by Chloe Neill
Even though the world was dark, there were three dozen people in the park. A woman sold yaka mein from a pot in the back of her truck, and a man fried beignets in an enormous kettle nearby. In one corner, a beautiful woman with dark skin, a tignon wrapped around her head, listened while the woman in front of her, her tiny frame and wrinkled skin putting her easily in her eighties or nineties, blotted her eyes with a tissue. The woman, a priestess or conjurer, pulled something from a hidden pocket in her skirt, pressed it into the older woman’s hand, and sent her on her way. A gris-gris maybe, a powerful voodoo charm that was banned, like every other form of magic.
But these were all sideshows for the main attraction—the music and dance. In the middle of the park, a circle of men and women stood with drums of every shape and size. Some were handheld, not much bigger than tambourines. Others were more than a foot long and hung from wide straps around the neck or shoulders. Some were too big to hold, their glossy vessels in chrome stands that seemed too beautiful to have survived the war.
But they had survived and now built—one drum at a time—a song that was just as layered and complex as the city itself.
Rat tat. Rat tat tat. Rat tat. Rat tat tat.
Foom. Bum bum. Foom. Bum bum.
Chik chik chik. Chik chik chik. Chik chik chik. Chik chik chik.
In front of the drummers, women danced. They wore white blouses and circle skirts in a patchwork of colors, bells on their ankles adding another layer to the song as they spun, stamped their feet, swung their arms.
The drums beat through me, like my heart had adopted their rhythm. For a little while, it was like the war hadn’t come to New Orleans at all. Like tourists might be lined up at Café Du Monde and outside the voodoo shops, like Bourbon Street would be a giant boozy party.
“It’s why we stay,” Liam quietly said. “And it’s why we fight.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
• • •
It was nearly midnight by the time we reached the gas station. We stopped across the street, taking precautions.
“Thanks for letting me tag along. It was good to see Foster.”
“It was good for you to see him.”
He nodded, and we stood in silence that was almost companionable but for the tension in the air.
Neither of us was ready to walk away. Neither of us was ready to move closer.
“I should get inside, try to get some sleep.”
He nodded, and his body tensed. He’d wanted to reach out, I realized. Wanted to touch me, but was working to hold himself back. We were holding ourselves back from each other, still looking for that place of comfort and trust. But I didn’t think we’d find it tonight. Not out here in the darkness.
“Good night, Liam.”
“Good night, Claire.”
And we went our separate ways.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I got up before dawn, snuck out of the station before the sun was up, and hopped on the scraggly bike I’d found in an alley behind the station and fixed up. The bike had been my consolation prize; I’d found a motorized Simplex in a warehouse off Canal Street, but didn’t have the parts to get it running again.
We had picked a house as a neutral meeting spot for our Icarus building surveillance. It was halfway between mine and Moses’s, although only Malachi and Liam knew enough about the gas station to understand that geometry.
Since Malachi had stayed behind today—figuring someone needed to stay with Moses, just in case—I met Liam and Gavin there, at the low cottage overgrown with palm trees, a years-old For Sale sign still hanging by one corner in the front yard.
“No one’s going to buy this place now,” Gavin said quietly as I climbed into the Range Rover he’d parked at the curb.
“No,” I agreed.
Even in the milky predawn light, it was obvious the house was in bad shape. The roof had caved into the middle of what had probably been the living room, and plants had grown in the void, a few stalks and branches already reaching up and out toward the sky, searching for sunlight.
If that wasn’t a metaphor for those of us who’d stayed, I don’t know what was.
The humidity was oppressive even though the sun hadn’t yet risen. Since we were possibly heading to a Containment building, I tucked my hair under a cap, the damp tendrils that escaped blowing in the breeze from the SUV’s rolled-down windows.
Liam seemed more relaxed as we drove toward ADZ, but his eyes still held that spark of intensity, of interest, of possessiveness.
“How’s your arm?” he asked.
“Sore and bruised, but okay. Thanks.” I’d have a scar, but I figured that just added to the mystique.
Gavin glanced at me in the rearview. “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“She got shot yesterday.”
Gavin’s eyes went wide, and the vehicle wobbled as he jerked the wheel. “You got shot? By Containment?”
“It just grazed me. I mean, it didn’t feel good, but I’ve done worse to myself in the store.” My dad had done a pretty good job of teaching me how to repair things instead of throwing them out and buying something new. Learning to use saws and hammers brought plenty of cuts and bruises with it.
Since I wasn’t ready to walk down memory lane with my dad, I put the thoughts aside.
Gavin whistled. “Figures you didn’t tell your guardians. They wouldn’t have let you out of the house.”
I snorted. “They’d have tried not to.” I thought I could probably get around Malachi and Moses, although Malachi would have a pretty easy time finding me. He could surveil from the sky.
“You talk to Gunnar?” Liam asked.
“Not directly,” Gavin said. “Passed along a message about Caval, signed it with an alias he’ll recognize.”
“Beau Q. Lafitte?” I guessed.
“Mais, you aren’t still using that name?” Liam asked.
