Gather the Fortunes E-Book

Bryan Camp

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The exciting sequel to the stunning debut, The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp.Renaissance Raines has found her place among the psychopomps – the guides who lead the souls of the recently departed through the Seven Gates of the Underworld – and done her best to avoid the notice of gods and mortals alike. But when a young boy named Ramses St. Cyr manages to escape his foretold death, Renaissance finds herself at the center of a deity-thick plot unfolding in New Orleans. Someone helped Ramses slip free of his destined end – someone willing to risk everything to steal a little slice of power for themselves.Is it one of the storm gods that's descended on the city? The death god who's locked the Gates of the Underworld? Or the manipulative sorcerer who also cheated Death? When she finds the schemer, there's gonna be all kinds of hell to pay, because there are scarier things than death in the Crescent City. Renaissance Raines is one of them.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Available from Bryan Camp and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Part One: This World

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Part Two: The Next World

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Part Three: The Far Lands

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

Part Four: As Above, So Below

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BRYAN CAMP AND TITAN BOOKS

The City of Lost Fortunes

BRYAN CAMP

TITAN BOOKS

Gather the Fortunes

Print edition ISBN: 9781789091229

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091236

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: May 2019

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 Bryan Camp. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Harold H., Gwen S., Michael, Richard, and Betty B., Richard C., Bruce I., Mary R., Judy O., and all the others who have made the journey ahead of us

PART ONE

THIS WORLD

WHEN DEATH COMES, he carries a tool for harvesting grain slung over his shoulder, his skeletal form swallowed by a billowing black cloak. And she descends from the heavens astride a magnificent horse, blood-flecked armor glinting in the light of a battlefield sunset, to carry a fallen warrior away to an everlasting feast. And he leads the way to the Scales of Judgment with his human arms stretched wide in welcome, while his scavenger’s eyes stare down the length of his jackal’s muzzle, weighing and hungry. And she waits — either hideously ugly or unspeakably beautiful depending on the way you lived your life — on the far side of a bridge that is either a rainbow or the Milky Way or both, a span that is either treacherous and thin as a single plank of wood, or wide and sturdy and safe, whichever you have earned. They are sparrows and owls, dolphins and bees, dogs and ravens and whippoorwills. They are the familiar faces of ancestors who have gone before, they are luminous beings of impossible description, and they are the random firings of synapses as the fragile spark of life fades to nothing. He is a moment all must experience. She is a figure to be both feared and embraced. They are the concept that rules all others; a constant, like entropy, like the speed of light. Death is both an end and a transition. Simultaneously a crossing over and the guide on that journey, one that is unique to each individual and yet the same for all. Death is able to be every one of these and more — all at once without conflict or contradiction — because death is the end of all conflicts, is beyond contradictions. Both nothing and everything.

The only thing Death has never been is lonely.

* * *

One of those many contradictions, a young woman named Renaissance Raines, waited for death in a neighborhood dive bar named Pal’s, scratching the label off a warm half-finished bottle of Abita with her thumbnail, unnoticed and sober and bored. She sat in one of the high-backed swivel chairs at the long bar that took up most of the main room, facing a back-lit altar of liquor bottles that glowed beneath a couple of flat-screen TVs and the chalkboards advertising drink specials. The wall behind her held a few small, two-person tables that were empty in the early afternoon but wouldn’t stay that way for much longer. Bright blue walls rose to a high orange ceiling illuminated by lights that tapered down to points in a way that reminded Renai of spinning tops. The life of the bar shifted around her — the electronic jingle and chirp of the digital jukebox in the corner, the brash, too-loud laughter coming from the handful of mostly white college kids playing air hockey in the back, the warmer, subdued conversation between a quartet of locals, an older black couple, a white woman holding a tiny, trembling dog, and a middle-aged Native American guy bellied up to the bar, a swirl of cigarette smoke in the air, the soft whir of ceiling fans overhead — and though breath filled her lungs and blood pulsed in her veins, she was as a ghost to all of it. She spoke to no one, shared no one’s companionable silence, sent no texts to check on anyone’s arrival, made no attempts to catch a stranger’s eye. If anyone looked at Renai long enough to really see her — her dark brown skin taut with youth and free of laugh or frown lines, her full cheeks that dimpled with the slightest of smiles, her loose coils of hair, usually allowed to hang down along her jawline but today pulled and wound into a bun on each side of her head, her slender runner’s frame lost in the depths of a thick leather jacket despite the heat that still hadn’t relaxed its grip even in late October — they’d wonder if she was old enough to drink the beer in her hand. She knew nobody would, though.

Most people didn’t really seem to notice her at all these days. She hadn’t gotten carded when she came in, no one had stopped her when she’d slipped behind the counter and taken a beer from the cooler. If she took her hand off the bottle and left it on the counter, the bartender would scoop it up and drop it in the trash. If she switched chairs to sit right next to the locals — or even leaned in between them — so long as she didn’t touch them, they’d keep talking as if she wasn’t there. If she interrupted, if she tapped someone on the shoulder, if she shattered one of the TVs with a thrown glass and shrieked with all her might, they’d see her, briefly, giving her the unfocused, confused look of a person shaken awake. If she stopped talking or touching them, though, they’d turn back to whatever they were doing, unsettled, maybe, but with Renai already on her way to being forgotten.

Life just wasn’t the same since her resurrection.

The details of her untimely end and her unusual return were still frustratingly hazy for her, even though she’d had years to try and remember. She had only a scatter of disconnected, vivid, and hard-to-trust flashes of memory to try to piece together. A moment of violence in a familiar room. A difficult journey across a place that was somehow both New Orleans and somewhere else. An eerie black streetcar that didn’t exist in the living world. A moment of choice — though not the specifics of the choice she’d made — in front of a pair of huge empty chairs: the Thrones that embodied Death. Rising again in a concrete tomb with another voice in her head: that of a Trickster named Jude. His body hanging upside down in a tree in Audubon Park. A Red Door that filled her with dread. None of it fit together into a narrative that made any sense to her.

