The Veil

by Chloe Neill

Both of them ignored me. “She took them out,” Liam said. “My word on it.”

  Moses looked at Liam. “You trust her?”

  Liam’s blue-eyed gaze was cool and appraising. “I’m not sure yet. But I know Containment’s gonna make trouble if we don’t take care of her Candid Camera problem.” He reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out four shining silver discs about the size of a quarter, laid them on the counter, where an image of St. Louis Cathedral, destroyed in the war, gleamed.

  They were Devil’s Isle tokens, created to allow Paras to buy supplies and food from the commissary. I had a dozen in the store’s lockbox, most given to me as souvenirs by agents and officers. Too bad I hadn’t thought to bring them.

  “You got cash, you’re the boss,” Moses said, then spun around on his stool. He pulled a keyboard from beneath the counter behind him, rapped his palm hard against one of the monitors.

  It whirred to life, a blue screen flickering with white symbols that looked like text. Moses raced his fingers, each tipped by a long, triangular nail, over the keys with audible clicks, and the images on the screen blurred by.

  CONTAINMENT-NET scrolled across the top in block letters.

  I took the opportunity to be amazed that someone from a world I assumed was completely different from our own had become so skilled that he could hack into a Containment database.

  And then I thought about what he was doing.

  “You can’t break into a government computer,” I said. Gunnar, at least, wouldn’t have been breaking in. He’d have been using his access improperly, yeah, but that at least seemed like a slightly grayer area.

  “How else did you think we were going to alter the videos?” Liam asked.

  “I don’t know. But that’s not exactly legal. They find out I was involved in altering it, it’s only going to make the whole thing worse.”

  Liam gestured toward Moses, stepped back. “Let her have it, Mos.”

  Moses grinned, cracked the knuckles on his small fingers like a boxer preparing for a brawl. “Happy to.” He put his hands over the counter, leaned over it, glared at me. “You wanna talk about legal, honey? I been sitting in this goddamn neighborhood for six and a half years. Can’t go anywhere else. Can’t see anything else. Can’t get home again. And why? Because your government is too stupid to tell the good guys from the bad guys. And you want to whine about what’s legal? You think this is legal? Interning people for nearly a decade? You think this is due process?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I just stayed quiet.

  “Well,” Mos said after a few seconds, “at least she’s smart enough to keep her trap shut.”

  He turned back to the keyboard and screen, began typing. A moment later, a list of files began scrolling across the screen.

  “Is their security that bad, or is he that good?” I whispered.

  “He’s that good,” Mos said, whapping the monitor again when it dimmed, waiting while it flickered to life again and the file list appeared on the screen.

  “Where did it happen?” he asked.

  “Royal and Conti,” Liam said. “Near the Supreme Court.”

  “Containment says that’s Sector Twenty-seven. When?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  Mos whistled. “Cutting it close, Quinn. Cutting it close. They could have accessed it by now.” He kept clicking.

  “But you’re in luck,” he said. “They haven’t.” And when the wraith’s image filled the screen, activated by his emergence, he shifted to the side so we could all watch the video.

  The wraith dodged out from the trees around the Supreme Court building, followed seconds later by the second one.

  “There aren’t cameras around the building,” Liam said. “It’s too dark, and there’s too much greenery. So the camera would have been triggered when they emerged into the street.”

  “Why not just clear out the brush?” I wondered.

  Liam crossed his arms, eyes narrowed on the screen as the camera jerked and followed the wraiths’ movements toward the girl. “The state owns the building and the land. They don’t have the money. Containment didn’t want to get into a big federalism argument, so they left it alone.”

  The camera panned out, caught me at the edge of the frame hitting the wraith with the limb, then getting flattened by his backhand. A little interim fighting, and then I disappeared into the alley.

  “Hold on,” Mos said. “There are two other cameras that track that sector.” He flipped through files until he found the right one, then loaded the video. The camera was across the street. It wasn’t close enough or high-quality enough for a lot of detail, but the wraiths moving toward me were plenty visible.

  I watched carefully, wondering whether I’d imagined that moment of communication I thought the wraiths had shared. But if it was there, I didn’t see it on the tape.

  Liam hadn’t spoken, and I glanced at him, found his gaze intent on the screen as I pulled the sign toward the alley. Not just watching, I thought, but measuring. My abilities, my performance, my style.

  It was an odd feeling to be judged for something I’d been hiding for so long.

  When the wraiths ran off, the video stopped. Mos tapped a few more keys, looked back at us. “So here’s the deal: I could borrow clips from earlier that don’t show wraiths—just the empty street. I can splice ’em in. But Containment’ll be expecting to see the fight, and when they don’t see one, they’re going to ask questions about the tapes being altered.”

  Liam frowned. “So what do you suggest?”

  “Better to introduce some noise, make it look like an electrical failure. Cameras are on the regular grid, not the gennies. Both fail, but the grid fails more often. So it’s a possible scenario.”

  “Do it,” Liam said. “Probably better get the sign, too, if you can.”

  “If I can,” Mos muttered.

  It took him less than a minute. He pulled up all three videos, found the fight, tweaked a small panel of dials and knobs until the images waved and fuzzed on screen. He replaced the files, got an answering beep.

