The Veil

by Chloe Neill

  The wall panels must have been poured into wooden molds, because they’d kept the whirls of the wood’s grain. I reached out, touched one, expecting to feel the rough grit of concrete. But it was smooth to the touch, even where it looked like the wood grain had changed the texture. And it was warm enough that I yanked my lingering fingers back after a few seconds.

  The gate was in the middle of Peters Street. It was the only part of the Devil’s Isle that wasn’t surrounded by concrete, or at least not completely. A tall black fence had been mounted into a couple of feet of concrete barrier. The fence had been “requisitioned” by Containment when the wall was being built, from an architectural salvage place in Bywater. It had come from a plantation on River Road, and was incredibly ornate, with ROSEVILLE in gold capitals across the front.

  Only in New Orleans would a prison get a Gothic revival.

  The gate was closed, a sleek guardhouse sitting outside it, guards standing at attention around it.

  I blew out a breath, clenched and unclenched my fingers against very sweaty palms. My body felt suddenly heavy, like it was rooting in place to stay outside those walls. My escape plan hadn’t had a sixth step. And if it had, it wouldn’t have been “walk into Devil’s Isle of own accord.”

  But the fear wasn’t all about me. Part of it was about them. About the images that lived in my mind about the war, about the beings who’d fought it, and the prison I’d imagined. I thought of military barracks, utilitarian buildings, sad faces. Beyond that, I had no idea what to expect, and that was as scary as anything else.

  “You do what I tell you, and nothing more, and you’ll be fine.”

  It was the tone of Liam’s voice that had me looking up, hoping it had been a good idea to follow a man I’d only just met into a supernatural prison that wanted to add me to its rolls.

  I nodded. “I’m not afraid of many things, but this place is one of them.” The intimacy of the admission had me looking back at the concrete, at all the things it kept in, and the things it kept out. “Of being locked away because of something I didn’t choose,” I said. “Something that came to me, and not the other way around. I tried to help someone tonight, and that’s threatening to tear my world apart.”

  I swallowed, looked into his shockingly blue eyes. “I didn’t run—because you asked me not to. You were straight with me about the Containment agents. I’m going to trust that you’re being straight with me now.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  “I’ll tell Containment you lied to them about a Sensitive and let them sort it out.”

  His eyebrows lifted in appreciation. “That’s a pretty good threat. I consider myself duly warned.”

  “Okay,” I said, and fell into step beside him. Because sometimes a girl had to take fate into her own hands.

  A Containment agent stood inside the guardhouse, his gun strapped to one side of his belt, a stick on the other. He looked at us mildly.

  Liam seemed utterly cool and composed.

  “Hawkins,” Liam said.

  “Quinn,” Hawkins responded. He was medium height with brown hair and blue eyes. Every bit of him seemed precise: bluntly square jaw, perfectly shorn hair, an immaculately pressed uniform that he filled out with heavy muscle.

  Liam pulled a leather wallet from his back pocket. Hawkins scanned his ID with a small wand, and the comp inside his station beeped with approval.

  “Who’s she?” he asked.

  “Trainee.”

  Hawkins looked me over. “She doesn’t look like much of a trainee.”

  “You tryin’ to insult me, or her?”

  “If the shoe fits,” Hawkins said. “You hear about the wraith attack tonight? Some girl in the Quarter fought them off with a stick.”

  I decided it wasn’t a good idea to take credit for that. But Liam didn’t have any qualms.

  “She’s the girl,” he said, and tucked the wallet away again.

  Hawkins’s eyebrows lifted. “You don’t say.”

  “It was me,” I said. “But it was a tree limb. Not a stick.”

  Liam looked at me with amusement. It was the first time I’d seen him put on anything close to a smile, and it highlighted dimples in each cheek. They transformed his face, made him seem a lot less disquieting.

  “Making sure you get full credit?” he asked.

  “I earned it.”

  “T’as raison,” Liam murmured.

