Debtors of the Gods-
If you ever manage to wander into the poor, swampy southern end of Louisiana, sometime around the turn of the century, and you know what you're looking for, you can find a sallow faced boy with a penchant for picking up trinkets from the ground and so much seething fury under his skin that even his shadow seems to scream with it. He'll be walking towards New Orleans, slowly, deliberately, and his pant legs will have a fine dusting of clay, because he's been walking all day and he's beginning to think that he'll be walking for the rest of his life.
He's almost right.
If you ask he'll tell you, with a voice so precisely smooth that you want to take it out of his ugly, gangly body and listen to it all day long, that he shouldn't have to walk, because his mother came from royal blood. And he's telling the truth, even though it's the kind of royalty bought with everything you have except money, the kind not shown with a crown or a title but with the ability to breathe artificial life into the long decayed, to spit into the face of Baron Samedi himself, with the fearful respect of the rich white men who used to use you until it ached and spit on you on the way out. With the ability to condemn others to your fate, and the neck to do it without guilt.
Of course, it wasn't always that way.
The sallow boy does not remember this, for he was a sallow baby, and his mother merely a girl, nursing a fresh bruise from trying to get money out of his father, when things began to turn. His mother was never one to get into debt. She saved and cherished money as if it were her own breath. But there were never enough coins in her purse, never enough breath in her lungs, never enough strangers in her bed. They may have been filthy with sugar profits, but they knew the going price for her kind of services, and she wasn't pretty enough to be a mistress. So she suffered. And like all those who suffer, the devil was the last to hear her pleas of help, but the first to the scene of the crime. The Other world wanted to bandage her up and polish her into shape and send her out to get them Food. They were hungry, and the soul of a poor wretch like her wouldn't fill them up for long. But if she could be bred to bring them something fresh, something whole, then she could have whatever parlor tricks she wanted from them.
So they told her as much, in the form of a whisper in the back of her mind and a flickering shadow that appeared when she closed her eyes, and at first she drew away from them.
The Other world didn't mind. It could wait. It could wait an eternity.
But it didn't have to. Because her bruises started to become cracked ribs, and the sallow baby was turning into a child and becoming afflicted with sickness and curiosity as he grew, and for all the times she struck him he would not be silent, and soon enough she stopped looking for help from the mortal realm. At first she just wanted money. They barely suppressed a chuckle. It always started with money, but They knew it wouldn't stop there. They knew it would grow. So They gave it to her for the measly price of her soul, nearly free as far as They were concerned. Slowly she recovered bits and pieces of dignity, and with it a new and stinging awareness of her daily humiliations. The money began to run out, and she felt her standard slipping once more. So she begged for more, and they gave it to her, not asking for a thing, their faces placid, entreating her to trust them. But that ran out as well, and she came back a third and fourth time. Eventually it was the boy's seventh birthday. He was just beginning to notice the stares of people on the streets, the sneers and slurs, the strange men who inhabited his mother's secret room. He was just beginning to feel the strange seductive power of hatred, to slip into the habit of bitter seething. He was tired of playing with his shadow because his mother didn't want him to associate with bastard boys out of misplaced pride. She was running out of money, she was running out of self respect. She was running out of excuses to tell the sallow, quietly brilliant boy. She found herself closing her eyes and opening them to the already familiar visages of the Others, of the grotesques she was nearly thinking of as friends. But she didn't want more money this time. She wanted a means of making it. She wanted a new life, new skin, new bones, new blood that was thick with power. Royal blood.
The Others twisted their wooden faces into smiles, and started a tab in her name.
