02 Seekers (15 page)

“Yeah, and that sounds like it’s not stupid and deadly.”

“Any other ideas?” I asked.

“Breakfast. My idea is breakfast,” she said firmly.

I laughed and some of the dark thoughts lifted from my brain. She hopped up to the ledge and started down the fire escape. I followed her, glad, again, she had stayed. Alex would make sure the seriousness I could sometimes get lost in didn’t consume me. She would keep me sane.

We got bagels…Alex’s choice. She even somehow managed to talk the shopkeeper down on the

price. As she gobbled hers in unfeminine, hunger-induced bites, and I took tiny bites to preserve the flavor, we walked in a direction we should have been avoiding had we been normal, sanity-loving people.

It didn’t take us long to find what we were after. The streets grew more cluttered, the expressions on people’s face more desperate. People waited for the bus to go to jobs that paid barely

minimum wage, while crime was dealt behind the closed doors of businesses and apartment

buildings. Through my gift, I was able to sense quite a few criminals, but I was also able to sense people trying to get by, managing their businesses in peace. It was a strange contrast of good and evil, hope and hopelessness.

“Which homeless and/or criminal street person should we start with?” Alex asked when it was obvious we weren’t in Kanas anymore.

“I don’t guess it-”

I stopped walking as a rundown television store with bars along the windows played the news.

Captions ran along the bottom of the scene. Our hotel was in the background as a reporter talked in the foreground. I followed the captions.

“Police have confirmed that five people are dead from the blaze, which happened around 10:00

a.m. yesterday morning. One confirmed victim was a housekeeper for the hotel.” A picture of a matronly black woman smiling for the camera made my heart sink. “The other four victims were guests at the hotel. The police have told us that they were checked in under, what appears to be, a false identity, but did not elaborate. The fire appears to have started in the room the guests were staying in, Room 103.” That had been our room. “Police say that it is the work of arsonists unknown and ask that anyone having information come forward immediately.”

They switched to the housekeeper’s devastated family, the reporter interviewing the woman’s weeping granddaughter. I turned to Alex for her reaction.

“You don’t think?” Alex’s eyes were huge with the question.

“It’s a setup,” I confirmed. “Someone is working really hard to make everyone think we’re dead.

But why?”

“I don’t know,” Alex replied.

I started walking again, noticing a pair of decidedly not nice people watching us from across the street. I glared at them, not in the mood for their awfulness, and they switched to staring at the ground. “I guess it doesn’t change anything,” I said to Alex.

“Except for the fact that we’re now dead,” Alex said. “What if they tell Dad I’m dead? Oh, Ellen will be so worried!”

“They don’t have our names or anything, and if they do DNA tests, it won’t be ours,” I said to calm her down.

“I guess…” she said dubiously.

We agreed to talk about it later, then focused on the reason we had walked so far. We started questioning people, trying to be as unobvious as possible. After a couple of unhelpful people, people who sensed we hadn’t been long on the street, we devised a tactic. She would ask rather simple questions to get them thinking along the lines of what we needed, and I would pick the information out of their brains. It worked well enough, though most people were oblivious to anything beyond staying alive or their next fix. I learned lots of things I would have given years of my life not learn, but nothing about a possible lair for nefarious Watchers.

After a break for lunch, and a morning of annoying, disappointing, results, we ran into a hobo in a back alley; our first real lead. He had a pack over one shoulder and was talking to a man lying against a wall across from us. We hesitated when we saw them, uncertain of the territory. This alley was more like a home than a hangout. It was squatter’s paradise, complete with improvised shelters and large bins for fires on chilly nights, not that they were in use now.

“Do you think we should ask them?” I asked. I surveyed the people around us, unconsciously gripping the hidden sword tighter.

“They certainly look streetsy. Is it safe?” she asked.

