by Chloe Neill
The sudden darkness was as good a metaphor as any.
—
Liam went downstairs alone to give me a chance to compose myself. That took me ten more minutes.
By the time I made it downstairs, Tadji had switched the OPEN sign to CLOSED. She’d also lit two pillar candles on the counter, which flickered shadows across the room.
I heard shuffling in the back—probably Liam—but Tadji was the only one in the front of the store. I rounded the corner, walked to the counter. She sat on a stool behind it and looked at me, our positions reversed from the usual.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Her dark eyes narrowed.
I cleared my throat. I hated apologizing. “I’m not really ready to talk about all of it. It has to do with my father, with the store, with what we saw today, and I’m still working through it. But I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, her eyes growing wide. “I didn’t even think about your dad, Claire, about how this was his place, his stuff. I just wanted to be helpful. I’m—” she said, preparing to apologize, but I cut her off.
“You did absolutely nothing wrong. It just brought up some stuff that I guess I haven’t dealt with.” I made myself turn around, let my gaze move from sign to sign, display to display, until I’d surveyed the entire store.
I glanced at the nearly empty carton of boxed matches on the counter, the showy sign above it. “Fire sale?” I asked.
Tadji grinned. “I appreciate a good retail pun, and since that box was full when I put it out, I’d say I’m not the only one.”
“Who knew you’d be so good at merchandising?”
“I know, right?” she said, smiling with pleasure at the compliment. “I think it’s because of my research, because I’ve spent so much time talking to people in the Zone. You talk to them, you begin to figure out what they want.”
I nodded. “Have you seen Gunnar since we left?”
She nodded. “He dropped by earlier. Didn’t talk about what happened. Just said he was going to catch a nap at the Cabildo, then head back in. He looked exhausted, but you know how he is—he’ll work till he drops.”
“As long as he drops, and no one drops him.”
Tadji went peaky at the comment.
“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I’m sorry. Grim humor. I meant the sentiment, though. Containment’s on Reveillon’s radar.”
“I can’t think about that,” she said, and cast a glance at the door. I wondered if she thought of Will Burke, a PCC Materiel agent, a Sensitive, and a member of Delta. He was a friend and ally, and had serious eyes for Tadji. Being Containment, he’d have been on Reveillon’s radar. Unfortunate in a number of ways, and not just because he was recovering from a gunshot wound he’d gotten at the Memorial Battle.
For the second time tonight, I’d put a distressed expression on her face. I was not going to win any awards for friendship today.
She hopped off the stool, pulled her messenger bag over her head. “I’m going to get going. I’m starving and tired, and I’ve had enough chaos here today.” She walked around the counter, hugged me. “You’ve got food? Something to eat?”
“I’m sure there’s something back there, yeah. Thank you—really. For everything.”
She nodded. “You’re welcome, Claire.” She paused. “I’d like to come back tomorrow—I’m working on my outline, and it helps to get out of the house, to think about something else. Unless that would bother you?”
I looked around the store, at the cheerfulness she’d brought into it. The sense of humor. “If it does, it shouldn’t,” I said, and we exchanged hugs again. “I guess you didn’t get to the coffeehouse today.”
“I did not. I think I’m going to stick close for the time being. But for now, I am out like the power in the Zone.” She waved a hand and walked out the door, the bells jingling behind her.
Liam walked out of the kitchen, bottle of water in hand, and looked around. “Did you run her off?”
I yawned, covering my mouth with the back of my hand. It wasn’t far past sunset, but I was ready for bed. “No. She’d had enough.”
“Long day for everyone,” Liam agreed.
I couldn’t stop another yawn. “We need to update Delta.”
“I’ll do that,” Liam said. “I think you’ve done enough for the day.” He looked back at the front door. “You’ll be safe here?”
“As safe as I ever am. The doors will be locked, and I’ll be upstairs with magic.”
He looked understandably dubious at my assessment.
“I can handle myself if I need to. And Ezekiel called you out, not me. He probably doesn’t know who I am.” And even if he did, what could we do about it short of leaving the Zone or my having a twenty-four-hour bodyguard? Neither of those was an option.
Liam nodded. “I think I’m going to take a drive. I want to look for billboards, maybe check out the Lower Ninth.”
“You’re going to look for the wraith again? You shouldn’t go alone.”
He grinned. “Cher, I hunted alone for many years before I met you. I’ll be all right. I just want to pass through, see if I can get an indication of where he’s been, where he’s holed up. If I find it, we can pick him up tomorrow in daylight. Maybe Delta will have settled on a location for their new HQ, and we can talk to them, too.”
“About Reveillon.”
Liam nodded.
“That sounds good. Be careful when you go home, Liam.” He would, after all, be heading back into Devil’s Isle, and he’d already pissed off Ezekiel once today.
“I will, Claire. You take care of yourself.”
When I nodded, he slipped into the darkness, back toward Devil’s Isle. I closed and locked the door behind him, then stood there for a moment, watching until he was out of sight, as if that would keep him safe.
It didn’t hurt to try.