With new limber in her tendons and fresh timbre in her voice, she opened up a small hovel in the corner of her town. Word spread that the woman inside the shamble of wood and cloth that rudely assumed itself to be a building could make you your greatest and most fathomless fantasy out of dust and the money you give her. That she could awaken a child lost to consumption, although it would seem hollow until it learned how children were supposed to act. That she could assure you the heart of those you desire, or at least their body, regardless of consent. Soon enough she had a congregation. She had a spider web of needy black women and greedy cotton barons who wanted each other, or at least needed each other, and who paid good money for connections. She had the kind of people who once walked down an alley to use her like a mongrel taking steamboats across miles and miles of muddy water to beg her favor. She bought a proper store with an improper back room. She had a kind, open smile, but it was hard to hide the sharp and ravenous hatred in her eyes. Nevertheless, business boomed. She had magic, after all, a very popular thing to desire. She granted wishes. Sometimes for extravagant amounts, sometimes for only a few dollars and a written promise, drawn out in ancient letters, signed with thick red ink. Few knew what exactly they were promising until they began withering away, their hair falling out and their skin waning. And even then they did not realize the price they paid until they at last expired and awoke to the smiling teeth of wooden and voracious Gods.
The Others ate like the Kings they were before the earth reawakened. The boy did nearly as well as They, children of the elite vying to play with him, his mother buying him fine clothes in purple and black, delicious and foreign fruits available to him regardless of season and expense. His mother grew more patient, less tired and impulsive, less likely to strike at him. But in many ways it was too late, because the fragile function of his mind capable of loving unconditionally the human species had been broken. And it would never be whole again.
The problem with blood you buy from the dead is that it starts turning into dust long before your lifespan is over. And if you're strong, you realize that buying grain with rats prepackaged in it instead of growing it clean by your own hook is bad business, and you try to get your commonality back. But she didn't want to go back, she wanted more. She liked the view from the top of the stage, she liked the way that those who had wronged her writhed, she liked the bend of a suffering spine and the electric sting in her veins. And when the radiating power, the invisible pull around her began to dissipate, she wanted more. And when her bones began to thin, and her voice to crack, she needed more. And so the woman who was once a mere girl, who was never one to get into debt, jumped so far down into the pockets of the damned that she might have broken he neck had it not been fortified by a steel will.
The boy watched her as she changed, as she seemed to get younger, not older, as time passed. As her rages became all the more harsh, all the more sudden. But he never knew the cause, even though he would have brief, fitful dreams about wooden idols prodding at him and deciding his future with words he couldn't quite understand. Even though he sometimes though he saw his shadow flickering although he was standing still. Even as the dreams became clearer and less like dreams. Even as she drew away from him. And as the world drew away from her.
Things do not last, and she fell out of fashion, her customers distracted by some woman who ran a salon in New Orleans and called herself Mamzelle and wary of the sickness that seemed to follow her patrons. The Others found that she was no longer turning a profit. They quietly cut her off. As the boy remembers it all the world, as if it were a part of some cosmic ploy, suddenly turned against him and his mother, who had worked so hard and come so far, who could destroy the world with a toss of her head and break him with a slap of her hand. She began to deteriorate. Her skin began to turn the color of pond scum, and her hair twisted into thin strands as the power drained from her and left her body, a hollow shell poisoned by a darker magic than she had every expected. She didn't like to look at herself, she sat in the dark, eyes shut tightly, begging the Others to be there when she opened them. She never saw them after the day she began to sicken, when they appeared, shortly, briefly, holding up a scrap of paper she had nearly forgotten. The bill for her borrowed life. Her name was crossed out, replaced by her son's. After that They waited patiently, like vultures, for her to die.
Eventually she did. That night the boy slept fitfully. The dreams that had haunted the corners of his mind for years grew stronger and viler than ever before. For the first time the Others spoke to him directly, smugly. They informed him that he had an obligation to them. And in the morning he left town, his mother's body cooling alone in her room, bearing the fresh knowledge that no churchyard in the world would take her.
So if you do find yourself in the swampy part of Louisiana near the turn of the century, and you meet that sallow, angry boy on his way out, you can strike up a conversation with him, and you can probably ask him for a favor.
It doesn't much matter what it is, I'm sure he'll oblige you, as long as you sign a scrap of paper and give him some money for boat fare and food.
He has a debt to pay after all.