What she knew for sure was that she’d died late one night in August 2011 and woke up some random morning that September in a bed not her own with the feeling that many days had passed without her knowing, like she’d fought through an intense illness whose fever had just broken. Over the days and weeks and months and years that followed, she’d discovered that her new existence carried consequences: what she’d come to think of as the aura of disinterest that surrounded her, these snapshots of her experiences in the Underworld burned into her memory, and a strange, profound distance from the world around her. She hadn’t been dead long, less than a week, but that was enough to destroy everything she had been. Family and friends had buried her. Certificates had been signed. Mourners had mourned. And then, before she had a chance to return to it, her world had moved on.

She’d been brought back to life, just not to her own.

Renai gulped down a couple of mouthfuls of Abita as if her thoughts had left a bad taste in her mouth. She grimaced at the lukewarm beer and considered swiping a cold one. What she really wanted, she realized, was heat. Coffee, tea, lit gasoline; anything that might ease the chill that had burrowed deep within her since her resurrection.

“Least she got some kind of justice,” the Native American guy said, with a hint of an accent Renai couldn’t place, just enough to guess he wasn’t from here. “Too little, too late, but better than nothing.”

For a moment Renai thought he was talking about her, but of course he couldn’t be. He didn’t even know she was in the room. She’d been half listening to their conversation while she brooded, though, so it didn’t take long for her to realize that they were still talking about the young woman who’d been murdered in this very bar a few years ago whose killer had just been convicted. Their maudlin discussion turned to the dead girl’s last words, and Renai spun her chair to face away from them. She didn’t need to listen to the rest of it to know what they’d say. The final sounds that passed across most people’s lips were either a plea for more time, or a question they’d never hear answered.

Renai had heard plenty of both in the past five years.

When she was just about to leave some cash for her beer — she had no fear of being caught, but her momma hadn’t raised no thief — and make her way across town to what she was in this bar avoiding, the door to the men’s room swung open, and one of the college guys came barreling out. “Brah,” he shouted to his friends, “you gotta check this shit out! There’s, like, seventies porn all over the walls!”

“Wait till your ol’ lady meets Burt in the little girl’s room,” Renai muttered, referring to the picture of a nude Burt Reynolds reclining on a bearskin rug that hung over the bathroom sink.

As though in response to her words, Renai heard a man’s chuckle come from behind the bar. She glanced over and saw a brown-skinned older man who was, simply put, unfortunate-looking. He had a large, bulbous nose that looked like it had been broken twice as often as it had been set, and an obnoxious set of ears, too wide, too long, and oddly flat at the top. His eyes were either too small for his face or just dwarfed by the combination of the nose and ears. He wore a dark blue button-down work shirt with the name SETH embroidered over his chest pocket in gold thread. He twisted a washrag inside a pint glass with the deft, unconscious motions of someone who’d done it for years.

To her surprise, he seemed to actually see her, grinned at her, even. “Yeah you right,” he said, all one word like he was born here. “Mr. Reynolds done made more than one lady question her choice of companion over the years.” He set the glass down and rested his hands on the bar, leaning in closer to make his next statement quiet and conspiratorial. “Though a pretty young thing like you might just convince him to hop down off that wall and buy you a drink.”

Renai opened her mouth to answer, but something made her hesitate. He felt off somehow. Wrong. Not girl-grab-your-shit-and-run bad, but definitely worth choosing her words with care. It could be the fact that he’d noticed her at all that set her spidey sense tingling, but she had spoken. He might just have really sensitive hearing. Death had rendered her hard to notice, not completely undetectable. Nor was it the creepy thing he’d said, though gross bartender pickup lines were always cause for concern. As were the scattered designs inked across his taut forearms, which had the simple line-drawing look of prison tattoos. No, Renai realized, following the stretch of his arms down to the bar, it was his hands that had thrown her off.

Seth’s hands were filthy.

He had dirty shadows beneath his too-long nails, and some red substance was crusted into his cuticles and packed into the folds of skin at his knuckles. Renai’s heart clenched at the sight of it, her thoughts leaping to images of Seth wrist-deep in a pool of blood — but no, she reminded herself, blood dried a darker, browner shade than what stained Seth’s hands. This was soil: thick red clay. Her imagination shifted her horror-movie scenario to one of Seth burrowing down into the earth.

Or out of a grave.

That, coupled with his ability to see her at all, made her think that Seth was more than he appeared. “What are you?” she asked. It wasn’t a polite question to ask in the world of myths and gods that she’d been resurrected into, but she had places to be and no time for games. Besides, if he didn’t want rude, he shouldn’t have called her a “thing.”

“As you can see here,” he said, tapping a sharp fingernail against the name on his shirt, “they call me Seth.”

She raised an eyebrow into an imperious arch, a feed-me-none-of-your-bullshit gesture. “I can read, boo, but I guess you can’t hear too good.” She let a little Ninth Ward creep into her voice, knowing people tended to underestimate you if your dialect sounded a certain way. “Code switching,” the Internet called it. “Cooning,” her mother would have said, after kissing her teeth. “With them filthy hands of yours, I think we both know you ain’t no bartender, and since nobody in here seen us talking, I guess you ain’t exactly human, neither. So what are you? Psychopomp? Zombie? Jiang Shi? You here on your own, or did the Thrones send you?”

Seth smiled, his teeth crowded and uneven, and all pretense of humanity slid away from him. He didn’t have a vampire’s fangs or a ghoul’s obscene tongue or a wendigo’s fetid breath. His smile wasn’t even threatening. But in Seth’s sly, effortless conviction, Renai saw the kind of knowledge and power no mortal could possess.

