The Veil

by Chloe Neill

  “I used to walk the houses,” he said.

  I glanced at him. His gaze was on a small carriage house lined against the sidewalk, its door yawning open. “Walk them?”

  “The empty ones. I’d let myself in—”

  “As you like to do.”

  He snorted. “The store’s door was unlocked. As for the houses, I never went through a locked door. Didn’t want anyone looting behind me. But if I had time to kill, and a door was unlocked, I’d walk through. Take a look. See how they lived. What their lives were like.”

  That was a side of Liam Quinn I wouldn’t have expected to see. “And what were they like?”

  He frowned, considered. “Some of the houses were completely empty. They’d taken everything they could. In others, it was like, I don’t know, spying on someone’s life. There were still clothes in the closets. Magazines on the coffee table. Toys in the kids’ rooms. The beds were made up. Lot more mildew, sometimes mold, because of the humidity, but otherwise—they were just houses. I wondered where the people went.”

  “Did you ever take anything?”

  “No, but I’ve thought about it. Closest I’ve come was a house in Gentilly. I’d been tracking a wraith, lost him, but saw this house and went inside. Most of it was packed up—you could tell they’d left—but they’d left behind a few things. Big furniture. Mirrors. Some toys and sports equipment. And in one room—looked like the dad’s office—there were model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, probably a dozen of them. Lot of work went into them. I thought about liberating one. Seemed a shame all that work was going to waste.”

  “So why didn’t you take it?”

  He shrugged. “Because maybe they’ll come back one day. Or maybe the kids will. And those memories should be there for them. Should belong to them. Not to me.”

  I could practically feel my heart melting. “You know, you play the tough guy, but I think you’ve got a pretty gooey heart in there, Quinn.”

  Liam snorted, opened his mouth to respond, but didn’t have a chance. There was a streak of movement in front of us, a squeal.

  “Shit,” Liam called out, then slammed on the brakes, throwing out an arm to keep me from flying forward.

  The truck ground to a halt with a screech of tires. My heart pounded so loudly I’d have been surprised if he couldn’t hear it.

  “Wraith?” I whispered.

  He nodded and pulled back his arm. Wraith-in-front-of-the-truck being a classic move to get to second base quickly.

  He pulled out a flashlight, switched it on, bobbed the circle across the street. There was a pop, and the light dimmed, went out, as did the truck’s headlights.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, thumping a hand on the dashboard. It didn’t help.

  “Magic and electricity.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  It was dark as pitch, hard to see without any sort of light, especially on streets overgrown with magnolias and crepe myrtles.

  “Did you see it?”

  “I think it was a girl.” I thought I’d seen a glimpse of long hair, maybe a red skirt. But she’d moved fast, crossing the street and stepping into the yard beyond before I’d gotten a good look at her. “She ran away,” I said.

  “Yeah, I noticed that.”

  “No, think about it: She only ran because she saw us. What kind of wraith does that? What kind of wraith doesn’t attack outright?” She also hadn’t seemed to care about my magic, but I was in the truck. Maybe that hadn’t been close enough.

  Liam stared into the dark. “That’s a very good question.” He switched off the ignition, popped open the glove box, took out a small black case.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tranqs,” he said. “They don’t last very long, but if we can get into a position to use them, we can keep her from hurting herself or us.”

  Since we didn’t have a tranq gun, I guessed that “position” meant close enough to punch in a syringe. That was pretty damn close.

  Liam looked at me. “Is there any point in telling you to stay in the car?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. The power’s out, so the monitors won’t be on, nor will the cameras. You can use your magic if you have to, but you should be careful. You may not know when the power’s back on.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

  He left the truck running. The starter was probably electric, and if the power stayed out and he turned it off, he wouldn’t be able to restart it, and we’d be walking back to the Quarter.

  “Follow me,” Liam said, then opened the truck’s door slowly and quietly. He climbed out, offered me a hand, and I slid across cracked leather and down onto the street beside him. He closed the door just enough to get it out of the way, but didn’t bother shutting it. I’d yet to see a wraith who could hot-wire a vehicle. On the other hand, if they were getting smarter . . .

  He moved in front of the car, checked the ground. “I don’t think we hit her,” he whispered, then gestured toward the sidewalk. He looked back at me, put a finger to his lips. I nodded my agreement. I wanted to hear her coming. Staying quiet was the only chance I’d have for that.

  We stepped onto the sidewalk, bricks in a herringbone pattern that no longer lay flat, and trod carefully over the uneven surface. There were two houses with a small strip of grass and rocks in between. Probably where the homeowners had parked their cars. One of the houses was a narrow town house. The other was a white two-story house with Greek columns running down the front, and a triangular roof on top.

  Liam crouched down, checked the ground, then gestured toward the columned house. He must have seen footprints.

  I followed him to the porch, and he took a careful step onto it. Seven years without maintenance could create a lot of problems. When it held his weight, he gestured for me to follow him.

  The door was open. He pushed it open a little more, waited in the doorway for any sign of life—or wraith. There was nothing, so he stepped inside.

