by Chloe Neill
The emptiness had to be something she’d chosen; if she could get the house, she could get the stuff to put in it.
She walked in. Tall and slender, long red hair falling over her shoulders. She was a lovely woman; in other circumstances, I might have said that I’d have been happy to look like her when I grew up. Now? Not so much.
She wore a belted robe of pale turquoise that draped silkily to the floor. She opened an enormous glass-doored refrigerator, pulled out a plate of food, and moved it to the table. Leftovers for breakfast, or something she’d already prepared?
She sat down at the kitchen table, where she’d already placed a napkin, fork, and small cup of orange juice. A laptop was closed in front of her, and a manila folder lay to her right. Her feet, which were bare, were flat on the floor as she put the napkin in her lap, opened the folder, and began to eat.
And that was it. She read and ate methodically. She certainly didn’t look sad or deprived. She just looked . . . focused.
This wasn’t the kind of life I’d said I wanted. And yet it was exactly the kind of life I had. Except that I lived alone by circumstance. Not by design.
My mother. Living alone in her mansion, in a neighborhood of mansions, in a city still broken and stained by war. A woman who’d married and borne a child and then left. A woman who’d created a killer no one could see coming.
Feeling suddenly ill, I crept down the stairs, waited at the bottom with a hand on the railing until my breathing slowed to normal levels.
Whoever she was, I was still me. I was still Claire. And that was fine. That was enough.
I’d just keep saying that until it felt true.
I walked toward the front yard, stopped when I saw a truck newly parked in the driveway.
It was the same yellow truck we’d seen in the loading dock at Devil’s Isle, with the same streak of red paint across the front panel. A man climbed out of the back with a clipboard. He strode quickly to the front door, rang the bell, waited for Laura to open it.
She did so without smile or “hello,” without even meeting his gaze. She reached for the clipboard, signed, and looked at him expectantly.
The driver opened the back of the truck—and pulled out what looked like the same neon orange box loaded at the Devil’s Isle dock. It was no less bright today, and in the morning light I could see dark numbers stenciled along one side.
My mother opened the door for him, let him take the crate into her house. Then she closed the door in his face.
He gave the door a dour look before jogging back to the truck and speeding away.
So what did my mother have from Devil’s Isle, and why? What could Devil’s Isle have to offer her?
“You looking for something?”
I turned quickly, found the neighbor on his front porch, small dog tucked under his arm like a football. My heart stopped, then thudded hard twice before starting up again.
I didn’t know how much he’d seen. So I decided to pretend there’d been nothing to see at all. I offered a nervous laugh, and didn’t have to fake the nerves.
“Shin splint,” I said, pointing to my lower leg. “Just trying to walk it off. I was hoping the break would help me loosen it up. Running on concrete just kills me.” I gestured to the truck with a smile. “And then I got a little nosy. Not often you see a delivery truck like that around here!”
“Sure,” he said, and didn’t sound at all convinced.
“Anyway, I better get going. Have a good one!”
I jogged out of the neighborhood, found my bike, and raced home.
• • •
I walked into the gas station, expecting darkness and silence and safety.
Expecting him to be gone.
I hadn’t expected much of Liam Quinn. Wasn’t that always my mistake? My prejudice?
He wore jeans and a T-shirt, his feet bare. He stood in front of one of the tables, palms braced on the tabletop as he stared down at an open book.
There was something so right about his standing there, about his bare feet and intense expression. Like he was a warrior poet, a scholarly knight.
He looked up when I walked in, his body instantly on alert. And he didn’t relax much when he realized it was me. He didn’t ask me where I’d been. Could probably see I was flustered. Might have been able to see the grief in my eyes. But he didn’t ask about it. Not yet.
For my part, I had absolutely no idea what to say or do.
He filled in the blank. “It’s your place. But I’m staying until you kick me out. And if you try to kick me out, I might not go.”
I closed and locked the door. “All right.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I have no idea.”
He watched me for a moment. “Fair enough.”
Hope was like an ember in my belly. Small and hot and greedy. But that wasn’t thinking. It wasn’t even feeling. It was anticipation, and anticipation wouldn’t get me through this moment. Whatever this moment was. So I ignored it, focused on what was.
I walked toward him, and it took a couple of tries to get words out. “What are you reading?”
“I’m not entirely sure.” He showed me the cover. It was a big book with leather binding, the paper inside thin enough to see through. The pages were covered in minuscule calligraphy in a language that didn’t look even remotely familiar.
“A spellbook?” I asked.
“Do Paras need spellbooks?”
“I have no idea. That would be a good question for Malachi.”
Liam nodded, closed the book. “For all we know, could be recipes. Or a romance novel.”
“Love in the Beyond?”
“Something like that. I assume it happens.”
“Did you see the tension between Malachi and Rachel? That was pretty interesting.”
“I’d rather not think about Malachi at the moment.”
His body brushed against mine, and lust bolted through me, leaving me nearly breathless. If this was going to be our relationship, if I was going to get weak in the knees every time our paths crossed, I was in trouble.