“You,” he said, “are exactly the person I was led to believe you would be.” His voice had changed, too, the drawl of a local’s accent replaced by the clipped non-accent of someone so profoundly educated that regional markers had been bleached from his vowels.

See what happens when you try and play a player, she thought.

He reached into the chest pocket of his work shirt and pulled out a long, thin strip of paper, curled in on itself like it had once been rolled into a tight little cylinder. He set it on the bar next to her beer bottle, but kept it pinned beneath his soiled finger. “I’m going to request a favor of you now.”

That word, favor, resonated in her chest in a way that made her hold her next breath. In this new reality in which she’d found herself, one where myths walked the streets of New Orleans and magic was possible, Renai had learned that things like wealth and power had little to do with the accumulation of material possessions or hoarding of currency, and far more to do with will — with one’s ability to impact the world. Trading one action for another was the coin of the realm. The fact that he just assumed that she would want what he was offering told her she wasn’t dealing with some pitiful undead who had scraped up just enough magic to be able to resist death’s grip. No, she got the feeling that Seth was talking about divine favor.

Because whatever he called himself, Renai was pretty sure that this ugly, grimy-handed bartender was a god.

Renai chewed at her lip until she realized she was doing it and made herself stop. “I’m listening,” she said.

“This is the name,” Seth said, “of someone whose well-being I consider significant, someone who will soon come into your realm of influence.”

“I don’t have the authority to let —”

Seth cut her off before she could finish by closing his eyes and shaking his head slowly, his mouth compressed to a thin line. She couldn’t read the gesture well enough to tell if he was disappointed in the conclusion she’d leapt to, or if she’d offended him simply by interrupting, but she could tell she’d misstepped somehow and it stole the voice from her.

When he opened his eyes, he had the squeezed, horizontal-slitted pupils of a goat.

“If I thought you might neglect your duty in pursuit of personal gain, I wouldn’t have approached you. I’m merely asking that you give the situation careful consideration and do your best to see that he is well-cared-for. Nothing more.”

Renai tried to swallow, her mouth suddenly dry. She was caught, she realized, between not trusting Seth’s cryptic proposition and not wanting to deny any god, especially not one who’d gone to the trouble of finding her. And also, whispered a voice she tried to deny, it would be pretty fucking sweet to have a literal deus ex machina in her back pocket. There were about a dozen questions whirling in her mind, but only two of desperate significance, and only one she had the courage to ask.

“Why me?”

Seth frowned, like the answer should be obvious. “Because Renai — if I may call you Renai — out of all your associates, you alone have a unique perspective.” He’d pronounced her nickname correctly, like it had two ee’s at the end, which made her think that he’d heard her name out loud, not read it. Most people saw that ai in her name and acted like it added a couple more syllables. Made her wonder who’d spoken her name to him and what else they’d had to say.

“You retain,” he continued, “the ability to question orders. You are still capable of compassion. Simply put, I’m speaking to you because, of all the others I might have asked, you alone are still alive.”

Oh, Renai thought, so when you said I was the personyou thought I would be, what you meant to say was that I’m Death’s Little Mistake. A flash of annoyance sparked within her, prompting her to ask the question she didn’t really want to ask.

“And if, after careful review of my options, I still make a choice you don’t like?”

Seth’s frown deepened, but he nodded, as if this, at last, was the question she ought to be asking. “Then you will have done me no favors, and so I will owe you none in return. I may offer some small token of gratitude for your time, if I believe your consideration was genuine, but I assure you that I won’t hold a grudge. I recognize that you are under obligations of your own.”

Wonder how small a token we’re talking about, she thought, and then heard, in her grandmother’s voice: Always free cheese in a mousetrap, but I ain’t never seen a mouse happy he found it. She looked down at his hand, as if she could read the name through the paper, as if it would matter either way if she could. Seth had the five dots of a quincunx inked in the place where his thumb joined his hand: four bluish pinpricks arranged in a square, a fifth in the center. Another jail tattoo, the dot in the center representing the prisoner surrounded by four walls. She couldn’t decide if the tattoos were part of the mask Seth wore to disguise his true form, or if they represented something profound about him. Couldn’t say which she thought would be worse. What choice did she really have, though?

Putting her hand close to his soiled skin made every muscle in her abdomen clench, but she reached out and took the slip of paper from him anyway. He made her tug it out from beneath his finger, keeping just enough pressure on the paper that if she pulled too fast it would tear. “I’m not saying yes,” she said, “and I’m not saying no. I’m just saying I’ll consider it.”

The ugly god smiled, warm and cheerful and genuine. “Excellent! I’m sure that when you see . . .” He trailed off, raising a hand as if to ward off what he’d intended to say. “No, I’ve spoken my piece. The decision must be yours.”

On the bar where she’d left it, her phone lit up and trilled, the alarm she’d set to remind herself when it was time to leave. When she looked up, Seth was gone. The paper remained in her hand, though: RAMSES ST. CYR. The name tickled at her, like it was one she should recognize. She silenced the alarm and slid her phone and the slip of paper into her jacket pocket, deciding to file this whole conversation under “shit to deal with later.”

Death waited for no one, after all.