“Damn right I am. It’s got years of life left in it. Unlike this eyesore of a building,” he said, driving slowly past the address on the invoice.
He was right; it wasn’t much to look at. Low and squat, made of white-painted brick with long horizontal windows. Probably built in the 1970s, with lots of orange and avocado on the inside. There was no landscaping to speak of, just a long strip of low grass behind a strip of parking spaces. The sign in front, equally squat and unimaginative, read ADZ LOGISTICS in plain black letters. If this was some kind of Containment outfit, maybe they wanted to be unassuming.
“Doesn’t exactly look like a hub for innovation or research,” Gavin murmured.
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But if you’re involved in the murder of a Containment agent, you probably try to keep your work on the down low.”
“Probably so,” Gavin agreed.
“We’ve got more information about Caval,” Liam said, and told him what we’d learned from Blythe.
“Blythe gave your knife away?” Gavin whistled. “That’s cold-blooded.”
He drove to the next stop sign, then headed across the neutral ground to the southbound lanes of Elysian. He pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned insurance agency and positioned the car so we could see the building.
ADZ’s parking lot was empty, and the building was dark. Hard to tell if anyone actually used the place now. We’d have to wait to learn that truth.
And wait we did.
Dawn began to color the sky after twenty minutes of sitting in the car, twenty minutes of listening to Gavin eat a granola bar louder than I’d have thought possible of a human.
“Like a damn chipmunk,” Liam said.
“Boy’s gotta have energy. Never know what you’re going to get into.”
“The bottom of that wrapper, it appears.”
“You’re hilarious, brother. I missed your wry sense of humor and wit.”
Lia
m punched Gavin, and it jostled him and sent granola crumbs into the air like flakes of delicious snow.
Gavin muttered something in Cajun French that didn’t sound flattering. But I just sat in the backseat and smiled, my gaze on the road. For the little while that we’d been a group of friends—that short period between my being attacked by a wraith and the battle—I’d gotten used to their sniping. It was good to hear them irritate each other again.
But when a car turned onto the road—the first we’d seen since parking—we went quiet. We all hunched down a little and watched a white Mercedes pull into the lot.
“Damn,” Gavin said. “Nice wheels.”
“No kidding,” Liam muttered.
A woman in a suit stepped out of the car, closed the door behind her.
A woman with long red hair. The woman from the photograph.
“Merde,” Liam murmured. But I didn’t even think to respond. Before I knew what was happening, I was out of the vehicle.
“Claire!” Liam’s whisper through the open window was fierce and demanding, but I didn’t process it. The sound was only a buzz in my ears. I was striding across the street, the neutral ground, the other lanes.
This was my mother. And she’d parked at the Icarus building.
I started running, and the cap flew off my head. I hadn’t bothered to consider what I might say when I caught up to her. It didn’t seem to matter. I just wanted answers. Or acknowledgment. Or both.
She was a beautiful woman. Tall and slender, with red hair, green eyes, and pale skin. She wore a suit of burnt orange, a cream-colored camisole beneath the jacket, heels in the same shade.
She was nearly to the front door when I stepped in front of her. She didn’t flinch, just studied me until awareness dawned in her eyes.
“You’re my mother.”
She looked at me with clinical detail. “You’re Claire Connolly?”
My throat suddenly tight with emotion, I could manage only a nod.
“Then yes. My name is Laura Blackwell. I’m your biological mother.” She said it matter-of-factly, like she was confirming the humidity level.
My thoughts spun so quickly it literally made me dizzy. Laura Blackwell, the president of ADZ Logistics, the woman identified on the lab invoice, was my mother.
When I continued to stare at her, she rolled her eyes and motioned to the building. “I’m a busy woman, Claire, so while I assume you have questions, I need to get back to work.” She looked at me expectantly.
“You left us.”
“If by ‘us’ you mean yourself and your father, yes. I did.”
A full five seconds of silence followed that with no elaboration. “Why?” I asked.
“I wasn’t cut out to be a spouse or mother. Your father’s interests diverged from mine, and I realized I didn’t have the instinct for motherhood. You were a well-behaved child, but I simply wasn’t interested in you, intellectually or emotionally. Your father wanted a child, and I could admit to some curiosity about the biological processes. I considered it a kind of experiment. I hypothesized that the maternal feeling would grow, but it didn’t.”
She looked at me expectantly, as if she’d provided an entirely reasonable explanation and was confident that I would buy it immediately.
She sounded like a scientist, a woman who—not unlike Broussard—saw the world in very clear terms. In black and white with no shades of gray, even while she was talking about emotions and abandonment.
“So that was it? You decided being a mother wasn’t for you, so you walked away?”
“You’re being emotional.”
“I’m human.”
“Then try harder. As my child, you should have ample intelligence at your disposal.” She sighed. “As you didn’t appear to know my name, I assume your father upheld his end of the bargain.”
My blood ran cold. “What bargain?”
“He wouldn’t discuss me, and I wouldn’t interfere with his raising you, ask for alimony, complicate the divorce, or cause any of those other irritations. Not that I would have interfered—I had no interest in it. But giving you a ‘normal childhood’ seemed his only concern.”
