The Sight (6 page)

“I can handle myself if I need to. And Ezekiel called you out, not me. He probably doesn't know who I am.” And even if he did, what could we do about it short of leaving the Zone or my having a twenty-four-hour bodyguard? Neither of those was an option.

Liam nodded. “I think I'm going to take a drive. I want to look for billboards, maybe check out the Lower Ninth.”

“You're going to look for the wraith again? You shouldn't go alone.”

He grinned. “
Cher
, I hunted alone for many years before I met you. I'll be all right. I just want to pass through, see if I can get an indication of where he's been, where he's holed up. If I find it, we can pick him up tomorrow in daylight. Maybe Delta will have settled on a location for their new HQ, and we can talk to them, too.”

“About Reveillon.”

Liam nodded.

“That sounds good. Be careful when you go home, Liam.” He would, after all, be heading back into Devil's Isle, and he'd already pissed off Ezekiel once today.

“I will, Claire. You take care of yourself.”

When I nodded, he slipped into the darkness, back toward Devil's Isle. I closed and locked the door behind him, then stood there for a moment, watching until he was out of sight, as if that would keep him safe.

It didn't hurt to try.

—

I needed sleep and a new day, so I poured a glass of cold water and took the staircase to the third floor, to my long room of hardwood floors and plaster walls bookended by floor-to-ceiling windows.

I put the glass on the bureau and opened the front and back windows a crack, hoping a breeze would work its way upstairs.

A pigeon cooed on the courtyard side, so I checked for a message from Delta, found nothing. The mottled pigeon tilted its head at me in the halting, robotic way of pigeons, so I shook some seed into the small cup attached to its post and left it to its dinner.

When I reached my daybed, I unbuckled my boots, let them drop to the floor. My jeans and shirt followed, until I was left in “answering” clothes. (Just enough clothing, a customer had once told me, that you could still answer the door.)

I fell back onto the bed, exhaustion seeping into every bone and muscle. Some was physical, some was emotional, the cost of seeing horror, of remembering it, of dealing with its aftereffects.

I closed my eyes, tried to relax into the darkness. But even as weariness made my bones feel like lead, my mind continued to spin. It wanted to obsess, to wander, to repeat images of death and violence, to replay my conversations with Liam, to recite the things I'd need to do tomorrow—talk to Delta; order goods for Lizzie; apologize to Tadji again, just in case.

When the list rolled on and on, I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling, forced myself to slowly trace through the constellations formed by glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars. I followed Orion's shoulders, belt, dagger, the long line of the scorpion, the lion's powerful body.

Halfway through, my mind tripped to Liam, and I had to drag it back again. When I'd traced all ten of them, I was still awake.

So I counted backward from one hundred. I got to nineteen . . . and I thought of Liam.
“Stop it,”
I ordered myself.

I imagined I was walking through the storage room, tried to remember each piece of furniture in order. I made it through to the windows, could feel my body relaxing into sleep . . . and thought of Liam's arms around me.

And so the cycle continued, over and over again. An hour and a half later, I was still awake.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, then sat up and scrubbed my face, staring angrily into the dark.

There was no point in tossing around, so I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. I pulled on a pair of boxers to match the tank I already wore, shuffled to the doorway, and headed for the stairs.

I flipped on the light in the second-floor storage room, testing it. The power was back on.

I'd always liked to stay busy—fixing broken things, organizing the storage room, restoring an antique I'd found or traded for other things in the store.

And since learning my father had been a Sensitive, I'd been going through the building—the records, the antiques, my father's personal effects—looking for some clue about when he'd become a Sensitive and what he'd done about it.

Had he learned to cast off his magic, to keep his magic balanced? Was that why the store had been shielded from the magic monitors outside? And the most important question—the only one that really mattered: Why hadn't he told me?

“He just hadn't told me
yet
,” I mumbled, repeating the mantra I'd decided on.

I'd been too young—only eighteen—when he was killed. He had meant to tell me, maybe when I was older. He'd had every intention
of telling me but had been killed before he was able to take that step. Because the alternative made my chest ache—the possibility that he'd never intended to tell me, he'd never considered the possibility that I'd end up the same way—but without his help or guidance.

I sat down in front of two barrister's bookshelves in the storage room and opened the glass door on the bottom shelf. This week, I was working my way through the books my father had collected. The spines were gorgeous, all tooled leather and gilding, and they'd have sold for a pretty penny once upon a time. There were French Quarter tourist favorites—
A Confederacy of Dunces
and William Faulkner's
New Orleans Sketches
—along with plenty of classics I hadn't been allowed to touch as a child. Those tables had certainly turned.

