CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was pouring by the time I got back to the gas station. I grabbed something to eat and balanced out my magic, getting myself ready for my trip to Devil’s Isle.

Since I was already going, I searched through my cabinets, looking for something I could take to Lizzie. My father had stocked the gas station pretty well. But I’d been here for several weeks, and the stuff Moses and I found usually went right to the clinic, so I’d been working through my own stash. And I couldn’t rely on my garden plot; a tended garden was another sign of activity. I couldn’t risk putting a garden close enough to the gas station to actually make it feasible.

I still had plenty of MREs and the stuff I couldn’t stand eating any more often than I had to—including the potted meat Moses loved, even though mine wasn’t spoiled. But I figured I could spare another can of crushed tomatoes; it was too hot in New Orleans to make red gravy or soup. I didn’t plan to make pumpkin pie, so the canned pumpkin could go, too. A couple of rolls of gauze, a bottle of alcohol, and one of peroxide.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was something.

When the moon rose over a sodden New Orleans, I pulled a jacket over a tank and jeans, stuffed the goods into my messenger bag, and locked up the gas station.

It was a solid three miles downtown, but I loved walking in the dark, even if I was a little more tired today than I might have been. The darkness made me feel invisible, which made me feel powerful. I could slip around houses, through alleys. As long as I was careful, I could see without being seen.

I varied my routes toward Devil’s Isle—Bienville, Lafitte, Esplanade, Orleans. Names that were part of the history of the city, even if their streets were mostly empty now. Always a few houses with lights on or candles burning. But most were dark, standing silent and still, as if waiting for the moment when their families would come home again. NOLA was a city that preferred the dark. Shadows softened the rough edges, and moonlight made her sing.

Tonight, I’d taken Canal, planning to hop over to St. Louis Avenue. If I followed that straight down toward the river, I’d pass St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. Like most native New Orleanians, I had a love for the city’s older cemeteries, for the tall, narrow tombs, the history, the strange dance of voodoo and Catholicism.

I nearly screamed when a cat jumped in front of me, sleek and black, with eyes that shifted between green and gold in the moonlight.

He sat down on the sidewalk, stared up at me inquisitively.

Maybe I should get a cat. Maybe having someone to come home to at the end of the day would do me good. My father had actually stored tins of cat food in the gas station, maybe expecting he’d eventually take a cat there.

I’d have said having a cat would be a lot less emotionally risky than having a boy, except that I’d had a cat before. Her name was Majestic, and she’d deigned to let me own her until the war began. She ran off after the first Valkyrie attack on New Orleans and never came home again.

The cat that stared up at me now didn’t have a collar or tags, so I ventured the question.

“You want to come home with me, live in a gas station?”

Those clearly hadn’t been the magic words. With what looked like an imperious sniff, the cat lifted its tail and jogged into the silent street, then disappeared into the dark.

I guess he preferred freedom, hard as it was, to being a captive.

I adjusted my bag, started walking again. And made it nearly a block before I heard the footsteps behind me.

My heart began to race. But this wasn’t my first night in the city. If it was Containment, it wasn’t even my first Containment fight of the day.

But I needed to know either way. I stopped, pretended to tie my shoe, and the footsteps fell silent, too. I stared walking again, and the footsteps picked up again. One block, then another, then another.

He or she was about forty feet behind me. And either the person wasn’t very good at tailing people or wasn’t worried about being caught.

Unfortunately, the magic monitors in this part of town were armed and ready; the closer you got to Devil’s Isle, the better they were maintained. That meant it was tree-branch time again. Or the New Orleans equivalent.

I reached a four-way stop marked by palm trees and Creole cottages. I turned the corner, which put me out of my tracker’s direct line of sight, then darted around the next cottage into the narrow space between the houses.

I searched the ground, looking for something I could use, grabbed a wrought-iron bar that had probably been part of a window guard, given the turned metal near the top and bottom.

The footsteps drew closer. I judged my timing, and then jumped out, leading with the bar.

And stared up into Liam’s eyes.

“Do you have a death wish?” My voice was as fierce as I could make a whisper. The houses around us were dark, but that didn’t mean no one was listening.

“Not especially,” he said, his gaze on the iron bar. He used a fingertip to push it away. “Nice weapon.”

“It’s what I could find. What the hell are you doing out here? We decided I was going alone.”

“You decided. I made no commitment either way. You shouldn’t be roaming around by yourself.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” he said. “You absolutely can. But maybe you’ve got someone who’d like to help you take care.”

I stared at him, at a loss for words. “How am I supposed to respond to that?”

“Positively.”

