The Sight
Page 1
Praise for The Veil
“[The Veil] was full of action, a steady to fast-paced plot, mystery, a slight romance element, and an interesting mix of familiar yet unique world building. Any and every urban fantasy fan out there needs to read this.”
—Vampire Book Club
“The Veil was truly a fantastic read and most certainly one of my top reads for 2015 thus far. If you’re a fan of Chicagoland Vampires, you will fall in love with The Veil . . . and Claire and Liam.”
—Literary Escapism
“The world building was fabulous; the characters were likable; the plot and tension provided a great ‘what’s going to happen next?’ feeling that kept me engaged. . . . I loved it and basically devoured it in only a few sittings.”
—Paranormal Haven
“A great start to a new paranormal series from an author I love! If you don’t have this on your to-read list, make sure you get it there ASAP! I think it’s going to be an amazing ride!”
—Fiction Fare
“Action-packed and fast-paced, with enough sexual tension to keep a girl hoping. And with a cast of characters that I couldn’t have picked better myself. This book was exactly what I needed to restore my faith in the paranormal. Yes! There can be a new series that catches my interest and gets me giddy again!”
—Under the Covers
“Neill is truly a master storyteller!”
—RT Book Reviews
“A fast-paced read that you won’t want to put down once you pick it up.”
—A Book Obsession
“A fabulous beginning . . . filled with nonstop action and drama.”
—Fang-tastic Books
“This was absolutely enthralling, entertaining, and completely original. . . . This truly was a wonderful start to what promises to be a standout series.”
—My Guilty Obsession
OTHER NOVELS BY CHLOE NEILL
THE CHICAGOLAND VAMPIRES NOVELS
Some Girls Bite
Friday Night Bites
Twice Bitten
Hard Bitten
Drink Deep
Biting Cold
House Rules
Biting Bad
Wild Things
Blood Games
Dark Debt
Midnight Marked
“High Stakes” novella in Kicking It
Howling for You (A Chicagoland Vampires Novella)
Lucky Break (A Chicagoland Vampires Novella)
THE DEVIL’S ISLE NOVELS
The Veil
THE DARK ELITE NOVELS
Firespell
Hexbound
Charmfall
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
Published by New American Library,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
This book is an original publication of New American Library.
Copyright © Chloe Neill, 2016
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Names: Neill, Chloe, author.
Title: The sight: a Devil’s Isle novel/Chloe Neill.
Description: New York, New York: New American Library, [2016] | Series: Devil’s Isle; 2 | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016019522 (print) | LCCN 2016012353 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698184534 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451473356 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Magic—Fiction. | Good and evil—Fiction. | New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Fantasy/Urban Life. | FICTION/Fantasy/Contemporary. | FICTION/Romance/Paranormal. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Occult fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3614.E4432 (print) | LCC PS3614.E4432 S55 2016 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019522
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
CONTENTS
PRAISE FOR The Veil
OTHER NOVELS BY CHLOE NEILL
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
EPIGRAPH
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
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EXCERPT FROM Some Girls Bite
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come . . .
—Revelation 11:18
CHAPTER ONE
New Orleans, Louisiana
Late November
We rode in a truck that had seen a lot of miles—more than two hundred thousand of them, according to the odometer. The windows were open to the heat and humidity and sunshine, all of it powerful even in the early morning. But that was New Orleans for you.
I piled my red hair into a topknot and futzed until the bun was secure, then leaned my head against the door. Even the hot breeze felt better than none. The truck rocking beneath us, the city nearly silent around us, my eyes drifted closed.
“You gonna fall asleep?”
I slitted a glance at the man in the driver’s seat. Liam Quinn was tall and lean, built of hard, stacked muscle. His hair was dark and short, and matched the scruff along his jaw. His eyes were a shockingly bright blue, with lashes dark and thick enough to make a fashionista jealous.
He was undeniably handsome, undeniably sexy, and undeniably off-limits.
And I was getting loopy from lack of sleep. I could have used a ten-minute power nap. Or a four-hour power nap. But since I still had something to prove, I sat up straight, blinked hard to force my eyes to focus. “Nope. Totally awake and eyes on the road and checking my six.”
He looked amused. “You’re just stringing words together. Bounty hunters don’t sleep on the job.”
“I’m a bounty hunter in training,” I pointed out. “And I wasn’t sleeping. I was . . . silently debriefing.”
