Gather the Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Author:Bryan Camp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Chapter Nineteen

This deep in the Underworld, the trees had given up on any pretense of reality and were as flat and as uniform as the stage scenery in a high school play. Lights, camera, action! Renai thought, still a little giddy from the exertion of restraining the spirit within her. A few minutes’ walk brought the two of them to a huge house at the foot of Elysian Fields that didn’t exist in the living world, an old plantation-style mansion. The growling, frenetic horns of a brass band called from within, and a crowd in fancy evening dress spilled out onto the lawn, flirting and mingling and laughing. At least, they were as loud as they could be, band and crowd both, given that they played and spoke in the desperate whispers of the dead.

At the entrance to the property, a small white fence separating the revelers from the rest of the Underworld, a loa named Babaco waited. Babaco was an older black man, wearing a practical brown suit with a matching fedora tilted just so, who leaned on a cane and smiled wide as they approached.

Everything about the Fifth Gate should have been comforting: a fancy party where the black folks were doing the eating and drinking, instead of the ones serving the drinks or carrying the trays, and a grandfatherly figure, clean-shaven and warm-eyed and kind. The sight of this place filled her with dread. She’d been here before—on her own journey through the Underworld, as part of Jude Dubuisson’s schemes—but her memories of that time were brief and jumbled and awful.

And the worst of them happened at this never-ending party of the dead.

At her side, Sal cleared his throat. “How ’bout I handle this one,” he said. “I know you ain’t exactly Babaco’s biggest fan.” Renai just nodded, thankful that they didn’t have any dead with them who would be forced to listen to Babaco’s line of bullshit.

It didn’t matter how many times she heard it, the offer made by the Gatekeeper of the Fifth Gate pissed her off every time. This was the last chance before the end, he’d tell them. Before the Thrones. Before the scales. Babaco offered the dead an extension. A deferral from judgment. What he didn’t mention—unless the dead could manage to ask, anyway—was that this choice would last forever. That if they chose to stay here at the party in the depths of the Underworld, their coin of Fortune would continue on without them, and they’d be trapped here for all eternity.

According to Sal, it wasn’t such a bad deal. The music was good and the food was rich and the wine was free—what more could anyone ask for? Every once in a while, Renai would remind him that he’d asked for more back when he’d made this trip. He didn’t like that answer very much.

She knew, logically, that she couldn’t have chosen to stay here. She had too vivid a memory of standing before the Thrones, awaiting her own judgment. No, her unease had something to do with all of Jude’s trickery surrounding her resurrection.

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