Outside, her noble steed waited on the curb, black and gleaming and powerful. Murder and resurrection had stolen just about everything from Renai, but sometimes when the gods took with one hand, they gave with the other. The Thrones did, at least; they’d given her the leather jacket she wore — far more than the simple garment it appeared to be — and after she’d found that buses passed her by if she was the only one at the stop, they’d also given her a ride. Not a “steed” in the truest sense of the word — even Renai’s difficulty at being noticed probably wouldn’t hide a horse galloping through city streets — the Thrones’ gift had taken the shape of a motorcycle: a Honda Valkyrie. Unlike an actual motorcycle, though, this bike rumbled to life as soon as Renai swung a leg onto her, always seemed to know exactly where Renai wanted to go when she gripped the handlebars, and never ran out of gas. Renai called her Kyrie. She didn’t know how intelligent Kyrie was, or if she had an actual name of her own, or why the motorcycle felt so strongly like a “she.” She also chose not to think about what sort of fuel powered a motorcycle from the Underworld.

As Kyrie sped away from Pal’s with a roar that could only be called eager, it occurred to Renai that she avoided thinking about a lot these days. Her old life; her duties in this new one. The dead and the Thrones and the other gods she’d met, however briefly. The changes she’d endured since her resurrection. She’d made a habit of pushing it all down deep into the cold, empty well in the center of her, far enough from her present moment that she hardly thought about anything at all, letting one day bleed unexamined into the next. Years had gone by like this, with her learning almost nothing new about the world she’d found herself in, just doing as she was told. Following the rules she’d been given.

She leaned into the slide as Kyrie turned from Orleans onto Broad, leaving behind the green sprawling canopy of the live oaks growing in the neutral ground for a wide stretch of asphalt open to the afternoon sky. She patted her jacket pocket absently, making sure that she still had the slip of paper Seth had given her.

He had described a much different person than the one Renai saw in the mirror. Seemed to think she was capable of defiance when she didn’t even bother to question. But was it apathy that dictated her actions? Or fear?

Kyrie’s tires thumped and bucked over the streetcar tracks running down Canal, shaking away Renai’s thoughts. Those bumps meant she was almost there, so it was time to get her game face on. She unzipped a small pocket on the front of her jacket that she never used — small and awkwardly placed, probably for a cell phone — and pushed the little scroll of paper inside, zipping it back up, knowing she didn’t want to lose it, knowing she’d get distracted by it if it wasn’t somewhere secure.

She did her best to clear her mind of doubt and questions, of everything but her only true purpose in this world of hers. A few minutes later, Kyrie swung past Tulane and Broad, turned and bumped up onto the sidewalk on Gravier across the street from a squat, ugly cinder block of a building, her engine grumbling to a stop. Renai kissed her fingertips and tapped them against Kyrie’s chassis as she swung her leg off the bike. The metal was cold to the touch despite running full throttle in the late October warmth. Something else she and the bike shared. The building was yet one more thought she’d been avoiding, a task she chose to think of in the abstract until the moment came. Hands clenched into fists in her jacket pockets, Renai forced herself to look across the street.

In its distinct lack of personality, the building that Renai didn’t want to think about could have been a cheaply designed office complex or a parking garage, if it weren’t for the half-sized windows and the coils of razor wire woven through the surrounding fence, but when she allowed herself more than a glance, it looked exactly like what it was.

The place Kyrie had brought her was Orleans Parish Prison, and Renai had come here to take a man’s life.

HALF AN HOUR later Renai paced up and down the sidewalk across from OPP, bored and pissed and starting to wonder if she’d gotten the time wrong. In her earbuds Destiny’s Child sang that they’d been through the storm and the rain, that they were survivors. Since the dead didn’t really respond to texts, music was about the only use she got out of her phone, smart as it claimed to be. She’d programmed a bunch of numbers into it back when she’d first gotten it — the hospital where her mom worked, her cousin’s place in Houston, the house Uptown she still thought of as home — but had deleted all of them after she’d almost called her mom once. She still couldn’t be sure if she’d really pressed the CALL button by accident or if it had been subconscious desire, but forcing herself to hang up had been harder than the first time she’d taken a life. She didn’t know if she had it in her to resist the temptation to hear her mother’s voice again.

At the thought of taking lives, her attention wandered back to the building across the street, and then flicked away again, back to her sneakers and the unexpectedly smooth sidewalk beneath them. Her pacing resumed. An NOPD cruiser pulled up to the curb, so close that she could feel its engine rumbling. Renai felt a nervous, obsequious smile stretch across her face, immediately pissed she’d done it and then remembering it wouldn’t matter, that the white cop behind the wheel wouldn’t notice her any more than the drinkers in Pal’s had, that she was the next best thing to invisible. Sure enough, he studied the computer screen built into his passenger seat as if she weren’t there at all. She’d never thought she’d be free of the second look, the immediate suspicion that the color of her skin elicited, but now that it was gone, she found it strangely unnerving. She was pretty sure there was a French word for it, something about the feeling of being in a foreign country.

Girl, Renai heard her mother say, you always could find shade on a sunny day. Turned out she didn’t need a phone call to speak to her mother after all.

Just as “Survivor” ended and Lorde said she’d never seen a diamond in the flesh, a raven swooped out of the sky — framed by the glowing red letters of the Falstaff tower — and landed with a little hop on the top of the police cruiser’s light bar. About time, Renai thought, shutting the music off and tugging out her earbuds.

“You’re here early,” the raven said, tilting his head to the side, “you got a hot date or something?”

Renai raised an eyebrow. “I ain’t so much early as you are barely on time, Salvatore.” And there was Renai’s mother again, in the yes-I-did-just-use-your-full-name sound of her own voice.

The bird dipped his head and raised his beak, a gesture that made Renai think of someone rolling their eyes. “Barely is still on time in my book, Renaissance.” The raven had an accent that was halfway between old New Orleans and some Brooklyn gangster on TV, an accent that came from Chalmette — one of those places on the outskirts of New Orleans that wasn’t exactly in the city, wasn’t quite a neighborhood, and wasn’t quite its own town — not far from the Bywater neighborhood where Renai’s extended family was from. What Sal and Renai shared was that they were both psychopomps, guides who led the dead to their just reward.