Liam was the actual bounty hunter, and we’d spent hours searching the Lower Ninth Ward for a wraith, a human infected by magic. We hadn’t found him, which was a bad result for everyone. Containment wouldn’t be happy, and the wraith w
as still on the loose, still a threat to the public and himself.
“You did good tonight. We didn’t get a great result, but you did good.” He paused. “And I’m still thinking about that football.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I’m still thinking about the baseball cards.” We hadn’t found the wraith in the several abandoned houses we’d searched, but we had found a former bachelor pad with a man cave and plenty of sports memorabilia.
“I know the owners could come back,” I said, letting my fingers surf in the wind outside the truck. “It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. It’s just—somebody really loved those cards, and they’re getting moldier by the day.”
Liam smiled a little. “And you want to put them in the shop.”
The “shop” was Royal Mercantile, my store in the French Quarter. Or what was left of it after the war with the Paranormals. They’d come through the Veil, the barrier separating their world from ours, and spread destruction and chaos across the South. New Orleans had been ground zero.
“For display and for safety,” I said. “Not for sale.” I glanced at him, his muscles taut beneath the short-sleeved shirt, strong hands on the steering wheel. “You like to sports?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Do I like to sports? You sound like a woman who’s never said that word before.”
“My dad didn’t care about sportsball.”
“You know that’s not a thing.”
“I do,” I admitted. “But I like the sound of it.” I looked at him, the long, rangy body with a powerful chest and arms. “I’d say quarterback—possibly receiver. Maybe pitcher, maybe power forward in sportsball.” It wasn’t difficult to imagine him muscling in for a layup.
He shook his head, but a corner of his mouth was still quirked in a grin. “I played sportsball in high school. Power forward.”
“Nailed it.”
“What about you?” he asked.
“I ran track for a couple of years in high school, until I realized I didn’t really like running.”
“You do plenty of running now,” he said, turning onto North Claiborne.
“That’s because I’m chased. If there’d been Paranormals and wraiths chasing me in high school, I’d have put more effort into it.”
When the truck began to slow, I glanced up. The street was clear; ours was the only vehicle. “If we’ve run out of gas, you have to carry me back to the Quarter.”
Liam just shook his head. “Look,” he said, pointed to the side of the road.
A billboard in front of an auto repair shop had been covered in eye-searing yellow paint. DEATH TO PARANORMALS had been painted in enormous red letters across it.
“I came down this street yesterday,” Liam said, squinting into the sun as he leaned over to look through the window, his cologne lingering faintly behind him when he sat up again. “That wasn’t there.”
“It’s new,” I said, gesturing to the buckets, brushes, and cans of spray paint that littered the parking lot around the post.
“I don’t suppose you sold that stuff. Know who bought it?”
I shook my head. “The supplies didn’t come from my shop. The only paint I have is white, and I don’t have any spray paint.”
“The brushes?”
I shook my head again. Whoever had painted the billboard had used foam rollers to color in the large letters. “Only bristle brushes. They’re not from Royal Mercantile.”
The supplies could have come from anywhere—and from anyone with an ax to grind. The war with the Paranormals had started seven years ago and ended a year later, but the billboard proved the animosity hadn’t completely faded.
“We should tell Gunnar,” I said, thinking of one of my closest friends, and the second-in-charge at Containment, the division of the Paranormal Combatant Command that managed everything in the former war zone, including Devil’s Isle, the prison where Paranormals were incarcerated—or were supposed to be. There were fugitive Paras who’d managed to evade imprisonment and fugitive humans newly infected by magic who hadn’t yet been rounded up. That’s why bounty hunters like Liam had jobs.
His gaze still wary, Liam drove on, taking us closer to Devil’s Isle’s towering walls, which enclosed the Marigny neighborhood. “Tell Malachi and the others, too. They should know someone’s got an attitude problem.”
Malachi was an angel and a friend, and a member of Delta, a group of humans and Paras dedicated to changing the treatment of Paranormals. Their existence proved that not all Paranormals were enemies, just as the billboard proved that not all humans were allies.
The tricky part was telling the difference.
—
It was a Saturday morning in the French Quarter, and there wasn’t a single person in sight. My shop—the first floor of a three-story town house on Royal Street—was one of the lucky buildings that hadn’t been destroyed, although we sold a lot more MREs and bottled water these days than antique sideboards.
Liam sputtered to a stop in front of the store. Our victory flag—a gold fleurs-de-lis on a field of purple—flapped in the breeze from the second-floor balcony.
