The Sight (15 page)

I had that coming. “Listen, that day, after the attack on Devil's Isle—”

“I picked a bad time to change things around, disrupt the balance.”

“No—well, yeah. Not because of the attack. The store was hardly the important thing there, but it made me think about some things. Face some things emotionally that I hadn't really wanted to think about.”

I told her about it. About my regrets, my jealousy, my “safe space.”

“Then I'm here at the right time,” Tadji said. “Because there's an entirely new world opening up for you right now. A dangerous and occasionally sickening and cruel world, but a world filled with Cajun bounty hunters and lively conversation about peanut butter.”

“You do make it sound so glamorous, what with the peanut butter and all.” I tilted my head at her. “Are you sure this is what you want to do? I didn't think ‘retail merchandising' figured into your five-year plan.”

It had been a very detailed plan. With spreadsheets and colored tabs.

“I've been thinking about that,” she said. “Someday I'm going to finish my dissertation research, and then what? I'm going to leave the Zone and try to get a job at some college, telling people how
dangerous and mysterious the Zone was? Don't get me wrong—I love what I do, what I study. But for all its issues, I don't want to live anywhere else.” She pressed fingertips to her chest. “It gets into your heart.”

“No argument there.”

“As for right now, I want to keep interviewing people, learning about their language. I think I can do that here: I can help run the store while you're doing your thing, and I can talk to people. There's really no better place to do that. Unless that's a problem for you.”

“I want to be in a footnote.”

“Done,” she said with a grin.

“How much do I pay you?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I didn't think we'd get this far. I figured there was a chance you'd boot me out for asking.”

“Never,” I said. “Think about what you want salary-wise and let me know.” I had no idea what the going rate would even be. Even prices were wonky in the Zone.

She held out a hand. “Deal.”

We shook on it, but I didn't let her go. “Your skin is crazy soft. What are you using?”

Tadji smiled slyly. “I've been mixing up this concoction with olive oil. If you can get me some more, I can make you some . . . and some to sell.”

“This is clearly the beginning of a beautiful entrepreneurial relationship. Although,” I said, frowning as something occurred to me, “as keen as I am on bringing you into the biz, people might ask questions if I'm not here.”

“They aren't asking any fewer questions when you leave the store locked up for a couple of days.”

I couldn't argue with that.

“We'll think of an answer. We'll make it work,” she said with a nod. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a partner.

“I actually have a first task for you,” I said, and told her about the orders for Lizzie. “But I'll walk you through ordering and all that jazz. Oh, and you can take all the early shifts so I can sleep in.”

“No dice.”

“Worth a shot. I will give you a handy Royal Mercantile apron.” I stepped back, frowned down at the rows of shelves beneath the counter, remembering that I'd lost two of them when we left Camp Couturie. “I just have to remember where the extras are.”

“Those are the ones with the pockets in front?” she asked, moving her hands in front of her thighs to mimic their location.

“That's them.”

“Good. I really like those.”

“About you being gone . . . ,” she began, then paused. “It's going to get worse, isn't it? All of this?”

Tadji had a bad history with magic, a childhood that had made her wary of it. She'd recently begun to come to terms with that, and with the family who'd instilled that wariness in her. So I wanted to lie to her. I wanted to tell her everything was fine. But shielding her from the truth—keeping her from preparing herself—wasn't going to help.

“It's going to get worse,” I said.

She nodded gravely, as if trying to adjust her expectations.

“I don't know how much worse,” I said, wanting to give her some hope. Because what was the point of living here without it, full heart or not? “It depends on how fast Containment can find Ezekiel and shut down Reveillon. Maybe they found him overnight at Camp Couturie.”

“And if they didn't?”

“These are bad people, Tadj, especially Ezekiel. They're believers, and they're believers who are willing to be martyrs. They're
violent, they're dangerous, and they believe they are absolutely right. They won't stop until this is done—whatever that means. So if you see any of them coming, you run in the other direction. Walk right out the back door, go to the Cabildo—to Gunnar or to Burke—and don't look back.”