  The wind was picking up, leaves and debris stirring on the porch as I followed Liam into the house. It was pitch-black and smelled dusty. Musty. The humans who’d stayed behind probably would have cleaned it out of anything valuable. But that didn’t mean a wraith wouldn’t nest here.

  We let our eyes adjust to the darkness, until we could tell the house’s central hallway split off into rooms on the left and right.

  A sound broke the silence—a warbling moan, definitely female. It seemed to come from every room, and set every hair on my body on end.

  Was the wraith calling out to us? Or to more wraiths?

  “She’s making noises,” Liam whispered. He was close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body. That comforted me more than it should have.

  “Which direction?” he asked quietly.

  “I couldn’t tell.” And now I could barely hear over the beating of my own heart. Facing down a wraith on a well-lit street was one thing. Wandering through a dark and abandoned house in a dark and abandoned city was something completely different. I didn’t believe in ghosts; but if I did, I’d have believed they lived here, in this memorial to a different time.

  The sound echoed through the house again.

  “I’ll go left,” I whispered. “You go right.”

  He grabbed my hand. “You’ll stay with me.”

  “We don’t have time for that. The house is too big. We go together, we might miss her, and we’ll never find her again in the dark.”

  We stood there in silence for a moment. “If you need me, call my name.”

  “I will.”

  And then he stepped away, letting the chill settle between us again.

  I moved to the threshold of the first room, walked inside. I could see the silhouettes of furniture, a mirror above a fireplace that reflected only darkness.

  I paused, waited to hear movement, or more sounds, but there was nothing. A breeze blew from a doorway on the other side of the room.

  I walked toward it, j
umped when I ran into a spiderweb dangling from the ceiling, pushed it away.

  The next room was a kitchen. A U-shaped set of cabinets with an island in the middle, a small table and ladder-back chairs on the other side of the room. It still looked clean—no piles of empty cans and bottles. Maybe the looters hadn’t gotten to it.

  She came from out of nowhere. Suddenly, she was screaming and lunging as she tried to claw at me, as if she could dig through skin to get to the magic I’d absorbed. She might have run before, but now we were in her territory. We’d cornered her, and she’d protect herself.

  I jumped back, moved around the kitchen island, putting the furniture between us, got my first look at her. She was pale and thin, her hair blond and stringy. But I didn’t think she was as far gone as the wraiths on War Night.

  “Liam! I found her!”

  She opened her mouth, made that sound again. She garbled, part whimper, part moan, part horrible, guttural scream. But I’d have sworn it sounded like an actual word. Something like “context.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Connnnteshtt!”

  It could have been a word, but I wasn’t sure. Couldn’t tell.

  “I hear you,” I said, stepping forward. “I’m listening to you, trying to hear what you tell me.”

  I put a hand on the gun. Could have drawn it. But I felt too much pity.

  Liam had been right. I couldn’t do it. Not against someone who hadn’t been as lucky as me.

  But I had other tools. There was a table and chairs to her left. If I could grab one of the chairs, I could use it like a shield. Maybe trap her against the wall until Liam got here with the tranqs.

  I felt around for the magic, began to spin it together, to gather it up.

  She screamed again, sensing the gathering of magic, the thing she wanted more than anything else in the world, and she rushed me. She didn’t bother going around the island. She vaulted it like an animal, landed on me so we both hit the floor.

  Fear tore through me, sharp as her broken and ragged nails. She smelled old and sour, and she looked brittle, but like the War Night wraiths, she was strong, as though magic had concentrated her strength.

  She snapped at me, screamed that word—or the sound, or the moan—again and again. I used one hand to try to hold her back, and with the other, I reached out for the chair, pulling power and wood at the same time. But instead of flying toward me, it skittered across the floor, fell over, scraped against hardwood.

  She grabbed a lock of my hair, pulled, and yelled again.

  “Damn it,” I said against the pain, and reached out for the chair again, pushing all my energy into a final surge of magic.

  This time, the chair rushed toward me. I grabbed the back with both hands, used the legs to pry her off me and onto the floor. I scrambled to my feet, using the chair legs to pin her to the floor.

  Liam appeared in the doorway in front of us, looked obviously relieved to find me mostly upright and the wraith on the floor, although squirming like a fish.

  “When I told you about the tranq, this wasn’t the plan I had in mind.”

  I blew the hair from my eyes. “Thank you for pretending this looks like something I planned.”

  He went down on a knee beside her, opened the case, pulled out a syringe, and pressed it against her neck. A few more seconds of struggling, and she went visibly limp.

  He helped me to my feet. “You’re all right?”

  “I’m fine.” I pushed the hair from my face, pulled down the skirt I’d rumpled in the battle, and looked down at the wraith at my feet. “What’s next?”

  “Now we take her home.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We rumbled back to the French Quarter and the Devil’s Isle gate, white clouds moving above us. We had headlights again by the time we reached Canal Street. I downed the rest of the water on the trip, along with an ancient stick of beef jerky Liam found in the glove box. It took the edge off the dizziness, but I was going to crash hard later.

  I told Liam about the girl, what she’d said, as lightning forked across the sky. A storm was coming.

  “If that means anything,” he said, “I don’t recognize it.”

  So much for that clue.

