Gather the Fortunes Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Part Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from the Crescent City Series

  Read More from John Joseph Adams Books

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Bryan Camp

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Camp, Bryan, author.

  Title: Gather the fortunes / Bryan Camp.

  Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Series: A Crescent City novel ; 2 | “A John Joseph Adams book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018043604 (print) | LCCN 2018044778 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328876744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328876713 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Contemporary. | FICTION / Fantasy / Urban Life. | FICTION / Ghost. | FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.A4557 (ebook) | LCC PS3603.A4557 G38 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043604

  Cover design by Will Staehle / Unusual Co.

  Author photograph © Zack Smith

  v1.0419

  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

  Chapter One

  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.