  “He says you’re right,” Hawkins translated with a smile. “I’m thinking you’ve got a handful with this one.”

  “Which one of us are you talking to, Hawkins?” Liam asked.

  He smiled at Liam. “Weapons?”

  Liam pulled up his shirt, showing the gun belted at his lean hip. He removed it, handed it over.

  Hawkins nodded, scanned it, placed it in a locked box beneath his console. “You know the drill. You can retrieve it on the way out.”

  When Liam nodded, Hawkins brushed fingertips across his control panel, and the security grid disappeared.

  “You’re about to leave the city of New Orleans and enter a territory of the United States government,” Hawkins recited. “The U.S. government makes no guarantees regarding your health, welfare, or safety while you are inside Devil’s Isle. Magic is prohibited inside the walls. If you observe magic, report it immediately to the nearest Containment agent. Other than that, have a good night, and be careful in there.” Hawkins leaned back into the gatehouse and pressed a button, and the gate began to slide open.

  I followed Liam through the gate, into the area that had once been the Marigny. And just like that, I was inside Devil’s Isle.

  I tried to calm my ragged nerves. “Anything you want to prepare me for?”

  “You haven’t been in the Marigny since the war?”

  I shook my head.

  “It looks a lot different now. That can be hard for people who lived here, or have memories of here, so just plan on being surprised. As for Paras, keep your eyes ahead of you. Don’t stare at anyone, don’t talk to anyone. Stay beside me. If someone approaches us, let me handle it.”

  The sun had long since set. “It’s late. You think we’ll have issues?”

  “Some Paras are nocturnal, and most aren’t too fond of humans. Guards will be posted everywhere, and you don’t want to stare at them, either. And don’t do magic. Like Hawkins said, it’s banned, and there are monitors everywhere.”

  “We’re already in Devil’s Isle,” I murmured. “What else could happen?”

  He didn’t seem to appreciate my sarcasm. “Gunshot wounds from a guard’s service weapon, or solitary confinement in a jacket.” He glanced down at me. “You’ve seen those before? The ones they capture wraiths in?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “I have.”

  “Basically, you don’t want to draw any undue attention to yourself. You want to blend.”

  The warnings aside, that actually calmed me. “Blending I can do,” I assured him, and blew out a nervous breath. “Where are the wraiths and Sensitives kept?”

  “There’s a clinic. It’s on the other side of the neighborhood. We won’t be going near there tonight.”

  That made me feel a little better.

  “You do what I say, and get this done, and you’ll be fine. I promise. And try to keep an open mind.”

  I glanced at him. “About what?”

  Hands on his hips, he settled his gaze on the streets and buildings in front of us. “About everything.”

  • • •

  The Marigny had been a mostly residential neighborhood with blocks of Creole cottages and shotgun houses. The streets were in pretty much the same place as they’d been before, but half of those buildings were gone.

  War had knocked some of them down. Containment had left some of the lots empty, probably to improve their lines of sight from the tall guard towers in the middle of each wall and on each corner. Other lots had been refilled with long metal temporary buildings.

  There were uniformed guards every few hun
dred feet in familiar gray fatigues, guns belted at their waists. And above them, mounted on the buildings, were the magic monitors.

  Liam let me look around for a moment, get my bearings, before gesturing me toward a sidewalk that led deeper into the neighborhood. “This way.”

  It might have been late, but it was also hot, and it looked like Containment wasn’t spending money on air-conditioning. Paras stood outside, in small groups in the empty street, in doorways of the Containment buildings, or on the porches of the occasional cottages. Short and tall, horns and wings, feathers and fangs. The street was a catalogue of Paranormals, of the diversity created by magic and biology.

  Their expressions were just as diverse, but equally grim. Some looked sad, others numb, and some stared at me with obvious loathing, as if I were the personification of their oppression.