Alex meant for me to scope them out first. I concentrated to clear the images addiction,

hopelessness, and various survival methods from my mind. The man lying down was loud and

clear in my brain, but the man standing with the pack was fuzzy and indistinct. He was

questioning the man lying down about finding work and scorned that man as lazy. He thought of himself as a master of traveling work; he never begged for money, rather he worked for food and lodgings. He had a firm morality and couldn’t abide the handout mentality of many on the

streets. He was obviously the one we should be questioning.

“I think…” I started to say to Alex.

“Assassins! You’ve come to take me away again! I won’t go back! I won’t go! Murderers!

Fiends!” A woman with long grey hair and overly bright eyes stepped in front of us, screeching her words in a thick southern accent. Globules of spit flew in our direction as her loose skin wobbled with every movement she made. “You, sirs, cannot have me!” she added. She started

giggling and the fevered impressions of her thoughts let me know she was insane. It was my first run in with a mind consumed by disease. There was a compelling draw to get lost in the

madness. I pulled back, afraid to dig in too deep.

“Did she just call us ‘sirs’?” Alex whispered.

“Yeah…”

“Shoo!” the man with the pack said. He came up to us with long strides. “Go on, crazy, get!”

The woman scampered away, her loose skin flapping with her fleeing feet. I watched her

scamper into what shadows an afternoon in New Orleans allowed.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I think you two are a bit lost,” the man said delicately. “Angelinas, I should think. Don’t you have a proper home you should be in?”

“Angelina?” I asked.

He laughed. “You
are
new at this. I thought as much. What are you doin’ wandering around down here?”

“A friend of ours ran away from our foster home, and we’re worried about him,” Alex said,

before I could mess it up with my honesty. “We’re trying to find him, but we haven’t had any luck. We keep hearing from people about some strange disappearances, and a sort of new gang hanging around. It’s making us nervous.”

“Damn right you should be nervous. These are dangerous times. ‘Specially for pretty girls too stupid to know that wandering around is a dangerous business.”

“We’re not worried,” I said. Not about dangerous humans, at least.

“You’re stupid, then,” he said bluntly.

“Well, if you help us find our friend we can go back home, and you’ll have helped us be, um, un-stupid,” Alex said.

I nodded in agreement, even though it was a lie. If he knew something, it would only bring us closer to danger. “Is there anywhere around here that young kids might hang out at? Or

somewhere that people avoid? I mean a place our friend might have gotten mixed up in or…

anything connected with the disappearances?” I asked.

“The streets are always a bad place to get mixed up in, especially in areas like this one. Kids think they know it all. They get burned out and get themselves on drugs or killed, usually both.

If he’s missing cause of that, you won’t ever find him. Now the disappearances…if he’s gotten messed up in that – God help him.”

“Why do you say that?” Alex asked.

“The ones who disappear aren’t seen again.”

“Great,” I said.

His eyes locked on mine at my sarcasm, and I saw they were a very pale shade of grey. I took a step back automatically. There was a power in his eyes I couldn’t quite place. It went beyond my understanding. His eyes were thoughtful as he looked at me.

“You learn where to go and where you shouldn’t go when you’ve been on the streets for a while, Angelina. There’s places here you have to worry about; places where people don’t like the

homeless. Those are normal worries, worries we’ve managed to adapt to. This area you’re in is full of those types of places, not the other kind,” he said.

“We’ll never find him,” I complained.

Why was information so hard to find? People here had to know something! Or else they were too afraid to even think about the truth.

“I said: ‘in this area’,” he said. His eyes twinkled with amusement at the hint. I realized around the dirty face and scruffy beard that those eyes were laced with intelligence. He finally moved on to the information we wanted to hear the most. “I’ve heard word since I got into town to avoid the French Quarter. One Bo told me not to go around the clubs, and to be in the shelters by dark.

He said strange things were circling around the streets. He thought it was dark voodoo magic come to make the people of the city pay like it did in Katrina. I don’t know about that, but I do know that people disappear in this part of town and end up dead in that end.”

His thoughts, though fuzzy, were in agreement with his words. He was telling the truth. But what was there to avoid in the French Quarter, other than overpriced trinkets? And buildings set on fire…and run-ins with sword fighting Watchers. It clicked. Everything had been focused in that area. People were disappearing here, but that didn’t mean the danger was coming from here.

