by Chloe Neill
We went silent.
“Damn,” Tadji said, sadness punctuating the air.
“Yeah,” Gunnar said. “Ezekiel couldn’t have known where the troops would come from.”
“Which means, if that attack and the Devil’s Isle bombing are related,” Liam said, “he’s got people spread out across the borders, or at the Zone’s entry points, at least.”
Gunnar nodded. “Joint Ops considers Reveillon a hostile militia.”
Tadji frowned. “Wait, you think he’s got an organization that’s spread across the Zone?”
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be big if it’s agile, mobile,” Liam said.
“But it’s not hard to recruit people who are already pissed off,” Gunnar said. “If we arrested everyone who said nasty things about Paranormals, most of the U.S. population would be in chains.”
“I’ve heard from people in the Zone who are still angry,” Tadji confirmed. “Not paint-a-billboard angry, but angry.”
I found that kind of baffling. “Seven years later? I’m not saying you can’t feel what you feel, but holding on to that anger, obsessing about it—I don’t get it. It seems like such a waste of energy. Of limited time.”
“Some people don’t have a store,” Tadji said gently. “They lost loved ones like you but don’t have livelihoods. They live hand to mouth, and they stay here because they don’t think they have anywhere else to go. That leads to bitterness, to anger.”
“And like-minded individuals find other like-minded individuals,” Gunnar said. “Or that’s Joint Ops’ working theory. Either way, he managed to orchestrate the bombing of a federal facility without anybody catching on.”
“Operational security,” Liam said. “His people are smart enough not to talk.”
“Yeah,” Gunnar said. “PCC will be sending more convoys in—but in smaller, elite units that are prepared for guerrilla-style warfare. Still, the Zone is a very big place. There’s a chance they’ll do more harm before it’s all over. That they’ll kill again before it’s all over.”
Silence fell again as we all faced the possibility of war. This time by our own people.
“They’d have to have resources,” Liam said. “Money, contacts for the explosives.”
“And enough expertise to know what to buy, how to build them,” Gunnar agreed.
“I’ve seen a lot of the Zone,” Tadji put in, arms stretched and palms on the counter like a general considering strategy. “There’s no money in it, or not much, anyway.”
“We had money,” Gunnar said. The Landreaus had an enormous house in the Garden District, had been an important part of the city’s society class. “We put most of it into restoring the house, putting in generators, keeping it up. Keeping it as a memorial to the money we used to have,” he added dryly. “But I take your point.”
Liam crossed his arms, which made the muscles shift and flex. “So, outside funding?”
“Or members who stockpiled resources. There are still weapons from the war to be found across the Zone.”
“Could the members be ex-military?” Tadji asked, frowning. “There were stories during the war about disgruntled soldiers with a ‘kill all the Paranormals’ attitude. Maybe they were recruited.”
“Could be,” Gunnar said. “Or maybe Ezekiel—or whatever the hell his real name is, ’cause I’d put money on it not being Ezekiel—”
“Tad,” I suggested. “Or Chip. He could be a Chip.”
“You had it with Tad,” Liam said, leaning against the counter, eyes shining with humor. “I knew a Tad in high school. Total douche.”
“Tad the cult leader,” Gunnar said. “We’ll see if it holds. Anyway, maybe Ezekiel brought his own cash.”
“From outside the Zone,” I said. “He didn’t have an accent.”
Gunnar blinked. “You’re right. I didn’t catch that.” He penned a note on his small, ubiquitous notebook.
“We talked to Moses about his theory that magic has ruined the world,” Liam said.
“What did he say?”
“Basically, that it was bullshit. Magic leaked through the Veil when it was opened, and magic weapons saturated the soil in some areas. The ongoing effect of Paras is miniscule compared to that. Whatever effects magic has had won’t be fixed by killing Paras. But they might be fixed by more magic.”
“And that won’t happen until Congress is willing to enlist Paras to help,” Gunnar said. “That’s not going to happen any time soon, since it would require admitting the difference between Consularis and Court Paranormals, among other things.”
The door opened again. A few agents came in, including Burke. He stepped beside Tadji, nearly dwarfing her slender frame with his broad shoulders. Tall, with dark skin and dark eyes, and a generous mouth that always seemed to be smiling, he directed that smile at Tadji. “Tadji.”
“Burke.”
There was heat to be sure. I needed to grab some time with Tadji and quiz her on the rest of it. Nosiness was an honored New Orleans tradition.
“Hey, Burke,” Gunnar said while Burke’s gaze danced busily around the store.
“Looks different in here. I like it.”
“Thank you,” Tadji said with a smile. “Claire’s still getting used to it.”
“Change can be difficult,” Burke said.
“What’s the good word?” Liam asked.
Burke cast a glance around, making sure the other agents were out of earshot. “Our friends have a new house and would like to discuss and coordinate.”
“Our friends” meant Delta. They’d been infiltrated and betrayed by a Paranormal who wanted to reopen the Veil, so a new HQ had become a necessity. That Para, Nix, had also betrayed Liam’s younger brother, Gavin. He’d left New Orleans right after on some secret mission.