  We passed a woman who stood in a doorway, one hand on the frame, her lithe body silhouetted by candlelight. She was pale, with a long neck atop a slender body. Her hair was platinum blond and pulled into a knot, pale tendrils dusting high, round cheekbones. Her long, slender fingers were red, as was the line of deep crimson that ran down the bridge of her nose, then across her lips to her chin. She wore a simple dress of white cotton that fell from a straight neck to the ground below, the hem stained with dirt. She watched us as we walked, her body perfectly still, her face expressionless, but her wide almond eyes flicking to follow us.

  “Seelie,” Liam whispered, his gaze on the street.

  I nodded. That’s what we’d once believed was a “good” fairy. A Seelie was one of the many supernatural creatures humans had imagined, just as we had imagined angels and fae, demons and nymphs. We still called them the names we’d given them, because that was how we’d understood them before. But we’d gotten the names and the stories very, very wrong. Paras didn’t care about us. They didn’t grant wishes, or make us immortal, howl at the moon, or watch over us like benevolent guardians. They were invaders, plain and simple.

  Or maybe not so simple, I thought, as we passed the doorway. Ahead of us, a little girl with vibrantly green skin and lavender eyes hummed to herself while she played with a set of old-fashioned jacks—except that the jacks floated in the air like oversized molecules.

  “I thought they weren’t allowed to use magic,” I whispered.

  “They aren’t.” Liam’s eyes narrowed with concern. “And the penalties are stiff.”

  The closest magic monitor was across the street. It hadn’t signaled yet; maybe the girl’s magic wasn’t strong enough. Clearly, the technology wasn’t as consistent as Containment liked to think.

  A human guard was closer, a woman with a long face, hair slicked back into a low bun. She slanted her gaze toward the girl, the spinning jacks, and started toward us.

  “Damn,” Liam muttered, and walked toward the child, putting his body between her and the Containment agent.

  The little girl’s eyes grew enormous as she looked up at him. The jacks fell back to the ground like Newton’s proverbial apple.

  He winked at her. “Yeah, I’ve always been interested in history,” he called back to me, obviously playing off what he was doing—protecting the little girl.

  A door opened in the ratty shotgun house behind him, and a woman in a long dress darted outside, grabbed the girl’s arm with her own green hand.

  The woman looked up at Liam with round lavender eyes. She nodded at him, then pulled the girl inside, and closed the door with a resounding thud.

  Liam scooped up the jacks and the little red rubber ball, placed them in a pile near the door through which the woman and child had disappeared.

  The Containment agent reached the sidewalk. I hadn’t done anything (other than exist), but the determined look in her eyes still gave me cold sweats.

  “There a problem here?”

  Liam looked back at her, smiled. “Not at all. But I think we scared the kid. I was showing my friend here the plaque,” he said, pointing to a metal square bolted to the building. It explained the history of Fabourg Marigny—and showed Liam was a very quick thinker.

  But Containment agent’s gaze shifted back to the closed door. “She was using?”

  Liam frowned. “Using?”

  “Magic?”

  “Oh. No.” He put his hands on his hips, looked back at the door. “I mean, she’s a little kid. But I did notice you’ve got a monitor out.” He pointed to the box across the street. He was right—the light hadn’t turned green, but it also wasn’t in its “Ready Red” state, as Containment liked to call it.

  The Containment agent nodded, pulled out her walkie-talkie. “Appreciate the heads-up,” she said, and walked back across the street to the monitor.

  “Let’s go,” Liam whispered, putting a hand at my back. He had big hands. Warm hands.

  “That was a nice thing you did,” I said when we’d put half a block of distance between us and the agent.

  “Like I said, she’s just a kid,” Liam said. “Sins of the father aren’t the sins of the child. And things are always more complicated than they seem.”

  “She probably didn’t even know she was doing it. It happens.”

  He looked surprised. “To you?”

  I nodded. “First time was how I found out I had magic. I got lucky—the monitor wasn’t signaled. But it was still terrifying—to become an enemy of the state in a snap of the fingers, and not because you did anything at all wrong.”

  “Yeah,” Liam said. “I get that.”