His lips were on my ear, growling and nipping, sending shivers down my body. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
He was doing a pretty damn good job of making me think about him, too. “We have problems to deal with.”
“Like?”
“A biomedical conspiracy?”
“Oh. That.” He turned our bodies, pinning me back against the table, his thigh between mine. And then his lips crushed against mine, his body hot and hard and ready, his mouth eager.
“I want you again,” he murmured. “I have a lot of making up to do. And if we can’t have pleasure, if we can’t live, what are we fighting for?”
I couldn’t find a single reason to argue with him.
• • •
“You want to tell me where you were this morning?” he asked, when we were walking to Moses’s house.
“You won’t like it.”
His jaw tightened. “Try me,” he said after a minute, in a tone that confirmed to me he wouldn’t like it.
“I went to see my mother.”
I’d been right. His jaw twitched, and every other muscle in his body tensed as well.
“At her house,” I added.
“How did you—? Moses,” he said, answering his own question. “You got her address from Moses.”
“He did me a favor.”
“That was . . . reckless,” he finally said.
“You did know that about me.” He’d called me that plenty of times. While he didn’t like worrying, I was pretty sure he was turned off by cowardice and turned on by whatever category of bravery “reckless” fell into.
“I’d hoped it had worn off.”
“You hoped, in the time I’ve been living alone in
a gas station full of illegal magical objects, while being hunted by Containment and hanging out with illegal magical people, that I’d become less reckless?”
He was silent for a moment. “Good point. And what did you find?” His voice had softened with something that sounded like pity, and made me want to curl up in an uncomfortable ball.
“I found her. Sitting at a table, eating her breakfast. She was alone in an enormous house—not even a picture on the wall—everything just so. Just the way she liked it.”
He reached out, took my hand, squeezed it.
“There’s no room for me in her life. Maybe never was. Maybe not my father, either.”
“That matches what she told you at the building.”
“I know. Maybe I thought she was lying. Or maybe I just wanted to see for myself. Who she is, why she’s done what she’s done. Maybe I thought that if I saw her, I’d understand better. She’s my mother. If that’s the extent of her life, it’s sad, at least to me. But I don’t know if that’s the extent of it. I don’t know any more about her than she does about me.”
“Do you want to know more?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t expect to walk into a fairy tale. But I didn’t expect to pity her, either. I didn’t go just for my own benefit,” I said, changing the subject. “I wondered if I’d see anything that was useful. And I might have found something.”
“Reckless,” he said again as we reached Moses’s house. “And what did you find?”
I nearly answered, but caught a whiff of something in the air. Something delicious.
I glanced back at the road. Darby’s utility vehicle was parked at the curb. “Breakfast,” I said. “I found breakfast.”
• • •
Technically, it was second breakfast. But I’d earned it with the morning’s exercise. And it looked to be worth it.
Darby stood in the middle of the room in a pale green dress with a nipped-in waist, her dark hair gleaming. And she held a silver tray of chocolate chip cookies. Real chocolate chip cookies. Not freeze-dried. Not dairy- and gluten-free. Not rehydrated.
Cookies.
“How do you do this in a war zone?” I asked her, gesturing to the ensemble.
“Practice and denial,” she said with a grin. “And we’re working on a little something in the lab that keeps the power on.”
“If there’s going to be food every time I come over here,” Gavin said, a cookie in each hand, “I’m coming over here more often.” He looked us over. “Coincidence, you two arriving at the same time.”
Liam didn’t take the bait, but stared his brother down.
“About damn time,” Gavin muttered, taking another bite. “But don’t mind me.”
Liam took two cookies, handed me one. “Thank you, Darby.”
“You’re welcome.”
She offered the tray to Moses, but his lip curled. “Gross.”
Malachi took one, tried a careful nibble. His eyes lit up like a kid’s on Christmas. No words, just another careful bite. And then another. I wasn’t sure he cared much for human food; Darby’s cookies might have changed his mind. And for good reason—they were delicious.
“Damn,” Liam said, taking a bite. “These are amazing.”
“You’d be surprised what lab equipment can do.”
Liam swallowed hard.
“I’m kidding. Kidding.” She put the tray on a pile of electronics. “What’s the latest?”
“Gunnar not here yet?”
“He isn’t,” Gavin said as he and Malachi both reached for another cookie.
“Don’t ruin your dinner,” Liam told him, which advice Gavin completely ignored.
“I think I saw something this morning,” I said, and told them about my visit to see Laura Blackwell. I’d decided to call her that. It was the best way I could think of to cope with it.
“On my way out, a truck pulled up.” I looked at Liam. “Remember that big yellow truck we saw at the loading dock? The one with the paint on the front panel?”
“I don’t remember the paint, but yeah.”
“Same truck pulled into her driveway. And the driver gave her something he’d loaded out on Devil’s Isle.”
“What was it?” Gavin asked. He’d stopped eating his cookie.
“I don’t know. Didn’t see what it was. Only the box. Blinding neon orange.” I estimated the dimensions with hand gestures. “Had stenciled numbers on one side.”