That was where the similarity ended. Sal was, like every other psychopomp Renai had ever met, a spirit stuffed into a temporary physical body. In that, he had more in common with her motorcycle than with her. Renai, on the other hand, was a living, breathing human who taken on the role of a psychopomp after her resurrection. What was a definition for Sal was merely a title for her. As far as she knew, she was the only one of her kind. Some might say that made her unique. Others would call her a mistake.

“Besides,” Sal continued, “it ain’t like he’s exactly goin’ nowhere.” He dug beneath his wing, nipping at a feather. “Not on his own, anyway,” he muttered.

Renai sighed and held out her arm, inviting the raven to perch there. A rustle of feathers and a clench of talons later, and his weight settled onto her shoulder, far more than even a bird as big as Sal ought to weigh. She didn’t know if he was a once-human soul wearing a raven’s shape or an animal’s soul who had learned human speech or if he was something even stranger, but he’d taught her all she knew about being a psychopomp, and in this strange new life of hers, he was her closest friend. So she didn’t much care what he was, so long as he kept showing up.

“You got the name?” Sal asked, not lowering his voice even though he was right next to her ear.

“Miguel Flores,” Renai said. “5:12 p.m.” She knew more: his location in the prison, the circumstances of his end, and all the other details she’d need to be able to find him, but all Sal ever seemed to need was a name.

He aimed a wing in the direction of the prison. “Then let’s hop to it, Raines.”

The cop turned his engine off and got out of his cruiser, talking into the handset on his shoulder. Despite the fact that Renai had to step out of his way as he walked past her and up the stairs leading to the NOPD office building, he didn’t spare a glance for either of them. Usually, when Renai went out on a collection, she could depend on what she’d come to think of as her personal aura of disinterest to move around undetected. She’d stood in hospital rooms next to grieving loved ones, in bedrooms next to sleeping spouses, in nursing homes next to hospice nurses, and on roadsides next to paramedics, as unnoticed as she’d been in Pal’s. Walking into a prison, though, would take a little more effort.

She pulled up the jersey hood of her jacket and spoke the word the Thrones had taught her when they gave the jacket to her, a difficult-to-comprehend collection of hissing syllables. It meant a lot of things all at once: unseen, unheard, unknown, untouched. Renai had come to call it “the ghost word.” She hated using it.

As soon as the magic took hold, all the color went out of her vision, shifting into varying shades of a dark, shadowy purple. Her skin felt too tight and impossibly sensitive, all the intensity of a tab of molly with none of the euphoria. The air around her grew chilly, then full-on cold, as if the well of emptiness inside her leached warmth from her surroundings. A whine began just at the edge of hearing, like tinnitus or the antique computer monitors at her old elementary school. The power lines overhead glowed, incandescent as a lightbulb, crackling and popping like an open flame. Sal’s oil-black feathers turned white as bone.

Grinding her molars against the assault on her senses, Renai hurried across the street and the small, almost-empty visitor’s parking lot, right up to the razor-wire and chain-link fence. Hands deep in her jacket pockets so Sal wouldn’t see them clenched into fists, head down so the hood would hide her purse-lipped squint, Renai stepped through the metal.

Once, on a dare, Renai had touched the tip of her tongue to the two prongs of a nine-volt battery. The pain that resulted was brief, potent, and numbing. The jacket’s magic, activated by the ghost word, allowed her to move through physical objects as though they’d become fog, but doing so felt like the whole world was made of batteries and she was all tongue. The fence left stinging lines hatched across her body. Walls and doors would be worse. She forced herself to breathe and kept moving.

For a brief moment when she first entered the prison, a strong stink of antiseptic cleaner and body odor overwhelmed the pain of piercing its outer wall. She soon grew accustomed to the smell, though, and the hurt returned to the forefront of her focus. Thankfully, the dull roar of hundreds of people talking and stomping and arguing and bullshitting drowned out the insistent whine plaguing her ears. With a clenching of claws and a pointed beak, Sal guided her forward. Every person she saw — white, black, or brown; guard or prisoner, teenager or elderly — glowed with the fire, the life, that burned within them. Renai knew from experience to keep her distance, did everything she could to make sure she didn’t even come close to touching any of them.

By the time she followed Sal’s directions through two cinder-block walls, up a flight of stairs, and through enough steel security doors that she lost count, the pain of slipping through so much solid matter compounded until Renai’s breath came in heaves and tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. If the raven felt any discomfort at all, he gave no sign. Is that because he’s a death spirit and I’m still alive, she thought, or because I’ve only done this for five years and he’s older than the dirt in God’s garden?

Two inmates, one a younger black guy with his hair done up in twists and the other an older white man with a weak chin that made him look like a turtle, stood in the middle of the hallway with a couple of janitorial carts, one for collecting trash and the other for mopping floors. They were too close together for Renai to be sure she wouldn’t brush up against one of them if she tried to slip past, so she stopped, chewing at her lip, fighting the urge to leap out a window, to break the spell and reveal herself, anything to make the experience of using the ghost word end.

“Didn’t you use to have dreads?” Sal asked.

“What?” It just spit out of her before she could figure out what he meant, incredulous and hurt and confused all at once.

Sal aimed his beak at the janitors. “Like him. Don’t get me wrong, I like your hair fine the way it is now. Suits you. Just never got around to askin’ why you cut the dreads off.”

Renai wondered if he’d hit the wall if she threw him at it or just pass through it. “You really think this is the best time to be asking me about my hair?”

“Ain’t like they’re gonna hear us,” he said. “I’m just makin’ polite conversation is all.”

