roaring flames, standing unnaturally still even as they burned. Elderflower spun around and threw out his hand, the one wearing the brass and iron ring. Smoke streamed out from the ring, some of it gray as morning fog, some of it black as oil.
But Renai didn’t wait to see how Elderflower intended to stop the fire. She arched her back and twisted her wrist, angling it so that the blade of her black knife—when she reached into the nowhere place and pulled it out—would slice through the forearm of the ghoul holding her arm. A rush of wind and a huge splash and the stagnant funk of swamp rot told her that she was almost out of time, so she thrashed and cut the other hand that held her, and then was falling free and landing on her knees—a jarring pain that made her eyes water—and she slipped the blade back into the nowhere place and dug in the pocket of her jacket—
Only to be dragged back to her feet by one of the ghouls, its dead hand clamped around her neck. She grabbed its wrist, an involuntary response, her body fighting back even though her mind knew it was hopeless. Renai stared into its eyes, cataract milky and unseeing. Her other hand, though, fumbled in her pocket, found the medicine bottle, and—struggling with the safety catch on the top—crushed its thin plastic in her fist, trying not to picture the hand on her neck doing the same thing to her throat. She tore open the cigarette with her thumbnail, sifting through the loose tobacco leaves for a thin sliver of metal.
Another hand clamped over her wrist, this one warm and pulsing with life. Renai turned and looked into Jack Elderflower’s empty white eyes. He sneered. A glance over his shoulder showed the steaming, smoldering tables and deck, soaked from where he’d ordered a demon or a Shadow or a djinn—whatever he chose to call that shapeless creature of will and magic he shackled to his command—to douse the flames from Regal’s flame-throwing bat with a wave of swamp water. Leon and Regal struggled and fought, but as Renai knew all too well, there was no fighting the dead.
Elderflower forced Renai’s hand out of her pocket, twisting her arm so that he could see what was in her fist. For maybe the first time, Renai saw a genuine expression cross his face: surprise. “A cigarette? Seriously? What, were you hoping to give me cancer?”
Renai pulled in a breath to answer him and found, to her pleasure if not her surprise, that she had no difficulty breathing, that the ghoul was holding her by the neck, but not squeezing. She feigned a struggle anyway, wheezing a little and whispering the lyrics to “I Kissed a Girl,” so quietly that she knew Elderflower wouldn’t be able to hear her clearly. He leaned in, his smile more ghastly than the corpse that held her neck. “Last words,” he said as he leaned in, letting go of her arm to lean on the railing behind her. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment.”
“You have waited,” Renai agreed, all pretense of weakness gone from her voice, “for far too long.” And then she jabbed him in the neck with the shard of metal that was the last, final piece of what had once been an entire destiny. The sliver of Fortune that held only the moment of his death. He blinked once, eyes open just long enough for Renai to see that all along, Jack Elderflower’s eyes were a very nice shade of blue, and then he slipped to the ground, having finally reached the end of his long, long life.
Regal and Leon both shouted, their voices muffled by the ghouls still holding them fast. They were, as far as she could tell, celebrating their victory, believing what Elderflower had shown them. Thinking that he was in control, and his death meant that they’d won this round. Renai allowed herself a grim smile, but she knew what they didn’t—what they couldn’t know—that their fight was far from finished. She looked away when their struggles against the ghouls’ restraint turned frantic, not wanting to see it on their faces when they began to realize what even Elderflower hadn’t known:
That these ghouls were animated by a power other than the spirits he’d commanded.
“You can let us go now,” Renai said, talking to the ghoul in front of her from force of habit but knowing that all of them would hear and speak with the same voice. “I know you weren’t really obeying that asshole.”
The hand gripping Renai’s neck relaxed just enough for her to pull free, and even though she knew anything that could possibly feel pain in the ghoul had died days ago, she kicked its leg as hard as she could. It didn’t do anything, but it made her feel better. Regal shoved her way free of her own restraint, and then Leon followed, doubling over almost immediately, a hand pressed to his side. Regal helped him up by draping his arm over her shoulder, and though his face twisted in agony, he rose to standing more or less straight up.
It was eerie, standing there amid a crowd of dead bodies. There could be no doubt that there was no life in them, they were too still, too vacant. And more than a few of them were starting to smell. “You want to tell us what the sweet goddamn is going on here?” Regal said, her voice hoarse from all the futile shouting she’d been doing. “I thought chuckle-fuck over there was the one controlling all these zom—” Leon wheezed something angry toward her. “All these walking corpses that are totally something other than zombies.”
“So did he,” Renai said. “He thought they obeyed him because of this.” She knelt down and pulled the iron and brass ring off of Elderflower’s limp finger. The moment it was in her hand, she felt the storm surge back into her: powerful, trembling, and pissed. She let it rage, even though it hurt a little, surprised at how much she’d missed its presence.
“See, there’s two kinds of ghouls,” she said, rising to her feet. “There’s the ones who are mistakes. The recently dead animated by some remnant of their former self. When you summoned me and said you had a ghoul problem, I figured that’s what we were dealing with. ’Pomps not able to get to the dead in time, and their spirits getting corrupted. If that was the case, then Elderflower’s ring would have let him command the spirits animating all these bodies.” She shrugged. “But then, being a psychopomp should have given me the authority to strike them down. And I couldn’t. Which means these are the other kind of ghoul, the kind animated by a specific, deliberate magic.”
Renai threaded her way through the unmoving crowd of dead, shuddering every time her wings brushed up against one of them. She checked on Opal, who was a little damp from where the swamp water had been splashed on her, but otherwise seemed okay. Aside from being kidnapped and unconscious, of course. Then she picked up the flame-throwing bat and Leon’s trumpet from where Elderflower had left them and brought them over to her—well, her friends, she supposed, though it had been a long time since she’d had any of those other than Sal—and gave them back.
“See,” she said, talking to them, but aiming her words at the ghouls around her, at the p
ower animating them, “the mistake I made was thinking that the ghoul I talked to in the morgue was all on his lonesome. A message, not a soldier. But now I see that there’s been another player in this game all along. And since we’re all T-for-tight with each other, why don’t you come out so we can talk face-to-face.” She held up the ring. “Or we can do this the other way.”
The mouth of every ghoul gaped open all at once, a hissing, whispering laugh echoing in the night air.
“That’s a sound I ain’t soon to forget,” Leon said, wincing when Regal jostled him in reply.
The ghoul closest to Renai, an overweight white man in a nice dark suit and an ugly mismatched tie, sagged to his knees and then tipped over onto his back. All the air came out of his lungs in a gargling, resigned sigh. A shape moved in the back of his throat, wriggling and scritching its way out of his mouth, climbing up the dead man’s swollen tongue and over his thick, bloodless lips. At first it was nothing, a dark shape in the corner of your eye, a trick of the light, and then it was a cockroach, long and fat and glossy black. Its quivering antennae flooded Renai with a sense of immediate revulsion.
The roach spread its wings and launched fluttering into the air, swooping first at Renai—which made her flinch back and squeeze out an involuntary grunt, not out of fear so much as desperation not to be touched by it—and then hovering a few feet away. One by one the ghouls around them dropped, let out their own foul gasps, expelled their own bugs. They fell into place alongside the first roach, first a handful, then a cloud, then a swarm. They were coming from everywhere now, squeezing out from under the door to the cafe, flooding up from the loose boards at their feet, descending from the branches overhead. They clung together in a shifting, grotesque mass—first two stumps and a trunk, then stretching out two spindly limbs, then bulging into a bulb on top—until it was obvious that they weren’t just an infestation but a facsimile of a person.