If I ignored the insinuation, I could admit it would be good to have another set of hands in case of trouble, and I had a pretty good sense that the trip to Devil’s Isle would do him good.

I sighed and tossed the bar away. “I assume if I tell you to go home, you’re going to skulk around behind me anyway?”

“Pretty much.”

“You’ve got to go where I tell you. No sneaking inside to get to your town house.”

Something hard passed across his eyes. “I know I can’t go back there.”

“Fine,” I said, and started walking. “Do you have any idea how loud you are? I’m half surprised Containment didn’t hear you coming, send out a patrol.”

“I think you’ve been around Moses too long.”

I lifted my brows and he just smiled. “You introduced us.”

“Yeah, so part of that blame falls on me.”

“Part of it?”

“No more than ninety, ninety-five percent.”

•   •   •

It had been designed to keep Paranormals in, to segregate them from the humans in and outside the Zone, to keep us safe from their magical machinations. But it had also been designed to intimidate, and the concrete wall that surrounded the former Marigny, the current Devil’s Isle, was plenty imposing for that.

It was more than grim. Concrete and steel and barbed wire, with an electrified grid on top to keep fliers inside and at bay. The sections of the wall repaired after the battle were a little lighter than the old ones, but the grid still glowed eerily green, reflecting the color back on the wet asphalt. If you listened closely enough, you could hear the buzz of electricity and sizzling dust motes.

“We’re going to the Quarter side,” I told Liam, and steered him to the upriver side of the triangle, instead of the newly rebuilt front gate that rested in its river-facing point.

We walked toward the river, waited across the street beneath the shade of an oak tree, its branches arcing over us like guarding fingers.

Reveillon’s explosives had taken out large segments of the wall. Containment had taken the opportunity to finagle the architecture, building a concrete divot into the wall big enough to accommodate a loading dock.

A bright yellow truck was currently pulled up to the dock, its nose facing the street as agents moved boxes out of the back and piled them along the concrete platform. Floodlights illuminated the dock, showing the streak of red paint across the truck’s front panel, and CONTAINMENT written in block letters in reverse across the windshield so the car in front of the truck could read the text in the rearview.

“Well,” Liam said when we reached the dock, “that’s imposing.” He let his gaze rise to the enormous steel gate that kept the loading dock secure when it wasn’t in use.

“Welcome to the shiny new delivery entrance,” I said. “Crazy it took domestic terrorism to get them to add one.”

“Before, they were focused on literal containment,” Liam said. “They wanted Paras behind a wall, away from everyone else. That was the primary concern. Probably wouldn’t have imagined the prison would still be here seven years later.”

“Poor planning on their part,” I said.

“Intentionally poor planning,” he said, and we watched agents begin to load items into the back of the truck they’d just emptied.

“Taking things out of Devil’s Isle?” he wondered, as a man loaded a neon orange box into the truck, the paint so bright it nearly glowed in the dark.

“Apparently so,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”

Liam followed me fifty feet farther down the wall. Then I drew to a stop and pointed at the small metal door in the wall, set atop three concrete steps.

“The door opens into a corridor, and that corridor leads to a small room in one of the clinic’s back annexes,” I explained. “The door’s opened, and Lizzie gets notified. She’s the only one with access to it.”

“So she could walk out of Devil’s Isle if she wanted.”

“She could. Could have done it during the battle, too. But she won’t. That’s not who she is.”

“She stays inside, agrees to continue caring for the patients, and they don’t put cameras on the door so you can make deliveries,” Liam said. “That’s a good system.”

“It’s a compromise system, but it’s better than nothing.” It reminded me why Moses and I skulked around in dusty, moldy houses full of sadness and unfulfilled hopes. Because at the other end of this corridor were Paras with wounds that still hadn’t healed, Sensitives who’d become wraiths. People we’d never be able to save.

“Let’s give it a minute,” I said. Just because there weren’t cameras near the door didn’t mean there weren’t human patrols keeping an eye on us.

“Lower-level agents aren’t supposed to know about this,” I murmured, stepping back into the shadows as a couple of agents zoomed by in a jeep. “Just Gunnar and a few of the higher-ups, and even then it’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I don’t get caught, and they don’t come looking.”

“I don’t like it,” Liam whispered. “I understand it, but I don’t like it.”

“There’s a lot not to like in the Zone,” I said, pulling the chain from under my shirt. “But we stay here anyway.” I waited until the jeep rounded the sharp edge of the prison, then touched his arm.

“Let’s go,” I said, and we bolted across the street and up the stairs. It didn’t escape my notice that he put his back to me, guarding me with his body while I futzed with the lock. But I wasn’t going to argue about it.