What you’re doing, Renai thought, is trying to distract me so I’ll keep calm. It was sweet, in a dumb, insensitive kind of way. “New Orleans is technically a city, but really it’s a small town,” she said. “I figured I was bound to run into somebody who knew Renaissance Raines. More importantly, someone who knew she’s supposed to be dead. Thought it might be best if I looked like someone different.” Which was true, but also a lie. She’d cut her locks off herself and dealt with the funky, unevenly tangled mess that followed until her hair grew out into something she could manage on her own because she couldn’t stand the idea of going to a different hairdresser than the one she’d known her whole life. Not that Sal ever needed to know that.

He let out a playful little snort. “People need to notice you to recognize you.”

She allowed herself a grin. “You’re real good at sharing information I already know, bird. Where were you with those gems when I first came back?” She shrugged the shoulder Sal perched on, giving him a playful nudge. Before she could tease him more, the men finished their discussion and moved in opposite directions. Renai backed against — and partly through — the hallway wall to let the white guy pass. It felt like falling backwards into a pool of fire ant bites. She really couldn’t take much more of this.

“Almost there,” Sal said, once she was moving again.

“So we talked about my hair, what’s next, girlfriend, my love life?”

“You got enough of one to discuss?” He indicated a left turn at the end of the hall by pointing with his beak.

“Not even enough of one to lie about.”

“That’s too bad,” Sal said. “I always expected you to end up with our old pal Jude.”

At the thought of Jude Dubuisson, Renai’s stomach did a pleasant little clench, and some of the chill went out of the air. No matter how hazy her memories from her time on the other side, there was no forgetting how fine that man looked. She laughed and shook her head. “Like that could’ve gone somewhere good. You ever meet a Trickster you could bring home to . . .”

She trailed off when she saw the crowded room through the reinforced Plexiglas window of the next door. A common room two stories tall with a row of cells along the back walls, a handful of round tables and seats bolted to the ground, and a flight of stairs leading up to a second-floor landing and another set of cells. Televisions hung on the wall far out of reach, humming and crackling with a light that was painfully bright to Renai’s ghost-word-touched eyes. The iron-barred doors of all the cells stood open, their occupants spilling out into the common area, seated on the tables with their feet on the seats, leaning against cell doors with their arms folded, pacing or standing in small clusters, staring up at the televisions or talking or both. A soft, welcoming glow emanated from one of the cells on the upper tier: Miguel Flores.

“I can’t do this,” she said, not realizing she’d spoken out loud until Sal clicked his tongue in disagreement.

“Sure you can,” he said, “it’s his time.”

“Not that.” She waved a hand in the direction of all the men in between her and the stairs. “How am I supposed to get up there? We don’t all have wings, Sal.”

“I got faith in you. Just be quick. It’s almost time.” And with that, he launched from her shoulder, swooping up to the second-floor railing with a few flaps of his wings.

So much for sweet, Renai thought. She took a deep breath and studied the area, trying to concentrate despite the ringing in her ears and the magic stretching and scraping against her skin, hoping she’d discover a path she could slip through without touching anybody. It shouldn’t be this hard to cross a room. Under normal circumstances, people moved out of your way, even if they weren’t really paying attention. It had taken more than a couple of bruised toes before Renai learned that that rule didn’t apply to her anymore. Under the influence of the ghost word, it would be worse.

Much worse.

Renai let out a disgusted huff. “Hell with it,” she said. She cracked her knuckles, shook her arms and legs limber. “Don’t think about it, girl, just move.” She hit the door at a quick walk — popping through in a burst of pain — and kept moving. Unlike everything else in the world when she was under the shroud of the ghost word, living people weren’t cold, they were bonfires, so the common room air hit her like the gust from an open oven. She managed to dance around the group closest to the entrance with no trouble, but that took her too close to an older black man telling a story to another handful of inmates, his hands waving around as he added details to his narrative. She did her best — turning sideways and straightening her spine — but his hand swept through her stomach. Warmth filled her, starting in her core and racing through her veins like a shot of strong liquor. That was the worst part; it felt amazing.

The older man shivered visibly and grinned at his spectators. “Whoa,” he said, “somebody musta walked over my grave.”

That’s closer to the truth than you know, Renai thought.

When she brushed up against another inmate after another couple of timid steps, heat flooding into her from the contact, she gave it up as a lost cause and broke into a run, tearing through the crowd of unsuspecting men like a sudden draft, siphoning away minutes or hours or days from their life span with every touch. She reached the stairway a few seconds later, full of energy and sick to her stomach at the same time. Sal started to say something when she got to the top of the stairs, but stopped when he caught the side-eye she shot him. Head hanging a little, he hopped from the railing back onto her shoulder. Renai followed the glow to Miguel’s cell, readying herself for what came next.

* * *

Laying on a thin cot built into the wall, his breath coming in shallow, whistling gasps, Miguel Flores was dying.

Miguel was a short, compactly built young man, with light brown skin and thick black hair slicked down with sweat. He clutched a woolen blanket to his chest, ink swirling and sketched across his arms, both the smooth, delicate lines of professional tattoos and the rougher, simpler designs of prison ink. No one lay in the bunk above him. “My man’s got a private room,” Sal said as they entered, “lucky break, right?”

Renai frowned. “No one should have to die alone, Sal.”

“No, I just mean you won’t have to worry about bumping into nobody else in here is all.” He hopped from her shoulder onto the top bunk, an involuntary squawk coming out of him, like an old man groaning when he stood up too fast. “Besides, he ain’t alone. We’re here.”

Like the others, Miguel radiated heat, but his fire burned low, his life span down to nothing but smoldering embers. He shined instead, a beacon to anyone with the eyes for it that he wasn’t long for this world. Renai leaned down to him, smiling in case he could see her despite the jacket’s magic. The dying could, sometimes. He whispered something she couldn’t quite catch, a word in Spanish maybe, and then, “Katrina.” Oddly, he grinned a little when he said it.