“You'll be careful, too?”

I pulled her into a hug. “With friends like you guys, how could I not be?” I just had to hope we could all keep one another safe.

—

Liam strolled in a little while later, sweat beading across his brow. It was a hot day, and he'd been monitoring whatever the Containment agents had been doing to his truck outside.

“You want to take a field trip?” he asked when he'd grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. “Take a look at that address?”

It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. When I did, I stared at him suspiciously. “To Mid-City? Yeah.”

He nodded but looked over the store, then took a step closer. “Tell Tadji we're going to check something out, if you want, but skip the details. Just in case.”

I frowned at him. “Just in case what?”

He leaned down. “Just in case this is something your father only wanted you to know about.”

“I trust her,” I said, irritation blossoming.

“It's not her I worry about,” he said, gaze still and serious. “But those who'd use her to get the information.”

That lifted the hair at the back of my neck. I hadn't even thought that far ahead—of the possibility it was a building that would matter to anyone other than my father. That would matter to Containment. Considering that possibility made me want to visit it more—and absolutely not mention it to Tadji.

“And I'm going to have Gavin stay here with her while we're gone,” he said.

I frowned. “Stay here with—” I began, then realized why he'd suggested it. “In case they hit Royal Mercantile. You don't think Containment got him.”

“There's a chance he ran after we left. And even if he didn't, the camp is big. It would take a lot of hours and a lot of manpower to clear the entire camp. As for the store, Ezekiel took his first shot at Devil's Isle. I don't think the store is high-profile enough for Ezekiel.”

“Even if he's now pissed at me?”

“Even if.”

I looked over the store. “We could close it up. Lock the doors and wait for all this to be over.”

“I don't think that's necessary,” Liam said. “And we won't be gone long. Gavin will keep her safe, Claire. He knows how to handle himself.”

I nodded. “What should I tell her?”

“The truth,” Liam said. “So she's prepared, just in case.”

Damn it,
I thought, and went to find her again.

“Tadj,” I said, and her dark hair popped up behind a bookshelf she was swishing with a feather duster.

“Liam and I have to run out.”

She nodded. “No problem.”

“Liam's going to have Gavin stay with you while we're gone.”

She figured it out faster than I had, and her eyes went wide. “You think they'll come here?”

“Liam doesn't think so. There'd be no political benefit to hitting the store. But better to be safe than sorry. If you're not comfortable with it, we can close down. The Quarter will live without us for a few days.”

The door jangled as Gavin walked in again, and Liam stopped him. After a moment, Gavin looked over at us, nodded.

Tadji looked at me, chin lifted. “No,” she said. “We're not closing the store. We're not going to cower from bullies.”

“If you need to go,” I said, giving her a quick hug, “just go. You're more important to me than the store.”

Tadji grinned. “I'm sure that's at least sixty percent true. Go do your thing. We'll be fine.”

I wouldn't have called myself especially religious, but for the second time that morning, I offered up another silent prayer for a friend.

—

“I hired her today,” I said as we left the store and walked back into punishing humidity.

“About damn time,” Liam said. “How much are you paying her?”

“We haven't gotten there yet.” I stopped short on the sidewalk, staring at Liam's truck. The glass had been repaired, dents from gunshots flattened and filled. It didn't look good—Liam's truck would never look good—but it certainly looked better.

“Bulletproof glass?” I asked, walking toward it and tapping a finger against the back window.

“No. The Commandant wouldn't spring for that,” Liam said irritably, opening his door.

“Still, it looks pretty good. And they made fast work of it.” If Containment hadn't been involved, it probably would have taken weeks just to get the correct windows.

“I can't complain about that,” he said, and started the engine when I climbed in, closed the door.

It shut on the first try, which had us both staring at it.

“Huh,” he said.

“Yep. No bulletproof glass, but a functioning door's a nice thing.”

He didn't argue about it but headed to the edge of the Quarter and then north to the address my father had left behind.