Because he’d had integrity, and knew how to love, I thought. And had somehow managed to negotiate a life for me even while his heart was probably breaking.
“Did you love him?”
“I was fond of him, of course, but that’s hardly the point. There’s no logic in tying yourself to someone else if you aren’t happy. I wasn’t happy, so I moved on.”
With a slender manicured finger, she pushed back her sleeve, checked the time on a delicate gold watch, then looked at me again. “I’ve given you all the time I have. It will have to be enough. I hope you know that I don’t regret having had a child.”
She said it like she was making an offering, like her lack of regret was a gift. As consolation prizes go, it wasn’t much.
The anger rose so quickly I had to clench my fingers to keep from striking her, from slapping that smile off her face. How dared she talk about regret? She’d broken my father’s heart, walked out on him, walked out on me without another look. She might not have felt regret, but she also apparently hadn’t felt any sense of honor, any sense of obligation to follow through on the commitment she’d made by having a child in the first place. She’d just, apparently, moved on to better things.
It wasn’t the first or last time a parent had walked out on a child. But it had never occurred to me that someone could be so cold about it. She was a blank canvas, and seemed baffled, or maybe exasperated, that I didn’t see it her way.
For a moment, I felt like I was floating outside my body, watching myself try to sort through my roiling emotions. I knew, as I seemed to watch myself watching her, as I stared down at mother and daughter, that it would take time to process the emotions. To accept who she was, and be grateful that my father had shielded me.
That unleashed another torrent of emotions—but this time on his behalf. She had no idea what he’d gone through as a single parent, to keep me safe and alive and fed, especially after the war started, when the money dried up and he had to get what he could from selling MREs and bottled water.
“How could you just walk away, like you had no responsibilities?”
“I did have responsibilities. Important ones. I made good on those.”
“Like Icarus? Is that one of your responsibilities?”
Her body went rigid, her face very controlled. And there was something else in her eyes—something I didn’t know her well enough to assess. But it was a lot darker than the bafflement it had replaced.
“I have nothing more to say to you. And since you seem like a relatively intelligent person, perhaps you’ve gotten lucky and have more of my brain than your father’s.” She plastered a smile on her face, a bitterly cold smile. “Icarus is none of your business. It is mine, and I protect what’s mine very, very carefully. You can walk away right now, or I can call a Containment agent and have you taken out.”
She looked at me expectantly.
“I’ll just be going,” I said, and it took every ounce of control I had to say that civilly.
She nodded. “I assume I won’t be seeing any more of you. I don’t need the distraction.”
Five-to-one odds said she’d be calling Containment whether I walked away or not. So I planned to head in the opposite direction of Gavin and Liam, to keep attention away from them.
But the plan didn’t matter.
They came around the corner, three Containment agents with comm devices in hand, stunners on their belts. They’d gotten ahead of me. She’d signaled them somehow while we were still in the parking lot. While we were talking, while she was meeting her grown daughter for the first time, she’d called them.
Betrayal was a knife in my heart, but she was unapologetic. If anything, she looked irritated by my
response. She held up her palm, showed me the small device she held. A panic button of some sort.
“You’re disrupting my work,” she said flatly. “I don’t have time for this. And if you’ve run afoul of Containment, that’s not my problem. You’re your own responsibility.
“George!” she called out to one of them without taking her eyes off me. “We have an intruder.”
“You called Containment on me?” I could barely force the words out.
“You’re interrupting my work.” Again, that irritation.
“Hands in the air,” one of the agents said, and for the second time in as many days, I lifted my hands. But this time, I kept my gaze on my mother.
“I’m glad you left us.”
Her jerk was so small, so minor, that most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it. But I did.
“I don’t have time for this. I have work to do.” She looked at one of the agents, tall and slender with dark skin and deeply brown eyes. “You’ve got it, Chenille?”
“Ma’am,” Chenille responded. Her gaze kept flicking back and forth between us, obviously noticing the resemblance. But it didn’t change the grim determination in her expression.
“We aren’t done,” I called out as she opened the door.
She glanced back at me, one perfect red eyebrow lifted dubiously. “Aren’t we? It certainly appears to me that you’re done, Ms. Connolly.” With that, she slipped inside, leaving me alone with the agents.
My mother turned me in to Containment.
I closed my eyes, thinking this was it—my last moment of freedom. I’d be taken into Devil’s Isle to waste away until the magic took me. Destroyed me.
I willed Gavin and Liam to leave, to stay in the vehicle and drive away. To get themselves to safety. Maybe they’d be able to come up with a plan to get me, too, or maybe not. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about them.
But then things got more complicated.
A truck zoomed down the street and pulled up to the curb. Big and green and jacked up on enormous tires, with angry guitars blasting through the windows. There were two men in the cab, two men in the back. And two of them looked very familiar—Crowley and Jimmy, the hunters who’d attacked us outside Vacherie. They’d come back to New Orleans. Had they guessed we’d show up here? Did they know about her, or about ADZ?
