by Chloe Neill
“We can’t abandon her,” he’d said. “We can’t abandon New Orleans.”
“I’d rather live somewhere else than die here.” I’d been seventeen, and convinced I knew everything.
“We don’t just quit,” my father had said, putting an arm over my head as shots of magic crackled outside, vibrant green light flashing in the sliver of space along the bottom of the bathroom door. “We don’t just walk away.”
Instead, he’d made a plan to stay in New Orleans, with enough supplies to last at least a little while.
There was a tall, metal safe in the corner. It was dark green, with the manufacturer’s name across the front in pretty gold script. I’d seen a safe like that before—there was one in the back room of the store. Empty now, but meant to hold weapons.
I walked to it, Liam’s footsteps falling in line behind me, and turned the heavy handle, and the door swung open. Closed, but not locked. And inside, two rifles, two shotguns, two handguns that I guessed were nine millimeters, or something like that, and several cartons of ammo.
“He was prepared.”
“For war,” I said, touching a finger to the cold metal barrel of a rifle, then closing the door again.
“They’re yours,” Liam said carefully, glancing down at me. “You could take these with you—or one of them. Or anything else in here.”
I turned back to the room, crossed my arms as I looked at it all. “It’s mine if we assume it was my father’s.”
“You’d know him best.”
“I thought I did,” I said, and looked back at him. “What am I supposed to do with this, Liam? What am I supposed to think?”
Outside, while using my magic and then while seeing Liam’s reaction to it, I’d felt more myself than I ever had. Like, for the first time, I really and truly fit within my own skin, not trying to make myself fit in someone else’s. Not just Claire of Royal Mercantile, but Claire.
This—this castle my father had built and furnished—made me feel like a stranger all over again.
Liam searched my face. “He didn’t tell you about any of it.”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry.”
I nodded, walked to the army green cot across the room, sat down. “Me, too.” I looked up at Liam. “I feel like I have to keep grieving for him all over again, that every time I find out something like this, I lose him all over again. Lose the person he was.”
“Yeah,” Liam said with a sigh. “I understand that.” He walked closer, stood in the middle of the room with his arms crossed, chin down.
“Helluva thing. So what do you want to do?”
I looked down at the floor—more polished concrete—while I considered. We could use the supplies, sure. Everything in here could be used, sold, distributed to those who needed it. But I thought of the prediction I’d made to Tadji earlier today, of the fact that an army was actively trying to dismantle that organization that remained in the Zone. It wouldn’t be wise to burn through supplies we’d almost certainly need down the road.
I thought for a moment but couldn’t find anything that would be gained from telling anyone else about this.
“I’m not going to tell anyone. Containment would either destroy the objects . . . or try to use them against the Paras.” They’d become more flexible on that as the war had continued. “I’m not going to start a war against Containment, but neither am I going to hand them the weapons to use against someone else.”
Maybe that was irresponsible of me. Maybe I should have handed it all over to Containment for the good of the cause. But Containment’s “cause” was Devil’s Isle. That didn’t seem right, either.
Liam nodded. “Agreed. What about Gunnar?”
That answer was easier. There was too much here that could be used against me, against my father. And since I trusted Gunnar completely, used against Gunnar.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want this to become his problem.”
“And the food? The supplies?”
“We don’t have a lot these days, but we have what we need. I told Tadji today that I thought this was going to get worse before it gets better, and I think it will.” I looked around again, shook my head. “I don’t think we should touch it. Not now. Because there might come a time when we need it more.”
That neatly sidestepped the issue of whether I wanted to use it, the fact that I felt uncomfortable even thinking about it. It might have been my father’s . . . but he hadn’t given it to me. And that made me want to touch it even less.
My gaze settled on a pink footlocker across the room. “CC” was painted in green across the front. It had been mine, a Christmas present that I’d filled with dolls and books and mementos. And occasionally pretended was a boat.
Hope flared. Had he saved that for me, so I could have my own things here, my own space?
I rose and walked to it, flipped up the gold latches, and opened it.
It was empty, except for a single photograph.
I stared down at the lithe woman with the long red hair who stared back at me.
She was tall and slender, her long arms and legs covered by a simple wrap dress, sandals on her feet. Her hair was long and straight and vibrantly red, set off by golden skin and green eyes. She stood beneath a live oak, one hand braced on the rough bark, limbs and Spanish moss reaching down around her. The sky was blue and dotted with cotton clouds, sunlight dappling through the leaves to cast shadows on the ground.
She looked like the redheaded woman I’d seen at the Memorial Battle.
I flipped the photograph over, but it was blank. No name, no year, no indication of where the picture had been taken or by whom.
“Claire?”
I could feel Liam suddenly behind me, his body big and warm.
“Is that your mother?” he asked when I didn’t answer.
“I didn’t know my mother,” I said, barely holding back tears I didn’t want to shed. “She died—had a bad strain of the flu when I was only two. There weren’t any photographs of her in the house, so I’m not even sure what she looked like.”