—
I needed sleep and a new day, so I poured a glass of cold water and took the staircase to the third floor, to my long room of hardwood floors and plaster walls bookended by floor-to-ceiling windows.
I put the glass on the bureau and opened the front and back windows a crack, hoping a breeze would work its way upstairs.
A pigeon cooed on the courtyard side, so I checked for a message from Delta, found nothing. The mottled pigeon tilted its head at me in the halting, robotic way of pigeons, so I shook some seed into the small cup attached to its post and left it to its dinner.
When I reached my daybed, I unbuckled my boots, let them drop to the floor. My jeans and shirt followed, until I was left in “answering” clothes. (Just enough clothing, a customer had once told me, that you could still answer the door.)
I fell back onto the bed, exhaustion seeping into every bone and muscle. Some was physical, some was emotional, the cost of seeing horror, of remembering it, of dealing with its aftereffects.
I closed my eyes, tried to relax into the darkness. But even as weariness made my bones feel like lead, my mind continued to spin. It wanted to obsess, to wander, to repeat images of death and violence, to replay my conversations with Liam, to recite the things I’d need to do tomorrow—talk to Delta; order goods for Lizzie; apologize to Tadji again, just in case.
When the list rolled on and on, I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling, forced myself to slowly trace through the constellations formed by glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars. I followed Orion’s shoulders, belt, dagger, the long line of the scorpion, the lion’s powerful body.
Halfway through, my mind tripped to Liam, and I had to drag it back again. When I’d traced all ten of them, I was still awake.
So I counted backward from one hundred. I got to nineteen . . . and I thought of Liam. “Stop it,” I ordered myself.
I imagined I was walking through the storage room, tried to re
member each piece of furniture in order. I made it through to the windows, could feel my body relaxing into sleep . . . and thought of Liam’s arms around me.
And so the cycle continued, over and over again. An hour and a half later, I was still awake.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, then sat up and scrubbed my face, staring angrily into the dark.
There was no point in tossing around, so I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. I pulled on a pair of boxers to match the tank I already wore, shuffled to the doorway, and headed for the stairs.
I flipped on the light in the second-floor storage room, testing it. The power was back on.
I’d always liked to stay busy—fixing broken things, organizing the storage room, restoring an antique I’d found or traded for other things in the store.
And since learning my father had been a Sensitive, I’d been going through the building—the records, the antiques, my father’s personal effects—looking for some clue about when he’d become a Sensitive and what he’d done about it.
Had he learned to cast off his magic, to keep his magic balanced? Was that why the store had been shielded from the magic monitors outside? And the most important question—the only one that really mattered: Why hadn’t he told me?
“He just hadn’t told me yet,” I mumbled, repeating the mantra I’d decided on.
I’d been too young—only eighteen—when he was killed. He had meant to tell me, maybe when I was older. He’d had every intention of telling me but had been killed before he was able to take that step. Because the alternative made my chest ache—the possibility that he’d never intended to tell me, he’d never considered the possibility that I’d end up the same way—but without his help or guidance.
I sat down in front of two barrister’s bookshelves in the storage room and opened the glass door on the bottom shelf. This week, I was working my way through the books my father had collected. The spines were gorgeous, all tooled leather and gilding, and they’d have sold for a pretty penny once upon a time. There were French Quarter tourist favorites—A Confederacy of Dunces and William Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches—along with plenty of classics I hadn’t been allowed to touch as a child. Those tables had certainly turned.
“I’ll take a letter,” I said, pulling a book off the shelf, flipping through the pages. When no hidden note or secret message appeared, I replaced it again. “A sticky note. A receipt. A recipe card. A torn page from an old phone book.”
Anything that would help me understand who he’d really been.
I pulled a copy of The Secret Garden, my heart momentarily speeding when I spotted faint scribbles in the front of the book. But it was just a penciled price from some long-ago sale.
With more discoveries like that, night slipped away. Five more books followed, then ten. Then twenty. And then I was down to the final shelf.
“The Revolt of the Angels,” I murmured, reading the gold letters on the red leather spine. I didn’t know the book, but I’d bet the author hadn’t correctly imagined what a revolt of angels actually involved. I ran my fingers over the pressed metallic designs in the cover, the blue and red points of a radiating star.
“And how long ago were you written?” I wondered, opening the cover to find the publication information on the first page.
But there was no publication page.
The book’s interior pages had been hollowed out, carved into a rectangle but for a border of pages about an inch on each side. And there, resting inside the book, was a set of papers.
My heart pounding, palms suddenly sweating with anticipation, I carefully unfolded them, pressed them flat.
They were old legal documents—a deed issued to a name I didn’t recognize and what I thought were supporting documents, all of them yellowed with age.
They weren’t my father’s, I realized, flipping through half the pages. Just documents someone had put in a book for safekeeping, probably thinking they were being clever about it. My father had likely gotten the book as part of a larger lot, hadn’t even opened it.
I put them both aside, lowered my head to my knees. Maybe I’d never figure out anything else about my father. Maybe I’d learn to live with what I knew and what I didn’t.