  And just like that, my criminal past was erased, the evidence I’d used magic, that I was anything other than a normal human.

  I closed my eyes, felt some of the tension finally sliding from my shoulders. Now I could get back to the store and back to work. Life would go back to normal again. That was a definite mood lifter. “Thank you, Mos.”

  “Sure. That was entertaining. Feel free to call me again for your future hacking needs.”

  “Let’s hope there won’t be any. Come on, Claire.”

  Liam headed for the door, but I stopped, smiled back at Moses. “Can I tell you something?”

  Moses’s eyes narrowed, and I could feel Liam’s concern at my back. His fear that I’d do something completely asinine to insult the man who’d just helped me.

  “Okay,” Mos said carefully.

  “You’ve got a really great shop. Thanks for letting me see it.”

  His face blossomed with pleasure, which was as disorienting as his horns. I guessed he hadn’t had much practice at it, because it looked really awkward. The smile was lopsided, his eyes slightly bulging, too much tooth on display. But that he’d tried so hard to do something that hadn’t come naturally made me like him even more.

  “You take care out there, Red.”

  I nodded, and we left Mos to his electronics.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “You handled that well,” Liam said when we were on the sidewalk again. “About the store, I mean.”

  “It was the truth. He’s got a lot of cool stuff in there. Scavenged from the houses around here?”

  “Some scavenged, some traded. There’s a pretty extensive bartering system.”

  I stopped, looked at him. “It doesn’t bother you that he’s fighting against Containment? I mean, by doing what he does? By breaking into their computers, or whatever else he can do in there.”

  “You wouldn’t be safe if he hadn’t done it.”<
br />
  “I know. And that’s what’s bothering me. It’s just—I’ve been told for seven years that Paras—all of them—are the enemy. There weren’t shades of Paranormals. There weren’t good and bad. They were just the enemy. And I certainly didn’t meet any Paras who laid down their weapons, who tried to help us. I lost friends, most of my city, my family. They tried to annihilate us.”

  “The enemy who just helped you.”

  “Exactly. And I don’t know what to do with that. Moses said we were too stupid to tell good guys from bad. What did he mean by that?”

  “That it’s easier to pretend humans are good and Paras are bad. That makes dealing with threats easier. It makes housing them easier. And it makes killing them easier.”

  That explained part of why he’d made me come into Devil’s Isle. He didn’t really need me to fix the video, but he’d wanted me to meet Moses. To see the neighborhood. To get a sense of it, and the people who lived there. Had he showed me some exceptions? Sure. On the other hand . . . “They did attack us.”

  “As you’ve seen tonight, there’s more to it than that. Humans aren’t good because they’re human. And Paras aren’t bad because they’re Paras.”

  “And Sensitives?” I asked, looking up at him. “What are they?”

  He looked at me steadily. “That depends on the Sensitive. The point is, there are options.”

  When he didn’t say anything else, I figured he was done playing Devil’s Isle tour guide and it was my cue to say good night.

  “Thank you for helping me with the videos. If you’ll point me back toward the gate, I’ll get out of your way.”

  “You’re not leaving. Not until we find someone who has time to deal with you. To teach you.”

  I nearly stumbled. “Wait, you mean tonight?”

  “This is serious magic, Claire. Serious and potentially deadly, to you and others.”

  I managed to control my temper, but only just. “I know how serious it is. I live and work in the French Quarter, surrounded by monitors that make sure I don’t accidentally use magic I didn’t even know I had. That I shouldn’t have in the first place.” That I’m my own enemy for having.

  “And how did it feel tonight after you dealt with the wraiths?”

  The question, and the intensity in his eyes, made me shift uncomfortably. But I kept my gaze on him. I wasn’t about to look away. “I refueled.”

  “A snack isn’t going to fix the problem. Long term, you’ll keep absorbing magic until it destroys you. Until it is a cancer that knows only how to grow and destroys you from the inside out. Being in denial isn’t going to help you.”

  “I’m not in denial. I’m—I just need a minute.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. I was feeling overwhelmed, trying to reorient myself in a world that had just completely flipped on its head. “This is just happening really fast.”

  Liam paused. “Why did you help the girl, when you could have been spotted?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. She knocked me over.”

  Liam just kept looking at me, his silence saying he wasn’t buying my answer.

  I sighed. “Because she needed help.”

  “So she did, and you helped her. You made a choice. Now you face the consequences.” His voice softened. “Do you really think you can go back to living in denial after what you’ve seen tonight?”

  I looked away from him, trying to get my bearings, trying to center myself again. I wasn’t entirely sure what I had seen tonight. So yes, I did want to go back. I wanted to crawl into bed, sleep for ten or twelve hours, and wake up in the morning to a dull day with nothing but MRE shipments to worry about.

  On the other hand, MRE shipments weren’t interesting on their best day. In pretty important ways, life had all but stopped for me when my dad died. I’d kept the store running. That had been my focus, at least until I met Tadji and Gunnar. They’d brought me out of my shell, but there still wasn’t much to life in the Zone. Except, at least right now, a lot of fear.

