Half-Resurrection Blues (Bone Street Rumba, Band 1) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of Last Shot as well as the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, the young adult series The Shadowshaper Cypher, and the middle-grade historical fantasy Dactyl Hill Squad. He won the International Latino Book Award and has been nominated for the Kirkus Prize, the Mythopoeic Award, the Locus Award, the Andre Norton Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Shadowshaper was named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read. In addition to being a writer, editor, and composer, he facilitates workshops on storytelling, music, and antioppression organizing at public schools, religious houses, and universities.

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PART ONE

To live in the Borderlands means

the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off

your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart

pound you pinch you roll you out

smelling like white bread but dead;

To survive the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras

be a crossroads.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

“To live in the Borderlands means you”

CHAPTER ONE

It’s just past eleven p.m. on December thirty-first—that dizzy in-between time when we’re not quite here but not yet there—and hip, young white kids crowd the trendy streets of Park Slope, Brooklyn. Their pockmarked faces flash a theatrical array of expressions, everything from regret to ecstasy to total abandon, but I’m not fooled: they’re bored out of their minds. I can tell because I’m dead—well, partially dead anyway. When you straddle a fine line like the one between life and death, let’s just say you can tell certain things about people.

I dip into a brightly lit tobacco store for some Malagueñas and a pocket-sized rum. The rum goes into my flask and one of the Malagueñas goes in my mouth. I light it, walk back out to the street, and weave through the crowds. When I move quickly, no one notices my strange gait or the long wooden cane I use to favor my right leg. I’ve gotten the flow down so smooth I almost glide along toward the milky darkness of Prospect Park. There’s too much information here in the streets—each passing body gives up a whole symphony of smells and memories and genetics. It can help pass the time if you’re bored, but tonight, I’m far from bored.

Tonight I am hunting.

Music wafts out of a bar across the street—a kind of watery blues that evokes dentists’ waiting rooms. The hipsters roam up and down the block in packs, playing out a whole mess of different daytime-drama plotlines. There’s a few black and brown folks around, but they’re mostly staying out of the way. And me? I’m a grayish off-brown—a neither-here-nor-there color that matches my condition. It would be a jarring skin tone to notice, but I tend to just blend in. That’s fine with me. Whatever it is that’s been causing all this static is out there tonight. I’m sure of it. The more I can disappear, the more chance I have of catching them.

*   *   *

It’s been two weeks now. Two weeks of a vague and irritating twinge crawling up my spine every time I get near the crest of Flatbush Avenue. I’ve been walking circles around that area like an idiot, trying to sniff out the source. Stood for hours beneath the big archway with its soldiers’ frozen battle cries and elaborate stonework; closed my eyes and just listened, feeling all the damn spiritual vibrations ricochet across Brooklyn. Major throughways shoot off toward Flatbush and into Crown Heights, but I narrowed it down to some indedamnterminate spot in the Slope.

When I took it to my icy superiors at the New York Council of the Dead, they nodded their old fully dead heads and turned silently in on themselves to conference. A few hours later they called me back in. Because I’m an inbetweener, and the only one anyone knows of at that, the dead turn to me when something is askew between them and the living. Usually, it’s some mundane shit—cleanup work. But every once in a while it gets really hairy, and that’s when I go hunting. These are the times when I forget that I was ever even dead. Whatever shadow of life or humanity pertains to me—I know God put me on this fine planet to hunt.

Plus I’m good at it.

But the Council was all kinds of vague about this one. No explanation, just a photo of a man slid across the table with icy fingers. We believe this is the source, Carlos. His name is Trevor Brass. Do your thing.

“Which thing?”

An icy pause. Eliminate him.

And me: “Care to elucidate further?”

And them: Nope.

And what can really be said to that? They’re dead. They don’t have to elucidate shit. I don’t mind though. Makes things more interesting.

Oh, and protect the entrada at all costs.

See, the dead are good for coming up with some last-minute oh-and-by-the-way type shit. Protect the entrada. An entrada is an entrance to the Underworld. There’s only a couple scattered around the city, and they’re supposed to be well guarded by a team of fully dead COD soulcatchers, impenetrable and all that, but really, it happens. Soulcatchers have other things to do, turns out, than stand around flickering doors to Hell. Protocols tighten and then slack again. The particular entrada they’re referring to is in a shady grove in the middle of Prospect Park, not at all far from all this mess. It’s not hard to imagine that whatever this grinning fellow in the picture is up to has something to do with breaching through. How they expect me to simultaneously track the dude down and keep him from getting to the entrada is another question, but that’s not their concern. The Council hands out whatever garbled-up mandate they’ve regurgitated from their eyes in the field, and it’s on me to sort through the chaos.

So I nodded, pocketed the picture, and walked out the door.

*   *   *

I swig on my flask and head for the park. I want to check on the entrada, and that swath of urban wilderness is the only place I can clear my head. I’d forgotten that this tremendous pockmarked flock of New Year’s revelers would be here, jamming up all my otherworldly insights. A ponytail guy plows through the crowd to find somewhere to puke his guts out; I swerve out of the way just in time. He’s wearing too much aftershave and looks like he spent three hours trying to make his hair look that carelessly tussled.

Then I see my mark. He’s standing in the middle of all that hootenanny, laughing his ass off. He’s caramel-colored but still somehow pale gray like an overcast day. He’s got long, perfectly kept locks reaching all the way down his back and a goatee so carefully trimmed it might be painted on. His big frame rocks with laughter. Unquestionably, the cat is dealing with some supernatural . . . issues. Layers of grief, anxiety, and fanaticism swirl around him like ripples in a pond; they’re peppered with a distinct aroma of, what’s that? Ah, yes: guilt. And yet he’s chuckling madly.

That’s when it hits me: the guy’s not dead. Here I was, assuming that because the NYCOD brought me in, I’d automatically have another faded shroud on my hands, some errant phantom trying to make it back or otherwise disturb the delicate balance of life and death. But this fellow isn’t faded or translucent. He’s breathing. His memories aren’t closed books the way dead memories are. And yet, by the look of things, he’s not fully alive either. I squint through the crowd at him, not even trying to conceal my intentions anymore.

He is like me.

Another inbetweener—and not just one of these half-formed, not-quite-here purgatorious mo’fos: Trevor is full-fledged flesh and blood alive and dead at the same time, both and neither.

I duck into the outdoor entrance area of another bar. The bouncer shoots me a look that says why the fuck you movin’ so fast, cripple? I ignore it, tug on the Malagueña, and observe my prey. The smoke eases me into the excitement of the hunt. He is feisty, this one. I narrow my eyes. Just like the living, this...