I looked back at Liam. “This looks like the woman I saw at Memorial.”
He took the photograph, stared at it. “I didn’t see her—the woman with red hair.” He looked up at me, then back at the photograph again. “She looks like you.”
I nodded. But if this was my mother, I didn’t know then, and I didn’t know how I could know it now.
“Do you want to take this?” he asked, offering it to me again.
I didn’t know the answer to that. I didn’t know if I should drop it back into the trunk—the trunk with my name on it, that carried no memories of me or anything else—or take it with me, because maybe I could use it to figure out who she was.
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to take it. But I also didn’t want to leave it here. And I was too angry and sad to make a decision about anything.
“I’ll take it,” Liam said. “I’ll put it in the truck, and it will be there when you’re ready.”
That small kindness nearly did me in, but I forced myself to hold it together. We had bigger problems right now—bigger dangers—than my personal drama.
“Okay,” I said, and climbed to my feet.
“Let’s go back to the store,” Liam said, putting a hand against my back.
“Yeah,” I said, and turned my back on the spoils my father had gathered.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t home. And I was ready to go back to mine.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We went back to the Quarter with more questions than he’d come with. Why not tell me about the Apollo? Why not give me a chance to get there if something had happened to him?
Because maybe it hadn’t been meant for us. Maybe he’d built it, prepared it, for her, for the woman in the photograph. Maybe he’d been biding his tim
e until he could get to her.
“You all right?” Liam asked when we’d put some distance between us and the station.
“I don’t know. I’m confused and sad and suddenly the owner of what is probably the biggest cache of magical artifacts in the Zone.”
“If not the United States,” Liam said with a smile. “In a manner of speaking, you hit the jackpot.”
“If we ignore the contraband part.”
He waved that away. “I’m sure Containment wouldn’t care. It’s only a few things. A few hundred very illegal things.”
“Quit trying to cheer me up.”
He slid me a quick glance. “You’d rather wallow?”
“At the moment, yeah, I would.”
Brow furrowed, he futzed around under his seat. “I may have a cassette of depressing violin music in here somewhere.”
“God,” I said, rubbing my hands over my face. “Could you have picked a trainee with more drama? I’m sorry.”
“No,” Liam said. “Don’t ever apologize for who or what you are. A lot of people would have walked away from New Orleans, from Royal Mercantile. You built something, Claire. You are heart and recklessness and fire. The drama just came along for the ride.”
This time, I couldn’t keep the tears from falling.
“Your eyes appear to be sweating,” Liam said, and handed me a tissue he’d scrounged from under the seat.
“Shut up,” I said, but I was half smiling when I said it. “And thank you.”
“Anytime, Claire. Anytime.”
—
There were several customers in the store, but Tadji gestured us to the back room as soon as we walked in.
We found Gunnar at the table, bottle of Scotch in front of him and fury written in every feature. Gavin stood nearby, arms crossed and watching.
“Hey,” I said, glancing between them. “What’s wrong?”
“I am in a fighting goddamn mood.” He poured a finger of amber liquid into a short glass. “I had to walk away for a few minutes, or I was heading for court-martial.”
Liam stood beside his brother. “What happened?”
“They’re gone. Ezekiel, the arsenal, anybody else strong enough to fight. They cleared out the camp before PCC could be bothered to send anyone over there.”
Liam blinked. “What do you mean, ‘before PCC could be bothered’? Why did they wait? They had our firsthand reports.”
“They had your reports, and they had a bunch of red tape handed to them by some legal eagle in PCC who decided we didn’t have jurisdiction at the camp.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, taking the seat in front of Gunnar.
“Camp Couturie was a federal refugee camp on city property,” Gunnar said. “It apparently took a lot of red tape for FEMA to set up the camp in the first place—back when FEMA was still in charge—and all that goddamn red tape had to be untangled so that we could walk into Camp Couturie to search for Reveillon, even with a warrant.”
“Jurisdictional bullshit,” Gavin said.
“A-fucking-men,” Gunnar said. “By the time we got our teams in, they’d probably been gone for hours. And it took hours more to search completely. We found a few perfectly legal weapons and a handful of people who had no interest in joining him.”
I looked at Liam. “And that’s why they only sent one vehicle after us. They were letting us get away.”
“Damn,” Liam said with a nod. “Ezekiel had decided to run, and they used the other vehicles to evacuate the camp.”
Guilt settled heavy in my belly that we’d been the reason they’d run, had slipped Containment’s grasp. But we’d been the only ones willing to check out the lead. Containment should have taken the tattoo, the possibility of Camp Couturie, more seriously.
“Do you have any idea how many Reveillon members were there?” Liam asked.
“Based on the last population estimate, and the count we did today, about a thousand.”
Silence fell as we considered that.
“There can’t be that many gullible people,” I said. “People dumb enough to buy in to his nonsense.”
“Not necessarily dumb,” Gavin said. “Just gullible and angry.”