Burke held up a set of keys. “Who wants to go for a ride?”
Liam nodded. “I’m in,” he said, and looked at me. “You?”
I glanced at Tadji. “Can you merchandise while we commune?”
“Maybe,” she said with narrowed eyes. “If I get full details on the practice.”
“Nothing to tell,” I assured them. And I pinched her arm on my way to the door.
—
Burke had a jeep, a spare, military model with no doors and no top. The day had become hot and sticky, so the breeze was glorious. I braided my hair on the way out of the Quarter to keep it from flying around, and stretched out on the bench seat in the back after Liam called shotgun.
We took St. Charles, which was divided in half by the neutral ground where streetcars once ran. We drove through the Garden District, where the houses of the wealthy were stacked like boxes along the street. Most had been abandoned. A few, like Gunnar’s parents’ house, had been brought back from the brink of destruction. His large family still lived there, biding their time until . . . Well, I wasn’t really sure what they were waiting for. Maybe, like Reveillon, they were waiting for something different, something they hoped was inevitable.
“Look,” Burke said, slowing down.
A sign formerly identifying someone’s business—smaller than the billboard we’d seen on Claiborne—now read DEATH TO PARANORMALS.
“Spreading the hate,” Burke said.
“Like a virus,” I agreed. But there was no mention of Reveillon, Ezekiel, or anything else on the sign. “How do you think they’re actually recruiting?”
“Word of mouth,” Burke said. “You help someone chop some wood, you both talk about how pissed you are that you’re trying to eke out a living on bad soil. Junk man comes through, selling junk, picking up junk, and you talk to him. He’s heard about a meeting of like-minded individuals in the next parish, and you decide to go.”
Liam glanced at him, eyebrows lifted. “That’s pretty specific.”
Burke nodded. “One of our caravan drivers heard
some talk out near Natchez. We put Containment on it, but we didn’t find the meeting.”
“Maybe they’re mobile like the junk man,” I said. We didn’t see junk men often in the city. It was more common for someone to bring something in to the store to sell—from heirloom silver to busted-up electronics—for a few dollars or Devil’s Isle tokens. “Reveillon, or at least those outside the city, stay nomadic so they don’t attract too much attention.”
“Very possible,” Liam said.
Burke made a note of the sign’s location on a scrap of paper stuck beneath the sunshade. “Let’s keep moving,” he said, flipping up the shade and putting the jeep in gear again.
We moved down the street, the sign growing smaller behind us, but still big in our minds.
—
Burke pulled the jeep in front of a simple, white church, APOSTLES the only word that remained on the peeling wooden sign in the small yard in front of it. The white clapboard building, situated in Freret, was small and narrow, with a door between two windows on the front. A steeple reached into the sky above the arched doorway.
“Interesting choice,” Liam said as we headed up the sidewalk.
“It’s an historic property,” Burke explained. “The building’s on the National Register, so the state won’t touch it. The feds don’t have money to deal with all the abandoned buildings under their authority, which makes it a political no-man’s land.” His tone softened. “And there aren’t enough people in the neighborhood to use it.”
The war had treated every neighborhood differently. Battles had striped devastation into the Garden District, leaving blackened blocks beside pristine ones. The Lower Ninth, so damaged by the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina, had been mostly spared, probably because there weren’t as many houses there.
Freret had been terrorized and picked apart by a group of Paras who’d nested nearby during the war. A group of neighbors on a nighttime patrol had been slaughtered, and the neighborhood had been mostly abandoned after the attack. Who could blame them?
“We’ve been watching it for a while,” Burke said, “just to make sure we’d have the place to ourselves. Helps that the church is in a neighborhood, off the main roads.”
Burke rapped on the front door. Seconds later, the locks snapped. A curvy woman with pale skin and dark hair opened it. She wore cropped black pants and a short-sleeved sweater, her hair curled into soft waves around her face, tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose.
This was Darby Craig, a former scientist who’d been kicked out of her research unit when she learned the truth about Paranormals.
“Hey, Claire, Liam. Welcome to the new Delta HQ.” She stood aside so we could enter.
The door opened into a small, empty foyer, and a double doorway leading into the chapel. It was a space my father would have appreciated—antique in the extreme, with rough-hewn wooden floors and bare beams across the steeply pitched ceiling. There were marks on the floor where benches had once provided seating for congregants, but they were gone now. Probably used for kindling during the war, when magic sent cold snaps through New Orleans with chilling regularity.
An enormous stained glass window spilled light across the other end of the room. In front if it, wings outstretched, stood an angel. Malachi turned, his wings folding behind him with the soft whoosh of moving feathers before disappearing completely.
“As you can see,” Darby said, closing the door behind us, “the place was mostly gutted, but there’s a receiving room in the back and a small office.” She reached us in the middle of the aisle, smiled. “There’s a rookery in the steeple. The bell’s gone—probably melted down for weapons during the war. Pigeons took over the space, and we’ve started training ours to roost here. That’s one of the reasons why we picked it. Oh, and there’s this.”
She walked to the low stage at the front of the church, knelt down, and pressed her fingertips to the wood. A panel of the floor popped up beneath her hands.