I climbed out of the truck and into heat that was already oppressive at eight in the morning, then leaned down to look through the open window. “You want to come in for some iced tea?”
“Yes,” Liam said without hesitating, and turned off the truck, followed me to the door. I picked up a scrap of paper and a dead leaf from the tiled threshold, unlocked it.
Anticipating a hot day, I’d left the shop closed up. I’d found a small air conditioner at a swap meet a few weeks before, and I’d managed to get it running. The power had stayed on long enough to cool the air by a few degrees, wring out a little of the humidity.
“Oh, that is nice,” Liam said, pausing inside the door with his eyes closed, black lashes dark against his cheeks and his hands on his lean hips.
Longing, hot and strong as fire, burned through my chest.
I was a Sensitive, one of the few humans exposed to magic who’d developed magical powers as a result. That meant I was a nearly wraith, an almost wraith, a could-be wraith. Liam was supposed to hunt people like me, to lock them safely away in Devil’s Isle. Instead, he’d introduced me to people convinced I could control my magic, that becoming a wraith wasn’t inevitable.
But it was always between us, the possibility the magic would overpower me and he’d be forced to take me in. He believed that would be cruel and unfair to me. And despite the chemistry between us, that wasn’t a gap he’d been able to bridge. So I’d worked to ignore the heat, the connection. It took a lot of conscious effort on my part. And even then, I wasn’t very good at it.
I flipped the CLOSED sign to OPEN, forced myself to put space between us, to walk through the front room past bins of duct tape and bags of Camellia red beans and into the small kitchen. I opened the refrigerator, let the air chill my burning cheeks, then pulled out the pitcher of iced tea. I could’ve used a stiffer drink, but that would have to wait.
I poured two glasses, found Liam standing at the counter’s far end, where I’d spread the shards of a cuckoo clock that had hung in the store. I settled myself on the stool behind the counter, slid his tea over.
“New project?” he asked.
I looked over the piles I’d already separated into wood and metal fragments, the figures of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf that had traveled across the clock’s front. “This is the clock Agent Broussard’s cronies smashed. It was a gift from my father, so I’m going to put it back together.”
“You know how to put together a clock?” he asked, sounding impressed.
I smiled. “With enough time and patience, you can figure anything out. I’m ignoring the mechanisms for now—the gears are so small. I’m going to fix the case first.”
The bell on the door rang as two Containment agents walked in wearing their dark fatigues. I did
n’t exhale until they offered small waves, headed for the canned goods. I was still waiting for the shit to hit that particular fan again.
“You want to help?” I asked Liam, offering a bottle of wood glue.
He frowned over the pieces. “I’m not sure this is my crafting sweet spot.”
I snorted, poured glue into a small dish, dabbed a brush in it. “And what would be your crafting sweet spot?”
“Chopping wood,” he said as I daubed glue on the back of a wood sliver. “Changing oil. Fighting marauders.”
“I don’t have any wood that needs chopping, and I don’t have a car. Marauders are more likely. Glad to know you’re prepared for that.”
Liam made a sarcastic sound, then glanced up at the wall of clocks still functioning. “I should get back to Devil’s Isle, say good morning to Eleanor.”
Liam’s grandmother lived in Devil’s Isle, but by her choice. Only a few knew that she could see magic, the result of a blow during the war from a magical weapon.
The door opened and my other two closest friends walked in. Tadji Dupree waved hello as they walked into the store. She wore dark fatigue pants, a flowy tank, and enormous earrings of gold and silver discs that shone against her dark skin.
Gunnar Landreau was tall and militarily fit, with dark, wavy hair, pale skin, and a trickster’s smile. He wore dark Containment fatigues, but he was very decidedly on our side. Whatever “side” that was.
“You two nearly match today,” I said, gesturing at the fatigues as they came forward. “Pulling a Cagney and Lacey thing? Or Abbott and Costello?”
“Did their clothes match?” Liam asked, head cocked.
“No,” Gunnar said dryly. “Those were the only duos she could think of. Did you know she didn’t have a television growing up?”
“Deprived child,” Liam said, looking back at me thoughtfully. “Although that does explain ‘sportsball.’”
Tadji snorted, put her messenger bag on the counter with a thud.
“We had a television,” I corrected. “We just didn’t watch it very often.” I gestured to Tadji’s bag. “What do you have in that thing?”