Gunnar nodded. “Nailed it in one. You’re on a roll today.”
“I’m more than just delectable good looks.”
“They’ve probably split up,” Liam said. “Safe houses or camps across the city so they don’t attract too much attention. They might have done the same with the arsenal.”
“Every Containment officer who isn’t working in Devil’s Isle is searching the city,” Gunnar said, pouring another shot. “And that’s only the first issue in this shitshow of a day.”
I took the shot before he could drink it, winced at the heat, and waited for the warmth to settle. Not my poison of choice, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“We saw the fires,” Liam said.
Gunnar nodded, poured another drink, downed it. “We lost two in the fires to smoke inhalation. We also lost records, equipment, stockpiles of water—we keep it all over the city, just in case. But things could have been even worse. Fortunately, Malachi spotted one of the fires, just after dawn. He pulled a couple of napping agents out of the building, triggered the monitor so Containment would respond.”
“Clever,” Liam said.
“It was. The fire was too big for him to stop, and was raging by the time our people got there. We’d have lost two more men if he hadn’t intervened. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the violence. One of Burke’s convoys was attacked outside the city, near Ponchatoula.”
“They nearly made it to New Orleans,” Liam said.
“Nearly,” Gunnar agreed, misery in his eyes. “But not nearly enough.”
Liam sighed. “How many?”
“Four.” Gunnar ran a hand through his hair. The anger had burned off into guilt and grief. “Four more agents lost.”
“They’re spreading Containment thin,” Gavin said.
“They are. We know it, but we can’t do anything other than what we’re doing. At least not unless PCC can get some troops across the goddamn border. That would require identifying the PCC leak, which PCC denies it has.”
“The brass taking heat?” Liam asked.
“The president is pissed. Congress is pissed. The Joint Chiefs are pissed. And everybody is blaming someone else for this absolute clusterfuck.”
“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
We all looked at Gavin.
“Blame,” he said. “That’s what Ezekiel is doing—making promises about the future, blaming the past and present on Paras.”
“Yeah,” Gunnar said. “And he’s doing it damn effectively.” He looked at me. “Tell Malachi that Ezekiel is in the wind. And that he has my personal thanks for stepping in when he saw the fire.”
I nodded. “We’re meeting him at noon,” I said, and checked the wall clock. It was nearly time to leave. The Apollo had taken a good chunk of the morning.
“So, what do we do now?” I asked.
“We hunt,” Liam said darkly, deadly intent in his eyes. “We find them, and we take them down.”
We didn’t have time to throw out a plan before the air raid siren began to ring again.
“Shit,” Gunnar said, and we followed the crowd out the door. Royal was empty except for the flock of pigeons that lifted into the sky across the street, startled by our outburst.
Smoke lifted inside the walls of Devil’s Isle. And for the second time in as many days, we ran toward the prison.
—
Gavin stayed at the store, so Gunnar, Liam, and I did the running.
The sirens grew louder, the smoke more intense, the ache in my ankle stronger the closer we got to the fence. The gate was closed and guarded, so something had happened inside
, not at the gate.
“Report,” Gunnar asked, flashing his ID as the gate swung open.
One of the guards who stood inside nodded. “A Reveillon fugitive blew the riverside warehouse.”
We followed Gunnar into the neighborhood and two blocks past the gate, where flames shot from the roof of a long, narrow building. A dozen Containment officers stood nearby while firefighters worked to contain the blaze.
Reece stood across the street, hands linked behind his back. He looked like a soldier at parade rest, but for the tension around his eyes.
“Reveillon?” Gunnar asked when we reached him, and the sirens finally quieted.
Reece nodded. “Molotov cocktail. Fire was started by one of the fugitives.” He gestured to the opposite corner, where a woman in dirty linen kneeled on the sidewalk, her hands behind her head. She was flanked by particularly pissed-looking Containment officers.
“Only one building affected?” Gunnar asked.
“That we’ve seen, yes,” Reece said.
Near the fires outside the gate, TRAITORS was scrawled in spray-painted letters across the front of the building.
“It can’t be a coincidence they set similar fires outside Devil’s Isle and inside Devil’s Isle today,” I said.
“Is there any evidence Reveillon has been talking to the fugitives in here?” Liam asked.
“Not that we’re aware of,” Gunnar said.
“Maybe they planned ahead,” Reece said. “Both knew today was the day.”
Liam’s gaze lifted to the faint streaks that marked the sky outside the prison. “Or the fires outside were the signal—a sign the fugitives should act. What was in the building?”
“Storage,” Gunnar said. “Paper files, mostly. It’s barely guarded, because there’s literally nothing in there that anyone could use.”
“The building wasn’t staffed?” I asked.
“No,” Reece said. “And no injuries reported.”
Reveillon liked drama, which made me wonder why they’d bother torching an unstaffed storage building. It would be inconvenient for Containment, sure, but that was all.
“So there’s not really any point in burning it?” I asked.