  We kept walking. I’d seen photographs of neighborhood’s in New York and Chicago during the Industrial Revolution, when everything seemed dark and gritty and horribly depressing. This was pretty much the same, right down to the color scheme.

  Those old photographs had been black-and-white, and everything was gray, covered with what looked like a fine covering of dirt. I reached out, swiped a finger across a street sign, rubbed my fingertips together. The residue was dark and gritty, and left a sooty stain on my fingertips.

  “Ash from the security grid,” Liam said as I wiped my fingers on my pants and glanced up at the metal web that covered the Marigny.

  “It’s electrified, except when it’s not. Motes, dust get singed, fall down again as ash. Containment didn’t think about the ash when they developed it. It was freakishly expensive, as you’d imagine when you put a lid on an entire neighborhood. There wasn’t money to fix it.”

  “Why bother prettying up a prison for enemy combatants?”

  “That’s the theory.”

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to feel. Probably to be scared, intimidated. To remember violence and war. Maybe even to feel hatred. To see in the things that lived here as the reason my family was gone. As the source of some of my pain. All of those complicated feelings would have been normal. They would have been expected.

  And they were there, in part. So was fear, since I could feel angry and suspicious eyes on us as we walked down the street.

  But so was pity. And I hadn’t expected that. Not when we’d spent so much time hating them, fighting against them, being absolutely sure they were our mortal enemies. Because they had been.

  We reached another shotgun house still surrounded by a low fence. There were remnants of bright paint on the clapboards. It was “haint” blue, once one of the city’s favorite colors, a pale, chalky blue used to scare away “haints”—restless, wandering ghosts. Now the house was mostly a dingy gray.

  MOSES MECH was scrawled on a piece of torn ruled paper taped inside the front window. Liam walked up the steps to the small concrete porch, knocked on the door. I followed him, waited.

  There was a buzz, then a click, and the door unlocked, opened. We stepped inside.

  In shotgun houses, the front door directly faced the back door, and each room daisy-chained the next along the way. This front room wasn’t big—maybe ten feet square. But every single inch was filled with shelves, and every inch of shelves was filled with electronics. Old, bulky television sets. Radios. Toas
ters. Lamps. Electronic toys. Receivers. Clocks. Every row was stacked at least three deep, and the shelves extended all the way to the room’s ten-foot ceilings. Video players were crammed up to the acoustic ceiling tiles, pushing some of them off-kilter.

  For all the stuff, there wasn’t a speck of dust or ash in the place. It was clean as a whistle.

  A counter had been built at the opposite end of the room, making a barrier between the front room and the door that led to the rest of the house.

  A man sat behind the counter. He was small and pale, with green eyes, and a receding line of dark hair. Two glossy black horns popped from each temple. They gleamed like lacquer, and it took several seconds to realize I’d been staring.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Liam would be bringing me to a Paranormal. He hadn’t said one way or the other, but I’d figured he had a friend in some Containment office. I guess I’d been wrong.

  “I need you, Mos.”

  This must have been Moses, from the sign in the window. Which meant this was his shop.

  “And what brings you to Devil’s Isle today?” He looked up, nearly smiled at Liam before sliding that glance to me. His expression became very unfriendly very fast. “You brought someone in here?” His voice was low, gravelly, and utterly pissed.

  “She’s with me,” Liam said. “And I need a favor.”

  The man snorted, tossed his head, light catching the horns like they were made of glass. “I don’t help clueless humans.”

  “You’d be helping me. And she’s not a clueless human. She’s Sensitive.”

  Moses looked at me again, head tilted with interest. “I’m listening.”

  “She took down a couple of wraiths in the Quarter using magic.”

  “She got firepower?”

  “Telekinesis,” Liam said, then glanced at me with a smile. “Not that she knows how to use it.”

  “She regulating?”

  “She is not. She’s pretty much ignorant of everything magic. Containment got her on video,” Liam added. “We need that video cleaned up.”

  Moses snorted. “She’s too skinny to take down wraiths.”

  “I most certainly am not.”