I unlocked the door and pushed it open.

As always, I half expected to see a Containment agent waiting, and I could feel Liam tense behind me, probably from the same thought. But the corridor, while dimly lit and not really welcoming, was empty.

“It could take her a few minutes,” I said quietly, stepping inside.

“Should I close the door?”

“You want to be inside Devil’s Isle behind a locked door?”

“No,” he said. And that from a man who’d lived in Devil’s Isle. He pushed it closed just enough to keep agents outside from getting suspicious, but not enough to engage the lock.

“What now?” he asked.

I leaned back against the bare concrete wall. “Now we wait.”

•   •   •

The minutes ticked by. Five, then ten, then fifteen. The longest I’d ever waited to make a drop was seven minutes. We could have left—dropped off the package and left Lizzie to find it—but we needed to talk to her.

Still. Fifteen minutes felt like a long time. I was nearly convinced some rogue agent had intercepted Lizzie when the door opened at the other end of the hall. Liam and I jumped to careful attention.

Lizzie stepped inside, closed it behind her. She wore pale blue scrubs, the visible skin showing forks of fire that danced like moving tattoos. But that was no ink; it was actual fire, an impressive and dangerous part of who she was.

She nodded at me, cast a suspicious look at Liam. I’d proven myself to her, at least as far as she was willing to trust me. But Liam had been AWOL for a long time, and if her expression was any indication, she wasn’t thrilled about the fact that he had been gone.

She walked forward, her feet silent in thick rubber clogs. “Sorry for the delay. Minor crisis, but it’s fixed now.” She glanced at Liam. “I heard you were back.”

“I am.”

“Containment’s all abuzz about you.” She glanced at me. “And you, too. Hear you put on a pretty impressive show earlier today.”

“We were checking out Broussard’s house. They found us.”

“And you made your escape.” She cocked her head at the bruise on Liam’s cheekbone. “That hurt?”

“Doesn’t feel great.”

“I bet not.”

“You heard anything new inside about Broussard?” I asked. “About why he was killed, or who killed him?”

She shook her head. “Plenty of speculation about whether it was or wasn’t Liam. Plenty of complaints about Broussard. But it’s all been talk. Some have said it was a Reveillon member who didn’t get snatched, maybe someone in Containment jealous of Broussard’s position, but nothing specific. No names.”

I nodded. “You’ve heard about the Paras at Vacherie?”

Lizzie nodded. “Word got to me. Haven’t seen anything like that here. Just the usual complaints.”

“Any idea what’s happening?”

“Based on what little I know, sounds like an infection of some kind. A serious one, maybe something that affects blood or bone. A systemic infection they’re having trouble beating.”

“Would that normally be fatal?” I asked.

“It certainly could be without the right care. Among other things, fevers are dangerous, and they can cause big problems. But the red flag for me was the petechiae.”

“Say that again,” Liam said.

“Petechiae,” Lizzie repeated. “The red marks. They’re caused by internal bleeding that seeps through the skin. Can indicate sepsis—when an infection has spread through the body, and the immune response makes the situation worse.”

“So you think it’s an infection?”

“From here,” Lizzie said. “But I’m miles away, haven’t seen a patient, and I’m working based on communications from laypeople and the one nomedic who’s been to Vacherie.”

“Nomedic?” I asked.

“Nomad medic,” Lizzie said with a smile. “The volunteer docs who travel through the Zone. Lifesavers, but very unique individuals.”

Learned something new every day.

“My staff’s on alert about the symptoms. If we see anything like that, we’ll let you know.” Her features softened. “Tell Malachi I’m sorry.”

“I will.”

Lizzie’s gaze shifted to Liam, and she looked at him for a long, quiet time. “You leave because of the magic?”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Yeah, I did.”

She nodded, watched him again. “I can see it.”

That made me jerk. I’d thought she’d been staring him down because she was angry and hurt, and trying to figure out exactly how much anger and hurt were there.

“Like Eleanor?” I asked.

“Not quite. I can’t usually do it,” she said, frowning at me. “I can’t see any of yours. But there’s an aura around Liam. A haze.”

“It was Ezekiel’s magic.”

“And he was a Sensitive.”

Liam nodded.

Lizzie moved forward, eyes narrowed as she looked him over. “Sensitive plus human shouldn’t equal Sensitive, should it? Unless there’s something in that DNA of yours. Eleanor was hit by a weapon, after all. Not the usual way of obtaining power.”

“I’d give it back if I could.”

“I can see that. I can see that you’re fighting it.”

He looked surprised by that. “I’m not fighting it. I think it’s fighting me.”

This time she grinned. “Magic in a human body. Of course it’s fighting.”