It was a good way to keep the curious distracted. Watchers were always good at keeping

ordinary people distracted from the real danger. And the man that Margaret had tracked…he was obviously good at deception. The fact that he had been seen in this area probably meant he wanted to be seen. Perhaps, he had been seen in an effort to draw us out, so he could kill Margaret and Jackson. It seemed logical enough.

“Thanks,” I said to the man. “You’ve been a big help.”

“I hope you find your friend and…be careful. It might not be magic, but it’s still dangerous.” He shouldered his pack and walked off without a backward glance.

“Did you notice it?” Alex asked her eyes distant and sad.

“Notice what?”

“He was…” her hands circled around the words, “different.”

“Thanks for that,” I laughed.

“All I could think about was my mom when we were talking to him. It was strange…different,”

Alex repeated.

I had noticed the feeling. It wasn’t a tangible difference, more like he was different, pretending to be normal, pretending to be different. I shrugged the feeling off, not wanting another mystery over top of the ones we were currently trying to solve.

We set our feet in the direction of the French Quarter, the danger having been closer than we had thought. We passed the building we had spent the night on and traveled to the park with the colossus church. Not interested in tourists, who knew little beyond the world as it appeared, we kept walking until we reached a river. There more tourists and the consequent people who

followed the tourists bumming for money along the river. There were kids here, too; kids with ratty hair, smudged faces, and sad eyes, who definitely were not tourists. Some kept to the shadows, while others openly begged.

“Hey, man. You got a dollar? My sister hasn’t eaten for a week, and our mom is real sick…” A boy and a girl had approached a young yuppie couple. Their eyes were shining with unshed tears and the hint of a catch in his throat was perfect. From their thoughts I knew the girl had actually eaten this morning. Rather well, too, for someone homeless. The man handed them five dollars, avoiding their sad eyes, and the kids moved on. The girl nudged the boy when she noticed me staring at them. Their expressions shifted from helpless to entirely aware. They moved away swiftly, even as they sized us up as competition.

“Do I look that bad?” I asked Alex.

Alex stared at an ice cream stand, licking her lips lustfully. “Yep,” she agreed without looking at me. “Why?”

“Those kids think we’re homeless.”

“We are,” she reminded me. She folded her arms and watched them move on to another

unsuspecting victim. “You think we should ask them if they know anything?”

I shook my head. “They won’t tell us jack, not when they think we’re competition. Let’s just sit here for a while.”

“Sit?” she asked. “Why?”

“Well its real pretty here, ya see,” I said in a faux southern accent. “I want to…listen to people,”

I added.

“Oh,” she replied, picking out a bench for us to sit on.

Letting people in wasn’t the hard part. It was organizing the chaos that was the problem. I shifted through the conversations and images people kept up in their heads all the time, whether they were aware of it or not.

“Well?” Alex asked finally, fidgeting impatiently.

“Nothing interesting,” I told her, keeping my eyes shut.

“Nothing?”

“Did you want to know the secret ingredient to grandma’s chili?” I asked her.

“Um, not really.”

“Then, yes, nothing,” I said.

“Who would be thinking about their grandmother’s chili?” Alex asked.

“Somebody who really likes chili,” I replied.

She chuckled, and I went back to listening. We sat there for a long time, but either we had no luck, or we were on the wrong track…again. It was possible the bad stuff wasn’t happening on this end after all. It was possible the hobo had just been trying to protect us from being in a bad part of town. He seemed like the type of guy who would do something like that.

By nightfall, I was frustrated, confused, and frustrated at my confusion.

“It’s getting late,” Alex said finally. “And I’m getting hungry.”

I opened my eyes and rubbed at my temple to get the voices to stop. I put up my shield, dimming the voices to a long distance shout instead of a roar. “Yeah. Me too.”

She hooked her arm through mine, and we went in search of food. Why had I thought this would be so much easier? Why couldn’t someone just walk by and be thinking about what I wanted