I had no idea what we'd find when we got there. But I hoped some questions would be answered.

M
id-City had been one of my favorite neighborhoods in New Orleans. Like the Quarter, it had kept a lot of its unique architecture, although the war had destroyed many of those buildings.

We'd rolled down the windows. The breeze carried the scent of smoke, which grew stronger the farther north we drove, until the air was hazy with it. Then we saw the plume of smoke rising into the sky about half a mile uptown.

“I want to check that out,” Liam said, and I nodded my agreement as he turned toward it.

We didn't get very far. Dark Containment vehicles blocked the street two hundred yards from the inferno that engulfed a Containment precinct office. Even that far away, the heat that rolled off the fire was absolutely brutal.

Liam pulled up to the blockade, leaned out the window. “Hitchens!” he called out, and an agent turned around, nodded at Liam, and jogged over.

“Hey, Quinn.”

“The hell happened?” Liam asked as Hitchens passed a hand over his damp forehead.

“Reveillon. They went on a spree overnight. Torched four buildings owned by PCC or Containment.”

“Damn,” Liam said. “Any injuries?”

“I've heard a dozen with smoke inhalation, burns, but no deaths. Reveillon left its calling card—painted ‘Traitors' on the street in front, just in case we were confused.”

One of Ezekiel's favorite words.

If Reveillon had been setting fires overnight, Containment clearly hadn't gotten them all. And if there was some sort of coordinated arson, Containment probably hadn't gotten Ezekiel at Camp Couturie.

“Assholes,” Liam said.

“Agreed,” Hitchens said, then slid his gaze to me, back to Liam. “You working the Reveillon bounty?”

“Yeah,” Liam said. “Claire, this is Tucker Hitchens. Claire Connolly. She runs Royal Mercantile.”

“Sure, sure,” Hitchens said. “I know it. I don't live in the Quarter, so I don't get down there, but I know it.”

I lifted a hand, offered a smile.

Another agent called Hitchens's name, and he tapped the doorframe. “Gotta get back. Take care of yourself out there.”

“You, too, Hitch.”

The man ran back to his comrades near the vehicles.

“Ezekiel's still free,” I guessed. “And he's pissed.”

“Yeah,” Liam said. “And New Orleans will pay the price.” He put the truck in gear. “Let's get going. I don't want to be far from the Quarter for too long.”

I didn't argue.

—

New Orleans was relatively flat, so we drove to a spot where the buildings had mostly been destroyed, climbed into the back of the truck, then onto the roof, to get a look at the city.

“Four,” Liam confirmed, shifting his gaze from each of the four plumes that rose into the sky at what looked like random spots across the city. Except they weren't really random, at least not politically.

“‘And the nations were angry,'” Liam said quietly. “‘And thy wrath is come.'”

“The Book of Revelation,” I said, and he looked surprised that I'd recognized it. “My dad loved horror novels, and he thought Revelation fit the genre.”

Liam smiled a little. “Possibly sacrilegious, but it works.” He climbed smoothly down into the back of the truck, offered me a hand, helped me step down gingerly beside him.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's go take a look at your father's mystery building. Maybe we'll find a magic carpet that will transport us all into Happy Land.”

A boy could dream.

—

We drove back to Carrolton, Liam slowing as the numbers ticked down to the address we were searching for.

My stomach knotted uncomfortably . . . and then I just stared.

It was an Apollo station—an old-fashioned gas and service station probably from the 1950s. There was a rectangular building with two garage doors and a roof that swooped dramatically to one side. The Apollo trademark—a giant, sun-shaped sign—still stood in front of the building like the standard of another era. The modern, angular numbers on the side of the building said we had the right place.

Liam pulled the truck beneath the overhang in front of the building, which had probably shielded gas attendants from torrential southern downpours once upon a time.

“A gas station,” he said, glancing through my window at the tidy white building.

“Yeah.” It was all I could gather the energy to say. I'd expected something more. I didn't know what, exactly, but something that would tell me about my father, about the secrets he'd been keeping.