“Because Ezekiel was evil.”

“He wasn’t evil.” She pulled a stethoscope from the pocket of her shirt, wrapped it around her neck. “He was dying. Death by magic.”

The fate of all Sensitives who didn’t learn to control the magic. And an important distinction that Liam needed to hear.

“That wasn’t the magic’s fault,” she said. “Or his. I’m not condoning what he did. He was a sad and narrow-minded fool. But if he’d been given the right tools?” She lifted a shoulder. “Might have been a different story.”

She took another step closer to Liam. “You have the tools. You have knowledge and people. As long as you stay out of here, you’ll be fine.”

I think she’d given me the same speech.

“I’m trying my best,” Liam said.

“Good. That’s all any of us can do.” Lizzie looked at me speculatively. “And speaking of trying our best, what did you bring me?”

I opened my bag, offered up the goodies. She packed them into the wrinkled plastic grocery bag she pulled from a pocket.

“This will be great,” she said, holding up the square bottle of peroxide. “Surprisingly effective on cold-iron wounds.” Paranormals didn’t heal well from attacks by cold-iron weapons; that’s why they’d been so effective and changed the tide during the war. “Stupid I didn’t try it earlier, but it’s a human treatment, not a Para one. Doesn’t even exist in the Beyond.”

There was a scratch at the clinic door that had Liam and me whipping around, readying ourselves for a fight. A Containment agent, or a wraith that had escaped his room?

“Don’t fret over that,” Lizzie said. “Just a visitor.” She put the bottle in the bag with the other gear, then walked back to the door. “Someone wants to see you.”

Lizzie opened the door, then stepped out of the way. “Come on in,” she said.

There, sitting expectantly at the door, was Foster Arsenault, Eleanor’s golden Lab and a very good friend of Liam’s.

Liam murmured something low, something in Cajun, and went to one knee. Foster bolted toward him, tail wagging like a tornado.

“Oh, buddy,” Liam said, burying his face in the dog’s neck. “I’m so sorry.”

I had to look up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, breathing through pursed lips, trying to force the tears back. When Foster made a whooping whine that sounded like a complaint, I laughed, let the tears fall anyway, and wiped them away.

“I think he’s mad at you,” Lizzie said with a grin.

“He should be,” Liam said, scratching Foster’s chin so his back leg thwacked rhythmically against the floor. “I left him, too.”

“You did,” she agreed. “Gavin took him to Pike, and Pike brought him to me right after the battle. He wanted a chance on the outside, was worried how Foster would handle it. I told him I’d find a family for him while you were gone, let him hang out in the clinic for a couple of days. I hoped it might do the patients good.”

“Did it?”

“It did,” she said, stroking Foster’s head. Tongue lolling, he sprawled on the floor and basked in the attention. “And now I can’t seem to get rid of him. The Paras enjoy him. And he seems to calm the wraiths.”

That snapped my head up. “He does?”

She nodded. “Animal therapy isn’t a cure, but it helps. I’m not sure why, but I don’t really care. Anything that makes their lives easier and doesn’t hurt anyone else is fine by me.” She looked up at me. “Better a dog than permanent sedation.”

I nodded. That was an easy choice to make.

“How’s Pike doing?” Liam asked, stroking Foster’s flank. “Claire told me he got snatched.”

She grinned. “Pike? He’s great. Living in your house.”

Liam opened his mouth, wisely closed it again. “I probably owe him that.”

“Damn right you do.” Lizzie sighed, then looked down at Foster. “You ready to get back to work?”

He made a rolling bark that sounded like a song, got to his feet, and headed for the door.

“If only all our staff was so efficient,” she said with a smile. Then she looked at Liam. “It’s good to see you. But you made a hell of a mistake, leaving.”

She let her gaze flick to me, then back to him. “Maybe you’ve got a chance to fix that. If I were you, I’d be groveling.”

That was a note I was happy to leave on.

•   •   •

It had been a market, a meeting spot, a place to discuss and protest. And it had been a place for the rebellion of joy, where dance and music and camaraderie battled back, at least for a little while, against the difficulties of life.

Congo Square was a park on the lake side of the Quarter, just off Rampart and St. Peter. It had once been a field at the edge of the city, then a park lined with bricks and trees, and then, for a little while during the war, the place where doctors set up tents to help those injured in battle. The tents were gone, and rain had washed away the blood that had stained the brick during the war. Even now, the bricks still had scars from the fighting, great gouges where Paranormals’ weapons had pierced and shattered them.

That didn’t stop the hardy people who’d stayed from taking back the park. Because Congo Square was for New Orleans, for the survivors.

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.