“What is that?” Liam asked, moving closer.
“Trapdoor,” she said, pulling the panel up, which brought the scent of damp earth into the room. “Leads down to the crawl space. We’re guessing it was used during Prohibition given the age of the church. And during the war,” she added, her expression sobering as she dropped the door again and rose. “We found some empty soup cans down there, water bottles, that kind of thing. Folks probably hid during air raids.”
Paranormals with wings didn’t need electricity to fly above the Zone, which made the peal of air raid sirens all too common during the war.
“There was an office in the refinery above the factory floor,” Darby continued, glancing at me and Liam. “I don’t think you ever saw it,” she added, and we shook our heads. “Anyway, we kept basic supplies there—food, water, flashlights, batteries, a small genny. We moved them into the crawl space last week.”
Liam looked up. “Good to know we have it, if we need it.”
“Wanna see the back?” Darby asked, and Liam and Burke agreed, followed her through a narrow paneled door on the right-hand side of the stage.
While they walked to the back of the church, I stayed behind, met Malachi’s gaze. He’d been standing on the other side of the stage, arms crossed, his gaze intense on the stained glass, his thoughts partly hidden by the tousled curl that fell over one eye.
“And so we meet again,” I said.
“And I still have no coffee.”
I smiled, appreciating the humor. “I won’t hold that against you. We got an update from Gunnar.”
He nodded, and we stood there awkwardly for a moment. I still wasn’t entirely sure what to talk to him about. There was something very formal about him—maybe because he’d been a general in the Consularis army. “So, do you have any hobbies?”
His gaze slid slowly my way. “Hobbies?”
“I mean, what do you do when you aren’t working with Delta, or handling Para issues, or, well, working out?” I added, considering his physique.
“I read.”
“Oh? What do you read?” I thought about The Revolt of the Angels. If the text hadn’t been chopped out of it, I could have given it to Malachi.
“Military texts, primarily. Books on tactics and strategy.”
“Understandable,” I said. And when silence fell again, I was more than a little relieved that Darby, Burke, and Liam walked into the church again.
“And now that the tour’s over,” Darby said, “let’s get down to business.”
We gathered together, and Liam put his hands on his hips, gave his report.
“Four killed in the bombing by a group called Reveillon. Seven Reveillon members killed. The leader calls himself Ezekiel and contends the only way to fix the Zone is to rid the city of magic—Paranormals, Containment, and the works.”
“Imprisoning Paranormals isn’t sufficient?” Malachi’s voice was tight with anger. If humans knew what he was—and had been able to catch him—he’d be in Devil’s Isle with the rest of them.
“Apparently not,” Liam said, and reviewed what we’d learned about the group, the bombing, Containment’s investigation.
“How many from the bombing are still on the loose?” Darby asked.
“Outside Devil’s Isle,” Liam said, “unknown in numbers and spread, although a PCC convoy out of Pensacola was hit. Inside the gates, Containment thinks there are five fugitives.”
“Preparing for the next attack?” Burke asked. “Or planning a different one?”
“We don’t know yet,” Liam said. “Containment has people searching the prison, and I understand they’re warning the Paras.”
“There are too many places to hide,” Malachi said, walking to one of the church’s side windows and staring pensively outside. “Paras will be watching, and they may very well report what they find. But the prison, the neighborhood, is enormous.”
Liam nodded. “I think Containment is aware of the scale of the problem. They’re considering Reveillon an armed militia.”
Malachi turned back. “Good. I’m glad they recognize the severity.” He paused, seeming to choose his words. “There are clearly humans who, like yourselves, are sympathetic to our situation, our circumstances. But not all feel that way. Frankly, I wasn’t certain they’d take the threat with enough seriousness.”
“They’re after Paranormals, so who cares?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“If Ezekiel had wanted Containment to be lackadaisical about the threat,” Burke said, “he picked exactly the wrong way to do it. He killed humans, soldiers, families. That guaranteed Containment’s involvement and attention.”
“Agreed,” Liam said. “What’s our response?”
“There are Delta members outside New Orleans,” Malachi said. “Paranormals, primarily. Not many, but enough to gather intelligence about Reveillon’s activities outside the city.”
“I’ll assist with that,” Burke said. “Check in with the caravans, our suppliers, see what they can tell us.”
Malachi nodded. “I can help search inside the city, and we’ll get the information to Burke or to you,” he said, looking at me and Liam. “You can get it to Gunnar?”
“We can,” I said.
“Containment issued a bounty for Reveillon members,” Liam said. “I’ll be working that.” He glanced at me. “With Claire, as time and patience permit.”
“I do find patience is required,” Malachi said.
I gave them haughty looks. “I assume you’re both referring to my needing patience to deal with you.”
Beside me, Darby worked to bite back a smile. “And speaking of things requiring patience, I’m working on the slower side of things. I’ve managed to find a place—a former biotech building near the airport—that still has some pretty good supplies in it.”
“We’re helping her set up a lab,” Burke said, smiling at Darby. “She might as well be using all those letters behind her name.”
“Damn right,” Darby said.
“What will you be working on?” I asked.