“And maybe hell will freeze over, and angels will populate the earth,” I muttered. “Oh. Wait.”
I rose, taking the book and papers with me, turned off the light. Upstairs again, I put them on top of my bureau. Maybe I could find someone to send the papers back to. Maybe I’d keep the book for the irony.
And maybe, if I was lucky, I’d manage to get some sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
It was early. So early that darkness still spilled unmolested into the room. Sound had woken me, but it was too dark, I thought, for Reveille to have rung over the Quarter from the Devil’s Isle.
The song trilled again.
I blinked into darkness, the bed and walls and ceiling coming into focus. And eventually, the mottled gray pigeon singing an aria on the window ledge.
I considered pitching a shoe at it, but since it was probably a message from Delta, I dragged myself out of bed. I winced as I crossed the room, trying to force my legs to work together in sequence, my brain still foggy from the few hours of sleep I’d managed to grab.
“It’s five-damn-thirty in the morning,” I said, reaching for the pigeon, which danced back and forth. “Quit playing hard to get.” When I managed to grab him, I pulled the slip of ivory paper from the leather band on his foot. The script on the curled paper, long and elegant, read: Algiers Point. Practice. Now.—M.
“M” was Malachi, my Delta colleague and today, my new magic teacher. This was a summoning from an angel at five-damn-thirty in the morning.
Grumbling, I put some seed in the pigeon’s feeder, closed the window again, and resigned myself to my fate. I wasn’t sure how long Malachi had already waited, and being even later wasn’t very mannerly. Especially since he was helping me not to become a wraith, which I was totally on board with.
When angels called, Sensitives listened.
—
I showered, dressed, and noshed on one of the bananas a note from Tadji explained had been traded for powdered milk the day before, then slipped on a quilted PCC surplus jacket.
I locked up the store and went outside, headed for the river.
The Quarter was still dark, corners lit by gas streetlamps and the red glow of untriggered magic monitors. As Liam predicted, it had rained overnight, leaving the city damp and unusually chilly for this time of year. Another effect of magic—startling weather changes in our typically tropical corner of the world.
Even now, years after its peak, the Quarter smelled like the Quarter. Dampness, alcohol, garbage. It was like the boozy essence of Bourbon Street in its heyday had been trapped in the humidity that now misted through the city. Or maybe daiquiris, pralines, and their aftereffects had soaked into the asphalt and brick.
I should have been nervous, wary that Reveillon members were patrolling the neighborhood, looking for objects of their anger. But there was something magical in the darkness. Once upon a time, early morning in the Quarter meant garbage trucks, produce deliveries, joggers, businesspeople preparing to open stores and restaurants, tourists out and about before the heat became too oppressive.
Now the city was quiet, mist fuzzing the edges of the buildings and giving the gas lamps an otherworldly gleam. Devil’s Isle still glowed to the north, but the humidity softened its even lines.
I walked toward the union of Canal Street and the Mississippi River. The Crescent City Connection, the bridge on U.S. 90, had been destroyed during the war, and the new crossing was several miles downriver. There’d been a ferry terminal here once upon a time, but it was gone, too, destroyed right after Mardi Gras World had burned to the ground.
You wanted to visit Algiers now, you paid Mr. Bernar
d.
His ferry had been cobbled from a section of barge, the seam sealed and made watertight. Rings were welded to one side, which were intricately laced to the bottom half of a long ellipse of rope that spanned the river.
A man, thin as a rail with lived-in skin tanned by the sun, stepped out of his tent on the edge of the riverbank. “Mornin’.”
“Good morning, Mr. Bernard.” I held out a few dollars, which he accepted with a nod and then tucked into his worn backpack. “Can I get a ride across?”
“Sure. Early.”
I nodded. “Not my choice. Friend needs me.”
He nodded, gestured to the barge. “Climb aboard.”
I stepped onto the dock, then onto the long, flat barge, and watched as Mr. Bernard untied the hefty ropes that moored it to the muddy shore.
Rumor was, Mr. Bernard had been a pediatrician at a posh clinic in the Garden District when the war started. His office was hit in a fierce day of fighting during the Second Battle of New Orleans, and the loss of life—the loss of children—changed him. He walked away from what remained, joined the war, and then become the ferryman. Instead of battling illness, he battled the churning Mississippi day in and day out.
He tossed the ropes onto the barge’s deck. Now loose, it shifted into the current, pulling tight against the cable that kept it from washing downriver and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico.
He walked to the middle of the barge, hands in heavy leather gloves, his arms tanned and corded with muscle. He began working hand over hand, pulling the upper rope to move the ferry into the river.
I grabbed a rail as the barge bucked against the current. We needed to move east; the river, which boiled brown in the early dawn, wanted very much to push us south.
The barge shuddered as a tree limb jarred us, nearly ripping the rope out of one of its stations. Mr. Bernard grunted but kept his hands on the rope.
“I can help,” I said, and offered to do my part. But he motioned me back, beads of sweat popping on his face, and continued pulling.