Instead, we'd found . . . a gas station.

“Hold on,” Liam said, as if he could sense my disappointment. “Let's take a look.”

We climbed out of the truck, stood for a moment in the quiet. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, but there were no other sounds of life in the neighborhood. It was creepy to hear that absolute silence, but also comforting in a way. There were no people here, which meant no war and no Reveillon. Just nature drawing its green blanket back over New Orleans.

“The building's in good shape,” Liam said, walking around to join me on the passenger side. “Surprisingly good shape, all things considered. Either it wasn't hit during the war or it's been taken care of since then.”

He stopped in front of the door, put his hands on his hips as he surveyed the building, then looked back at me. “You've never been here?”

“Nope.”

He nodded, put a hand on the doorknob before I could get there. “Wait,” he said, and looked around. “Let's do a perimeter check first.”

I nodded, followed him to the side of the property, where weeds were tall in the cracked asphalt. There was a drive all the way around the building, a utility box, a locked security door. On the far side, windows coated in white paint.

“I don't see anything telling,” I said as we walked around to the front again.

“It tells us no one has tried to break in. Given the looting during the war, it means this building was exceptionally lucky, or someone protected it, at least for a while. The locks are rusty,” he said,
nodding toward the front door. “That tells us no one's been through the front door, either.”

He put an ear to the door, then tried the knob. It didn't budge.

“I don't suppose you know how to pick a lock?”

“I do,” he said. “But I don't have any tools on me.” He looked back at the truck, frowning. “And none in the truck, either.”

“I could open it,” I said. I'd shifted a dozen magical tumblers in order to lock the Veil into place. I could probably handle a commercial dead bolt.

Liam looked back at me, then behind me, gaze shifting around us. He walked to the canopy that covered the spots where the gas pumps had been, looked up and down, then back at the roof, the light poles, the streetlights, before returning.

“I think you're safe for that,” Liam said. “I don't see any monitors or cameras that could have eyes on us. But even if there is a monitor somewhere, and it goes off, we'll hear Containment coming.” Containment tended to roar toward magic with lights and sirens. “And that assumes they've got any personnel who could respond to a call right now.”

“The fires,” I said, and he nodded.

“Ezekiel knows how to use his people. The border attacks show he knows how to keep Containment spread thin.”

“And if they do get here?”

Liam smiled. “We tell them the truth—we're on a bounty, which we just verified with Hitchens. We found a wraith, and he went into a frenzy that triggered the monitor.”

That was plenty close enough to the truth.

“All right, then,” I said, and crouched in front of the door. I felt suddenly self-conscious doing magic in front of him after last night, after the conversation this morning he didn't know I'd heard.

Maybe I could use that, I thought, shifting to my knees and closing
my eyes. Malachi had told me to figure out how to use my emotions to help fuel my magic. This was a good chance to try it.

I let myself be frustrated, let myself open to emotions I'd rather have pushed away and pretended didn't exist. And by doing that, I acknowledged they had weight and power, and substance of their own in that weird space where magic existed.

Experimenting, I let them twine together, let the magic and the emotions braid themselves along the filaments of power, enhance them, direct them. To my surprise, the emotions contained it, a lasso around wriggling prey, and directed its movement. The magic still fought back, tugging against the line, but it was in my grasp, instead of the other way around.

It was the first time I'd set a limit on the magic itself, as opposed to trying to use the magic—its wildness and madness, its forcefulness and strength—to manipulate an object.

Hope filled me.

Maybe Malachi had been onto something.

Before I lost the edge and the grip on the filaments of power I'd created, I linked them together, imagined sinking them into the tumblers, letting them feel their way through the lock. I couldn't actually see their shift, the rise and fall of the pins, but I could feel them with that indefinable sense.

And then they fell into place, and the lock opened with a
click
.

Still on my knees in front of the door, I opened my eyes, the frissons of magic still sparking in the air like dust motes in a shaft of light.

I stood slowly, expecting to feel the magic rush suddenly back into the vacuum I'd created. But there was nothing but the sound of the breeze in the long and waving grass.