Darby bobbled on her heels, took a stumbling step backward before “Oh, shit,” she said. “Oh, shit.”
Gavin caught her by the elbow, steadied her again. “What’s wrong?”
“The numbers stenciled on the sides—were they ‘three-oh-five’?”
A wave of sickness roiled my stomach. “Yes. Why?”
Gavin led her to the couch. “Sit down. Take a breath.” He looked back at Moses. “Bottled water?”
“Kitchen,” Moses said. “I’ll get it.” He hopped down, disappeared into the kitchen, and we all looked back at Darby.
“Darby,” Malachi prompted, “what’s in the box?”
“I can’t be sure, but . . .” She trailed off, rubbing a finger over her lips as she stared into the middle distance, preparing herself for something.
“In the early years, like Gunnar was saying, the PCC was trying to learn about the Veil. Where it came from, what it was made of, what it could do. When I joined PCC Research, we were young and curious and stupidly excited to have discovered this thing. One of our tasks was figuring out a way to look through it. Some kind of device that could let us see what was happening on the other side.”
“A periscope,” Liam suggested.
“A porthole through the portal,” Darby said with a rueful smile. “That’s what we called it, and thought we were pretty clever.”
Moses came back, offered her the bottle of water. Darby took it with a smile of thanks, but didn’t twist the lid.
“We futzed around for a little while, played with optics and lenses, tried to stick them through the Veil. At first, we couldn’t manage it because the Veil’s not a tangible thing. It’s energy—a passageway made of energy. A doorway from our world to theirs. Then we got this idea.”
She took a moment to gather herself, while the rest of us waited, completely silent. “We decided we could use harmonics to disrupt the energy in a tiny portion of the Veil and make a little window.” She mimed pushing curtains aside. “We created this awkward little machine—the decharger—and got it to work once.”
“What did you see?” I asked, thinking of the battalions of warriors I’d seen.
Darby smiled. “Nothing but rolling hills. Which is one of the reasons we were so damn surprised when the war actually started. Hindsight.”
Several of us grunted in agreement.
“Anyway, the Veil was breached right after that, so it wasn’t necessary anymore. And then I was fired, and that was the end of my work on the decharger.”
“The decharger was in the orange box,” I said.
She nodded. “Yeah, but I haven’t heard anything about it in a really long time.”
“Someone heard about it,” I said. “Laura, maybe because she was at the PCC before.”
“Claire and Liam first saw it being moved out of Devil’s Isle,” Gavin said. “Why would a PCC Research implement be stored there?”
“There were buildings in the Marigny used for Containment storage before it became the prison,” Darby said. “It was probably in one of those. But what would she want it for?”
“If it was working,” Malachi asked, “could it be used to slip something into the Beyond? Through the window?”
“Like what?” Darby asked, but then her expression fell, and the room went absolutely silent.
“Like a virus,” Liam said.
“You use the decharger to o
pen the Veil,” I said, “and you use the virus you’ve already created and, what, just toss it in?” I looked at Darby.
“Aerosol,” she said, misery clear in every line of her face. “She’d need an aerosolized version of the virus for actual deployment through the Veil.”
Gavin reached out to squeeze Darby’s shoulder supportively. She put her hand over his, tried for a weak smile.
“How much product would she need to pull this off?” he asked. “Does she have enough to do real damage?”
“The size of a virus is measured in nanometers,” Darby said. “Tiny. You can fit a lot of them into a small space. In 1979, a missing filter at an anthrax plant in the Soviet Union killed a hundred people in a few hours. That was an accidental release.”
“Presumably she wouldn’t have wanted the decharger unless she had something to deploy,” Gavin said.
“So she’s got a virus, and she’s got a way to sneak it into the Beyond,” I summarized. “But we don’t know how much she’s got, or how many Paras she could kill.”
“Say that Cajun swear again,” Moses requested.
“Fils de putain.” This time, the Quinn boys said it together.
“No,” Darby said, and walked across the room, kicked at the wall with a heel, then looked back at us. “The PCC wouldn’t do this. We aren’t at war. There’d be no reason for it.”
“Maybe they don’t know.”
She looked back at me. “What do you mean?”
“Gunnar said the PCC is funding the research,” I said. “That doesn’t mean they want to deploy it this way, for genocide.”
“That would mean it’s Blackwell’s doing.” Liam’s voice was somber, and he reached out, squeezed my hand, offered the same kind of support Gavin had given Darby a moment ago. A reminder that I wasn’t alone. That we were in this together.
“Or hers and Lorenzo Caval’s,” I said. “I obviously don’t know Blackwell very well. But after our conversation yesterday and what I saw this morning, I’d say she’s really focused on her science, her work. Single-minded.” I rubbed my neck, trying to relieve the tension that had gathered there. “Maybe I’m projecting, but she seems unbalanced. Not because she left us for work, but because she seems to wear blinders about everything else.” I told them what I’d seen of the house, of her manner.