  Hell. Maybe if I could learn how to deal with the magic, keep myself from becoming a wraith and being locked into Devil’s Isle, I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.

  I looked back at Liam. “What, exactly, do you have in mind?”

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  • • •

  We walked deeper into the neighborhood in silence, down a narrow street of film-covered buildings, with residents huddled pitifully in doorways. There were more temporary shelters in this part of the Marigny, more Paras milling around with vacant expressions—or clear hatred in their eyes. A man with cragged gray skin leaned against a wall, small, dirty wings folded behind him, peeking through a dirty gray trench coat. His copper eyes, pupils slitted like a snake’s, watched us warily as we moved.

  This was a prison, and we were the captors, which made us the enemy.

  Liam stopped at a town house surrounded by a chain-link fence. There was a long two-story building on one side with a balcony that wrapped around the second floor, and on the other side a pile of rubble that no one had bothered to clean up.

  Liam unlocked the gate, pushed it open, gestured for me to go inside. He looked around warily before closing and locking it again. I followed him into the building, which smelled like cinnamon and smoke—and up a narrow staircase to the second floor. The stairs dead-ended in a door, which he unlocked with a series of keys.

  The door opened into a long, narrow apartment. There was a living room with a couch and bar at one end, a kitchenette and small table and chairs at the other in front of a large bank of windows. A doorway in the exposed brick wall probably led to a bedroom or bathroom.

  There wasn’t much furniture, and it was an odd mix of styles. An old-fashioned cane-backed couch sat opposite the bar and brick wall, its cushion a deep emerald velvet. The wall behind it bore the remnants of a landscape mural, heavy on the greens and blues. The bar had a counter in front and cabinets behind of gleaming wood, topped by a wood-framed mirror. The bar and the bottles of rum and bourbon on the shelves had probably been salvaged from a watering hole that hadn’t survived the war.

  I glanced back at Liam, found his eyes on me. “This is your place,” I realized.

  “It is.”

  But he was human. “You live in Devil’s Isle?”

  “I lived in the Marigny before the war. Didn’t see any reason to stop.”

  “And Containment didn’t object?” I still felt I needed to understand his connection to them.

  “They like keeping an eye on me.”

  I walked to the painted wall, crossed my arms as I looked over the scene someone had carefully painted onto plaster. It looked like an afternoon in Regency England. A dozen men and women in white lounged near a lake, baskets and blankets spread on the ground for a picnic, a large house in the background. The paint was faded, the house partially chipped away, some of the partygoers missing their painted limbs.

  There was probably a metaphor for war in there somewhere.

  “You live in the Quarter?” Liam asked.

  “Above the store,” I said, glancing back at him. “I was seventeen when the war started. I didn’t know my mom. I lived with my dad, helped him run the store. Now he’s gone, and it’s mine.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I nodded. “There are happier stories, sadder stories. War does that.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  I turned around. “What about you? Your family? Are you close to them?”

  “Some more than others,” was all he said.

  I nodded, and in the silence that followed, asked, “Why are we here?”

  He looked at me for a long time, judging, evaluating, appraising. He did that a lot. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

  He walked to the other end of the apartment, disappeared through the doorway. He didn’t wait to see if I’d follow, but I did. I was curious to see what kind of sanctuary a man like Liam Quinn needed.

  And w
hen I stepped through the threshold, I wasn’t sure if it was a sanctuary so much as an ode to the biggest bed I’d ever seen.

  This room ran nearly the entire length of the apartment. The bed faced another wall of windows, its carved headboard situated against a half wall that, I guessed, probably hid entrances to a bathroom and closet. The footboard was nearly as long and just as ornately carved, both of them curved around the edges of the thick mattress.

  I walked toward it, ran fingertips across glossy wood.

  I looked up, found him staring at me, felt warmth creep up my neck. It wasn’t often I was caught staring at a man’s gigantic bed.

  “This is beautiful,” I said, like a confident appraiser.

  “Thanks. My paternal grandfather was a furniture maker. But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Come here.”

  I nodded, followed obediently around the half wall. As I’d guessed, it hid doors to a bathroom and closet, and a small office area. And that was what he’d wanted me to see.

  The office held a long desk with a pencil cup and a notebook. Above it, the wall was covered with dim photographs, news-sheet clippings, handwritten notes, all radiating from a map of the city stuck with pins of different colors. Colored twine connected them in a very grim art display.

  The largest photographs were of a girl with long dark hair and shining brown eyes. In one, she was a toddler with dark pigtails and a dress that poofed with crinoline. In another, she was an adolescent wearing jeans and a vintage purple LSU shirt, her long hair in a ponytail.

  “Her name was Gracie. My baby sister. She was sixteen.”

  I looked back at him. He ran a hand through his hair, and I realized as he stared at the pictures, the mementos, that he looked tired, like a man who’d been fighting for something, or someone, for a very long time.

  Pity tightened my chest. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

  “She was killed by a wraith.”

  My mouth went dry, and my stomach went cold. A wraith—the thing I could become—had killed his family. No wonder he’d wanted me off the streets. And probably part of him hated me to the core.

  I tried to stay cool, nodded. “When did she die?”