  He parked the truck near the gate, frowned at me. “You want to stay here?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “It might be tough to see—to watch. They’ll probably jacket her. And if she wakes up, they’ll have to sedate her. She probably won’t react well to that.”

  I could see the war in his eyes. There was always a chance I could end up in Devil’s Isle, too. And if I did, he was the one who’d have to bring me here.

  If things had been different . . .

  But they weren’t. There was a big part of me that wanted to say no, to stay in the car and let him take care of this part of it. But that wasn’t fair to him, and denial wasn’t going to do me any good, either.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I’m not afraid.” It was a lie, but I thought he needed to hear it.

  “Okay. Then let’s hurry.” Liam lifted the girl into his arms effortlessly, walked toward the guardhouse.

  The guard, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, kept a nervous hand on the gun at his waist. “Stop,” he said, holding up a hand. “Stop right there.”

  “I’m Liam Quinn, and I’m a bounty hunter.” He nodded at the girl. “As you can tell, she’s a wraith. And we’ve got about five more minutes before the tranq wears off. I need to get her to the clinic and in a jacket before that happens.”

  “I—I need some identification.”

  “It’s in my pocket.” He nodded toward me. “Claire. Back right, please.”

  I nodded, slipped the wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. I pretended not to notice the rest of the architecture.

  “Four minutes and forty-five seconds,” Liam said as I held the wallet out to the guard for scanning. When he was done with it, I put it back in my pocket. We could settle up later.

  “What about her?” the guard asked.

  “She’s my trainee. Four minutes and thirty-five seconds. I’ve got a weapon, and you can remove it, or I can keep it on in case she loses it before we get there.”

  The guard looked nervously at me, Liam, the girl in his arms. “Fine. Okay, fine.”

  We headed in the opposite direction of Eleanor’s house, closer to the Quarter than Bywater this time. And it wasn’t as late as the last time we’d come through, and there were more Paras out today. Mostly adults, a few children. A family of Paras with striking red skin and spaded tails, two children chasing each other on a long stretch of grass that had once been Elysian Fields Avenue. I didn’t know enough about the Beyond to know if that was horribly ironic or poetically appropriate.

  The clinic was only a few blocks from the gate, but we were jogging by the time we reached it. It was a two-story town house on Frenchmen Street that faced Washington Square. Two pale blue floors of windows with white shutters, a wrought-iron balcony surrounding the top floor.

  “It’s not very big,” I said.

  “This is just the first building. They use all the buildings on the block, keep everybody separated.”

  He reached the door, pushed it open with a foot, maneuvered the girl inside.

  I didn’t remember the building from before the war, but it looked like an office. The door opened into a small hallway with an empty reception desk and couple of old chairs. Ancient and scarred hardwood floors led down a corridor, with other rooms leading to the right. It was still an old building, and the walls and ceiling were thin. Thumps and muffled voices—some of them very unhappy—echoed through the room.

  The girl began to stir.

  “Lizzie!” Liam called out, over the din of sound. “I need you!”

  There were footsteps, and then a woman appeared on the threshold in brilliant orange. She was slender, a few inches over five feet, with tan skin. Her thick, dark hair was cropped into a bob just above her shoulde
rs and streaked with yellow and orange. Her nose was small and straight, but her irises were the color of flame, and they shifted and shimmered just like forks of fire. There were streaks of color along her neck that disappeared into her top, reappeared below the sleeves to travel to the tips of her fingers. Just like fire, they shifted and moved like flames dancing across her skin.

  Lizzie definitely wasn’t human. A fire spirit of some sort, by my guess.

  She spared me a glance, looked at Liam. “I hope you tranq’d her this time.”

  “Yeah. And it’s wearing off.”

  She nodded, put two fingers in her mouth, and whistled shrilly. There were footsteps, and two men in scrubs appeared in the doorway. “Get her jacketed first, then get her into a room.”

  The first orderly came over, his eyes the same burning embers, and let Liam transfer the girl into his arms. They trotted out of the room, down the hallway.

  Lizzie pushed a hand through her hair, the fire on her hand shifting as she moved. Like fire itself, it was a little scary, a little awesome. “Haven’t seen you this week.”

  “Long story,” Liam said, then gestured at me. “Lizzie, this is Claire Connolly. Claire, Lizzie.”

  “Hi, Claire.” Lizzie looked me over, the fire in her eyes sparking when she reached my face again. I didn’t know how she’d done it, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that she knew what I was.

  “Well,” she said, smiling, “that’s an interesting development.”

  “I’m being careful,” Liam said.

  “I certainly hope so. And that she is, too.”

  “She is,” I said, meeting her gaze. I was in the mood for answers. “What happens to the wraiths when they’re brought in?”

  “They’re cared for as best we can. We try to keep them calm, keep them fed, keep them clean. Until someone comes up with a cure, that’s all we can do.”

  “And Sensitives?”

  She gestured to a couple of stingy chairs in the waiting area, and perched on the edge of the desk.

  “Sensitives are in a separate ward,” she said. “Same protocol—calm, comfortable, cared for. But any magical practice—even the regulation of magic—is forbidden here.”