“I'll take a letter,” I said, pulling a book off the shelf, flipping through the pages. When no hidden note or secret message appeared, I replaced it again. “A sticky note. A receipt. A recipe card. A torn page from an old phone book.”

Anything that would help me understand who he'd really been.

I pulled a copy of
The Secret Garden
, my heart momentarily speeding when I spotted faint scribbles in the front of the book. But it was just a penciled price from some long-ago sale.

With more discoveries like that, night slipped away. Five more books followed, then ten. Then twenty. And then I was down to the final shelf.

“
The Revolt of the Angels
,” I murmured, reading the gold letters on the red leather spine. I didn't know the book, but I'd bet the author hadn't correctly imagined what a revolt of angels actually involved. I ran my fingers over the pressed metallic designs in the cover, the blue and red points of a radiating star.

“And how long ago were you written?” I wondered, opening the cover to find the publication information on the first page.

But there was no publication page.

The book's interior pages had been hollowed out, carved into a rectangle but for a border of pages about an inch on each side. And there, resting inside the book, was a set of papers.

My heart pounding, palms suddenly sweating with anticipation, I carefully unfolded them, pressed them flat.

They were old legal documents—a deed issued to a name I didn't recognize and what I thought were supporting documents, all of them yellowed with age.

They weren't my father's, I realized, flipping through half the pages. Just documents someone had put in a book for safekeeping, probably thinking they were being clever about it. My father had likely gotten the book as part of a larger lot, hadn't even opened it.

I put them both aside, lowered my head to my knees. Maybe I'd never figure out anything else about my father. Maybe I'd learn to live with what I knew and what I didn't.

“And maybe hell will freeze over, and angels will populate the earth,” I muttered. “Oh. Wait.”

I rose, taking the book and papers with me, turned off the light. Upstairs again, I put them on top of my bureau. Maybe I could find someone to send the papers back to. Maybe I'd keep the book for the irony.

And maybe, if I was lucky, I'd manage to get some sleep.

I
t was early. So early that darkness still spilled unmolested into the room. Sound had woken me, but it was too dark, I thought, for
Reveille
to have rung over the Quarter from the Devil's Isle.

The song trilled again.

I blinked into darkness, the bed and walls and ceiling coming into focus. And eventually, the mottled gray pigeon singing an aria on the window ledge.

I considered pitching a shoe at it, but since it was probably a message from Delta, I dragged myself out of bed. I winced as I crossed the room, trying to force my legs to work together in sequence, my brain still foggy from the few hours of sleep I'd managed to grab.

“It's five-damn-thirty in the morning,” I said, reaching for the pigeon, which danced back and forth. “Quit playing hard to get.” When I managed to grab him, I pulled the slip of ivory paper from the leather band on his foot. The script on the curled paper, long and elegant, read:
Algiers Point. Practice. Now.—M
.

“M” was Malachi, my Delta colleague and today, my new magic teacher. This was a summoning from an angel at five-damn-thirty in the morning.

Grumbling, I put some seed in the pigeon's feeder, closed the
window again, and resigned myself to my fate. I wasn't sure how long Malachi had already waited, and being even later wasn't very mannerly. Especially since he was helping me not to become a wraith, which I was totally on board with.

When angels called, Sensitives listened.

—

I showered, dressed, and noshed on one of the bananas a note from Tadji explained had been traded for powdered milk the day before, then slipped on a quilted PCC surplus jacket.

I locked up the store and went outside, headed for the river.

The Quarter was still dark, corners lit by gas streetlamps and the red glow of untriggered magic monitors. As Liam predicted, it had rained overnight, leaving the city damp and unusually chilly for this time of year. Another effect of magic—startling weather changes in our typically tropical corner of the world.

Even now, years after its peak, the Quarter smelled like the Quarter. Dampness, alcohol, garbage. It was like the boozy essence of Bourbon Street in its heyday had been trapped in the humidity that now misted through the city. Or maybe daiquiris, pralines, and their aftereffects had soaked into the asphalt and brick.

I should have been nervous, wary that Reveillon members were patrolling the neighborhood, looking for objects of their anger. But there was something magical in the darkness. Once upon a time, early morning in the Quarter meant garbage trucks, produce deliveries, joggers, businesspeople preparing to open stores and restaurants, tourists out and about before the heat became too oppressive.

Now the city was quiet, mist fuzzing the edges of the buildings and giving the gas lamps an otherworldly gleam. Devil's Isle still glowed to the north, but the humidity softened its even lines.