“No,” she said, “that was years ago. This moment is just for you.” She hated the way her voice sounded to her own ears, harsh and cold. She had to be this way in this moment, though. If she let herself care, let herself feel, there was no way she’d be able to do what needed to be done.

Miguel’s eyes went wide with fear, and even with the asthma filling his lungs full of gunk and squeezing the breath out of him, he managed to suck in enough air to speak four words in English. “Don’t want,” he said, gasping, “to die.”

Renai tried to keep her face impassive, but a frown tucked at the corners of her mouth. “Nobody does,” she said, “but everybody’s got to.” And then she reached inside of him and ripped his soul out.

OFTEN THEY ARE fields of untamed nature: Aaru, the peaceful land of reeds and plentiful hunting believed to be the soul of the Nile; Elysium, the always sun-kissed valley of unending bliss, and Asphodel, the merely pleasant meadow of unrelenting banality; Fólkvangr, where the slain warriors chosen by Freya feast and fight amid their stone ships and wait for Ragnarok. And sometimes they are gardens: Eden and Firdaws and Fiddler’s Green and the orchard where the Jade Emperor’s peaches grow. It is a euphoric tunnel made of light created by hyperactivity in the brain due to blood loss. They are the lands on and above Mount Meru where the virtuous await their next chance to attain moksha. It is the island of Magh Meall, the Summerland, the House of Song. Heaven. Paradise. A place of reward for living a righteous life.

It is not the end that awaits us all.

* * *

One of the first misconceptions about humanity and life that Renai had to let go of once she’d taken on the role of psychopomp was the idea that the human soul was a single object. Since she was a child watching cartoons, she’d been taught that when a person died, a glowing, incorporeal version of that person rose out of the body, usually crowned with a halo and clutching a harp. As she grew older, movies and depictions of Heaven had reinforced this concept until she’d come to believe that a soul was just a person-shaped light trapped inside the body in the same way she believed that her tongue had different spots for sweet and salty, or that bulls hated the color red: never considered, never questioned, and completely wrong.

Beneath her, the dying man let out one last truncated exhale and went still. What Renai held in her grip was a braided coil of light and quicksilver and shadow, the sum total of everything that made Miguel Flores unique: his identity, his destiny from his birth to this moment, his ability to influence the world around him. A whole human life in her hands.

It was her job to tear it apart.

As she worked at unbraiding the soul, she was struck by the memory of Sal teaching her to do this, his words so clear in her mind that she had to glance up at him to make sure he wasn’t repeating his instructions yet again.

You start, Sal said, with the most crucial part of your dead, their Fortune. She gripped the strand of Miguel’s soul that was composed of light between her thumb and forefinger and unwound it from the other two, the rest of the braid going awkwardly slack in her fist when the first piece slipped loose. When it came free, it stretched and oozed, like warm taffy. Renai gathered it up into the palm of her hand, tugging it up and rolling it into a ball, her fingers moving quick and sure in an upsettingly accurate impression of a spider’s legs looping webbing around its prey. When she had all of it gathered into a golden sphere about the size of a fist, she set it to the side.

You get the dead’s Fortune into the Underworld, Sal had repeated many, many times, no matter what. That’s Rule Number 1.

Next came the person’s ability to influence the world around them. There were many names for this capacity: ka, spirit, medicine, juju. Sal called it Voice. She unwound the shadowy and the silvery strands away from each other, letting the shadow-thread drop in a coil on Miguel’s stomach, gathering the liquid silver of his Voice into a pool cupped in her two hands. None of this shit gets into the Underworld. Not one bit. That’s Rule Number 2. Miguel’s Voice rippled and swirled in her palms, pulling into a tight bead like a giant drop of mercury, growing more solid as she watched. It shifted colors and forms, first a bunch of grapes, then an apple, and finally settling into the shape of a peach. She bit into it, and her mouth flooded with tart and syrupy-sweet juice and a rush like a spike of adrenaline. The same sensation of warmth and vitality she’d siphoned away from the inmates she’d brushed against downstairs filled her when she swallowed. In the past she’d offered some to Sal, but he always flicked his beak away in a raven’s version of a head shake and told her that if he was meant to eat it, the Voice would have taken on a shape he could stomach.

Renai devoured the rest of the peach in a few eager, slurping bites, so full of energy when she finished that she half expected her skin to glow. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, a little chagrined at her enthusiasm. Voice was the part of the soul that let a person, if they had the training or the will or the faith, perform magic, so if the dead were allowed to bring even a fraction of what they possessed in life into the Underworld, they might find their way back to life. She reached down and placed the peach pit — fighting the urge to lick the last droplets of dew from its rough pockmarked surface — in the hollow of Miguel’s throat. A tiny portion of Voice was always left with the body, to fuel those little magics of memory and nostalgia, those whispers of guidance and support, all the subtle ways that the dead still influenced the world once they were gone. Whenever she’d asked Sal why they ate most of the Voice instead of leaving it all with the body, he’d only tell her, There’s two kinds of shit that would happen if we didn’t: bad and ugly.

The part of a person that most people would think of as their soul: their identity, their mind — what Sal called Essence — was what remained after death. That’s what psychopomps guided to the Underworld. Renai bit her lip, waiting. This part didn’t always go the way she wanted it to. Sometimes, the dead were just . . . dead.

After a tense moment, the shadowy thread on Miguel’s stomach rose, wavering like a plume of smoke. It grew bulging, too-large eyes, a face that only vaguely resembled the man he had once been, and long, spindly arms capped by massive hands. The rest remained a wisp, dwindling into a thread-thin tendril that vanished into Miguel’s abdomen. Renai plucked the golden sphere of Miguel’s destiny from the cot where she’d left it and squashed it between her palms until it formed a flat, round disk. When she held it up to the light, it had become a coin. Miguel would use it to pay his way through to the other side.