I could feel Liam's gaze on me, and looked at him, saw the
interest in his eyes, the pride. There was reluctance behind it, sure. Considering what I'd done in the full light of day, I could understand the uneasiness.

The moment passed, and Liam looked back at the door. He held up a finger, signaling me to wait, then pushed it open.

A dusty breeze spilled out, the air cool enough to make a mist of the humidity at our feet. “The air-conditioning works,” I whispered. But there were no other sounds, no other smells, no obvious dangers.

When we were certain no one would rush the door, Liam took the first step inside.

I moved to follow him, but the sudden vertigo made the ground shift at my feet, and I put a hand on the doorjamb to steady myself. Maybe I'd have to get used to this new way of wrangling magic, or its aftereffects.

I walked carefully inside, closed the door behind us—and kept a palm on its cold, metal surface to give myself a chance to regroup.

Liam flipped a switch on the wall. There was a momentary buzz, and overhead lights illuminated the space.

“Merde,”
he said, staring at the room.

—

Silence fell heavy around us.

“Lock the door,” Liam said after a moment, and I reached out and flipped the lock. I wasn't entirely sure what we were looking at, but I was pretty sure we didn't want anyone else walking in.

The interior of the building had been rehabbed, stripped down to concrete floor that had been refinished and glossed and bare walls. There was a small kitchenette along the wall to the right, and a spiral steel staircase that rose to a second floor toward the back.

There were shelves along the other walls. And in the middle of the large space were long tables, stacked with objects, like some kind of homegrown museum.

I walked to the closest table, glanced over the objects that filled it. A mask, a dagger, and a book wrapped in black leather. A set of small glass bottles. A large blue-black feather and a carefully folded triangle of white cloth. And that was just a sampling. All four tables, all four shelves, stored the same varied assortment of things.

“Magic,” Liam said.

“Yeah,” I said with a nod, lifting my gaze to the shelves, and realizing exactly what my father had done. “I think this is an archive of magic.”

Magical objects—books, weapons, charms, herbs, statues—filled the room, all of it as contraband in the Zone as magic itself. They hadn't actually been magical until the Veil had opened, spilling the Beyond's energy into our world. But after that happened, Containment feared Paras could use the objects against humans. And considering New Orleans's fascination with ghosts, vampires, and voodoo, there'd have been a lot of them to use.

I picked up a walking stick, similar to the dozens still stocked at Royal Mercantile. Most of the walking sticks in the store had a secret. If this one was here, it probably had a secret, too.

I picked it up, unscrewed the brass end cap. The wood didn't want to give, and it took a few attempts, but I finally managed to pry it away. I held out a hand, upturned the stick. A small purple bag, a symbol crushed into the old and stiff velvet, fell into my palm.

“Gris-gris,” I said, holding it up so Liam could see. A walking stick with a voodoo charm tucked inside.

I put the pouch and the stick on the table, wiped dust and sweat onto my jeans, but couldn't erase the tingle of magic. They might not have been magical before, but they were certainly magical now.

“If this is your father's building, then it's probably your father's archive.”

But from where? The Magic Act was broad; Containment confiscated everything that could arguably be magic. They saw crystal balls in glass paperweights, summoning guides in books of ghost stories.

“When the act passed,” I said, “my father cleaned out the store of everything they said was illegal, gave it to Containment. But it was all innocuous.”

Still, I remembered standing with him, watching as Containment burned a pile of books and voodoo “implements” in Congo Square.

“They shouldn't do this,” he'd whispered, gaze on the licking flames while others cheered. “These things are harmless.”

“These things are dangerous,” I'd said, parroting what they'd told us at school.

“People are dangerous. Guns are dangerous. Knives are dangerous.” My father had been tall, with brown hair and dark eyes. When he'd looked down at me, he'd seemed unbearably sad. “This is a reaction to fear, to the attacks. Even when we're afraid, we still have to think through what we're doing. We have to consider the consequences.”