I walked toward the union of Canal Street and the Mississippi River. The Crescent City Connection, the bridge on U.S. 90, had been destroyed during the war, and the new crossing was several miles downriver. There'd been a ferry terminal here once upon a time, but it was gone, too, destroyed right after Mardi Gras World had burned to the ground.

You wanted to visit Algiers now, you paid Mr. Bernard.

His ferry had been cobbled from a section of barge, the seam sealed and made watertight. Rings were welded to one side, which were intricately laced to the bottom half of a long ellipse of rope that spanned the river.

A man, thin as a rail with lived-in skin tanned by the sun, stepped out of his tent on the edge of the riverbank. “Mornin'.”

“Good morning, Mr. Bernard.” I held out a few dollars, which he accepted with a nod and then tucked into his worn backpack. “Can I get a ride across?”

“Sure. Early.”

I nodded. “Not my choice. Friend needs me.”

He nodded, gestured to the barge. “Climb aboard.”

I stepped onto the dock, then onto the long, flat barge, and watched as Mr. Bernard untied the hefty ropes that moored it to the muddy shore.

Rumor was, Mr. Bernard had been a pediatrician at a posh clinic in the Garden District when the war started. His office was hit in a fierce day of fighting during the Second Battle of New Orleans, and the loss of life—the loss of children—changed him. He walked away from what remained, joined the war, and then become the ferryman. Instead of battling illness, he battled the churning Mississippi day in and day out.

He tossed the ropes onto the barge's deck. Now loose, it shifted
into the current, pulling tight against the cable that kept it from washing downriver and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico.

He walked to the middle of the barge, hands in heavy leather gloves, his arms tanned and corded with muscle. He began working hand over hand, pulling the upper rope to move the ferry into the river.

I grabbed a rail as the barge bucked against the current. We needed to move east; the river, which boiled brown in the early dawn, wanted very much to push us south.

The barge shuddered as a tree limb jarred us, nearly ripping the rope out of one of its stations. Mr. Bernard grunted but kept his hands on the rope.

“I can help,” I said, and offered to do my part. But he motioned me back, beads of sweat popping on his face, and continued pulling.

He fought the river inches at a time with teeth bared and forehead furrowed until we'd crossed the half-mile span. Maybe this was his penance, fighting back against Old Man River because of the fight he hadn't been able to win.

He moored on the east side of the river, focusing on his task while I walked to the other end of the barge and across the dock. He'd wait there until he had a return fare, so if someone came along before I came back, I'd have to swim or wait him out.

Or catch a ride from an angel.

—

My legs unsettled, the ground seemed to wobble beneath me when I stepped onto dry land again.

Algiers wasn't the tourist spot it had once been; neighborhoods had been flattened by human shelling. The walls of the Mardi Gras World warehouse had crumbled long ago, and enormous faces—the heads of creatures that had once populated Mardi Gras floats—still
stared out from what remained of the enormous building like idols to a different age.

Because it hadn't taken much magical damage, the things that grew in Louisiana grew here in abundance. The land had become a creeping meadow, with flora and fauna that helped feed those of us who lived in the Quarter.

Just as he had the first time I'd seen him, Malachi stood in a copse, wings retracted. He wore jeans and a thin navy pea coat, his tousled blond curls just brushing his shoulders. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with golden tan skin. His eyes were golden as well, his nose straight and leading to lips that were fuller on the bottom than on the top.

If it wasn't for the mantle of authority that he wore as well as the clothes, you'd have thought he was a human. But that mantle was difficult to ignore.

I'd known Malachi for a month now, and I still wasn't sure of him. He'd been a general in the Consularis army, and his manner was almost always formal. I wasn't sure if that was because he was Consularis and we were human, or he was a commander and we were, if anything, soldiers. Or maybe that was just his personality.

He glanced back, met my gaze, and pressed a finger to his lips. Nodding, I crept through the grass to stand beside him.

A deer and a fawn stood in a clearing fifteen or twenty yards away, their bodies lit by the early light that slitted through the trees and spilled across the fog. They gnawed at grass that had grown where a parking lot once stood, then lifted their heads. Jaws working, ears alert, they chewed in the growing dawn.

The moment lengthened, and crickets resumed their chorus around us. The fawn, its haunches dotted with white spots, pranced forward merrily, tail switching to brush away gnats or mosquitoes.

Malachi's sudden whistle split the air and the silence. The deer jumped and ran, disappearing into the mist.

“Why did you do that?”

“It's better they remain afraid,” he said. “They become too used to humans—or anything else—and they're more vulnerable.”

“To being dinner.”

“There's no reason to make the hunt too easy.”

I cocked my head at him. “And are humans more vulnerable for becoming too used to Paranormals?”