If you ever have to choose, Sal said, between the Fortune and the Essence, you pick the Fortune every time. Call that Rule Number 3.

“Not bad,” Sal said, in the present now and not just a voice in her memories. “Few more decades of practice and you’ll be good enough to start collecting the dead on your own.” His beak gaped open in a raven’s version of a grin. “Course, then you won’t get to see my pretty self all the time.”

Renai laughed. “Too pretty for prison anyway,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Rather than facing the gauntlet of the crowd below her, Renai went out through the prison wall, a sharp splash of pain and a quick drop that left her buried up to her thighs in the basketball court below. After a few more minutes of hurt and irritation, she made it out of the prison entirely, and could finally pull her jacket’s hood from her head, breaking the ghost word’s spell and returning her to the world of natural light and physical objects and the ambient sounds of traffic. The relief made her groan aloud. Once again perched on her shoulder, Sal shot her a look but said nothing.

The streetlights flickered to life above her; twilight had fallen while she navigated her way through the prison and collected her dead. She crossed to the side of the street where she’d left Kyrie parked, leading the Essence of Miguel by one hand and holding the coin of his Fortune in the other. Miguel had taken on a little more definition, his torso filling out, his face smoothing into a fuller, healthier version of the man she’d seen in the cell. He now wore a dark blue dress shirt with the buttons done all the way up his neck, the collar ironed to sharp points. At the waist he tapered off into a smoky wisp like a cartoon genie. That smoke thinned down into a hair-thin thread that vanished back the way they’d come. She tucked Miguel’s coin into a jacket pocket and straddled Kyrie, coaxing Miguel into a position that more or less approximated sitting in front of her.

At first, she’d spoken to her dead in a constant, soothing litany at this stage of their journey, worried that they were terrified, panicked. She’d come to find that it was a waste of her breath, since they were always like Miguel, drifting along beside her with a placid, dreamy expression. That slender thread connected Miguel to his body, allowing him to claim the parts of himself that he wanted to keep: his looks, his fond memories, his sense of humor if he had one, and let him leave behind the burdens he didn’t: his perpetually overreacting lungs, his regrets, whatever crimes he may have committed. Without fail, every one of her dead had chosen to leave behind their last moments. The nicest thing about death, she’d found, was that you didn’t remember it.

She envied that luxury.

Standing there with both feet on the pavement and Kyrie still sleeping beneath her, it all came rushing back. One of the things she found it hardest to reconcile about her new life was why, out of all the memories she’d lost, she’d kept these. She’d been closing up at the store — a tourist-trap voodoo shop in the Quarter that her aunt had owned — when she’d felt the sudden, frightening realization that she wasn’t alone. One moment she’d smelled cinnamon, and the next she’d been knocked to the floor. A sudden line of ice at her throat, a blade so sharp it didn’t hurt when it cut. Fear, and then panic, and then the struggle to breathe and —

“Hey, Raines, you forget something?” Sal asked, overly loud, like he was repeating himself.

Renai realized that she’d just been staring, her chest tight with held breath, her pulse pounding. She dropped into Kyrie’s seat with all her weight at once, the kickstand popping up and almost ditching the bike. She recovered and grabbed the handlebars, the motorcycle coming to life with a comforting rumble, like the purr of a massive cat. Sal’s talons clutched at her shoulder to stay upright. She kicked off and let Kyrie carry her away with a roar.

“You okay?” Sal asked after a minute, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.

She made him say it again, like she couldn’t quite hear him. “Long day,” she yelled back.

Except that wasn’t really true, either. With the potency of Miguel’s Voice flowing in her veins, she felt like she could sprint for miles without slowing, without even breaking a sweat. But as much as she wanted answers about her missing time, she wanted to talk about her own death even less. So she ignored the throbbing of her heart, her every instinct screaming, run-run-run, and forced herself to drive slow, keeping Kyrie under the speed limit and obeying traffic lights, even though she usually didn’t. This part of the trip was more about giving the dead time to acclimate, to come to the realization that all of this was really happening. She couldn’t rush it just because she had a bunch of bad juju in her head.

Glancing down, she saw that Miguel had formed legs, like a tadpole abandoning his tail. His head swiveled back and forth as he watched the city roll by, and it looked to her like his vacant expression had been replaced by one more aware of his surroundings. He’d probably be wondering how he’d gotten out of jail, would be just coming to the realization that this wasn’t some strange dream.

“Soon,” she said to him, making sure she had a firm grip on his ghostly hand, “we’ll be there soon.”

A few minutes later, they turned off of Canal and onto Basin Street, riding along the edge of the Quarter. Renai did her best to guide Kyrie around the jagged cracks in the asphalt and the abrupt holes that pockmarked the streets, even though the bike had handled everything New Orleans’s disregard for infrastructure had thrown at her so far. Miguel shifted around in his seat, getting agitated now. She could feel the weight in the air of something unspoken, but she’d consumed his capacity for speech back in OPP.

“Relax, chico,” Sal said, when they eased to a stop at a red light, “you’ll get all the answers you want, I promise.”

“Careful, Sal,” Renai said, giving the raven a poke that earned her a pecked knuckle. “You don’t want to be making promises you can’t keep.”

Before Sal could reply, they were rolling again. Kyrie carried them past the eerily quiet Iberville Projects — closed since the storm and in the process of being torn down — and then hopped over the short curb of the neutral ground when they reached St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, idling to a stop on the recently cut grass. The high brick wall facing Rampart Street was coated in cracked white plaster, with the boxy aboveground tombs common to older New Orleans burial sites peeking over the top. The trees growing in the cemetery swayed in the breeze. A wrought-iron gate barred the entrance, topped by