He seemed pleased by the question, but that didn't change his manner. “Do you think I am your ally?”

I gave the question honest thought. “I don't know. But I don't think it matters.”

He lifted his brow in surprise. “Oh?”

“We have a common enemy. That makes us allies enough for right now.”

He smiled. “On that, we agree.”

“You heard what happened yesterday?”

He nodded. “Yes. Liam and Burke both got messages to us.”

“We'd seen a billboard near the Lower Ninth that morning. Then they marched down Bourbon Street. The leader, Ezekiel, said they had lots of allies, lots of signs. Have you seen anything like that? Recruiting messages? Other signs of them?”

“I've seen several billboards. But no indication of who painted them, or the size of their group. They'd have to be big enough not to worry about the loss of seven members in an orchestrated explosion.”

“Yeah.” And that was disturbing enough. “Is that why we're here so early?”

He smiled. “It isn't early for me. But generally, yes. You will not always have the opportunity to choose the conditions under which
you use magic. You need to be prepared to use it in less than optimal situations.”

I glanced around. It was cold, dark, and foggy, and I was still groggy from a night spent tossing and turning. “Less than optimal,” I agreed.

Malachi smiled. “Give me your jacket.”

My shoulders slumped. “I don't suppose you could trade it for a white chocolate mocha with soy and whip, could you? And maybe a croissant to go with it?”

He just looked at me.

“Never mind,” I said, taking off the jacket and handing it to him. “Did you make Burke do this?” I wondered, goose bumps rising on skin chilled in the brisk air.

“I didn't train Burke. Let's see what you can do.”

I glanced around. “No one will see?”

“No. I've shielded the woods.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “You can do that?”

He nodded, and I watched him for a moment. “Did you shield Royal Mercantile?”

“No,” he said with a smile. “I didn't know your father. And that is not a skill I have. I can bring you within the aegis of my magic—as I've done now. But that aegis requires a certain physical proximity.”

Malachi walked twenty feet away from where I stood, into the clearing where the deer and the fawn had munched on grass minutes ago. He linked his hands in front of him, feet spread as wide as his hips. He looked vaguely Viking-esque there in the meadow, the mist pooling at his feet.

“I want you to pick me up,” he said.

Like in a bar?
was the first thought that came to mind. “I—excuse me?”

“Pick me up.” He raised a hand, pointed a finger to the sky. “Lift me into the air.”

“Could I point out you have wings?”

“You could, but that would be a waste of time. Pick me up.”

“Just call me Skywalker,” I muttered, and took a good, hard look at the object of my magic.

Malachi was tall, broad shoulders, strong body. He probably weighed somewhere between one ninety-five and two twenty, not counting the wings. And I had no idea how much they weighed. I hadn't moved anything that heavy before—not on purpose, anyway—but didn't see why I couldn't do it now.

I gave him a nod, centered myself, blew out a breath. And then I lifted a hand, palm out, and began to gather the invisible magic that surrounded us. I couldn't see that energy, but I could feel it with some sixth sense, the perception that marked me as a Sensitive and—if I wasn't careful—would make me a wraith.

I pulled the magic together, building filaments of magic, and circling it around Malachi like a rope. When I'd built up enough magic that I was nearly dizzy with it, I slowly lifted my hand to raise him off the ground.

He didn't budge. Not even an inch.

“Problem?” Malachi asked casually, as if still waiting for me to start.

“No,” I said, and narrowed my gaze. I'd be damned if I couldn't do this—because there was no reason I couldn't do this. I had telekinesis. I could move things. He was a thing, so I could move him.

Maybe I hadn't calculated his weight well enough, I thought, and began to gather more than enough magic to account for his muscle and mass. Lifting my hand again, I wound more and more magic around him, until he seemed to glow with it, like he'd only just stepped through the Veil in the golden armor Paras preferred.

I drew my fingers into a fist and raised that fist to the sky, pulling the magic with me, and pulling him with the magic.

Not even a lock of his hair moved.

Frustration boiled over. “Son of a bitch.”

“You aren't trying.”

I made a sound of doubt, shook out arms that were trembling from effort. “If I try any harder I'll pop a blood vessel.” I narrowed my gaze at him. “You're doing something—something that makes you heavier.”

“If I was human, I might be offended by that.”

“But you aren't. What's the deal?”

Malachi looked at the ground, ran a palm over the nubby grass, pine needles, and sticks that littered the ground. He picked up two pinecones, then walked back to me. He held out his palms, one in each hand. “Open your palms.”

I did, mirroring his position.

“Example one,” he said, and dropped the pinecone in his left hand into my palm.

It felt like a pinecone, pointy and nubby.