by Chloe Neill
I nodded, and without another word for me, both of them focused on their irritation with each other, they headed for the door.
“And thank you for your business,” I mumbled as the door closed behind them.
CHAPTER NINE
Word traveled fast (delivered by Mrs. Proctor), and the butter all but disappeared in a few hours. I traded two of the sticks for a bar of goat’s milk soap dotted with lavender, which would feel a lot better than the industrial-strength stuff that usually arrived on the convoy. I had one bar left, which I’d save for an emergency or special occasion. Or to trade for honey, if I could find some. I’d heard a woman in what was left of Metairie still kept bees, and honey had a thousand uses. Maybe I could convince Gunnar to give me a ride out there.
In the lulls when business was slow, I tried to work on the owl again. But my mind kept drifting, and I couldn’t let that happen during daylight hours, when the store was open and Containment agents were in and out. And I certainly couldn’t take another chance with the monitor.
At ten till six, the sun finally sunk behind a bank of heavy clouds that signaled rain was on the way. Good. The Quarter could steam in the heat instead of just baking.
The bell rang, and the door opened. For the second time today, Liam Quinn crossed my threshold. His lip was still swollen, but it looked a little better.
He’d brought a brown paper bag and a very petite woman.
She was a slip of a person, barely five feet tall and delicate. She had long, wavy blond hair, her eyes round and green beneath darker brows and above a slightly upturned nose. She wore a long, sleeveless, gauzy dress in mint green with a darker ribbon around the waist.
“Nix, this is Claire. Claire, Nix.”
“Hello,” she said, looking me over.
“Hi,” I said, doing the same. She was the woman who stood between me and monsterdom. I wanted to be sure of her.
Liam held out the paper bag. “This is for you.”
“For me?”
“Bread. I brought it for you.”
I wasn’t sure I could have been more surprised. I wouldn’t have figured a bachelor bounty hunter for a baker. “You bake?”
He grinned. “Do I look like I have the patience for that? Eleanor made it. She trained in France.”
I opened the bag, looked inside. A crusty round loaf of bread sat inside, just like the kind my dad had sometimes brought home from a patisserie on Ursulines. It smelled like flour and yeast. If there were gifts involved, maybe this Sensitive-training gig wouldn’t be so bad.
I looked up at him. “It looks amazing. Seriously, thank you, and thanks to Eleanor, too. I really appreciate it.” Maybe Eleanor should be the recipient of the Glorious Final Stick of Butter.
“Where should we work?” Nix asked.
“Why don’t we go discuss that upstairs?” Liam suggested. “Fewer eyes curious about an after-hours meeting with a bounty hunter.”
“Containment does think I’m your trainee.”
“That’s a point.”
I held up the bag. “Let me just put this in the kitchen.”
I left the bread on the counter, closed the curtain behind me, and led them upstairs to the second floor. There wasn’t as much room here as on the third, but I wasn’t ready to invite either of them into my personal abode. Besides, people usually got a kick out of seeing the inventory.
We reached the second floor, and I opened the door, gestured them in. “The storage room.”
Liam looked over the furniture and antiques with wistfulness in his eyes, but it was shielded by his masculine brow and pursed lips. Nix didn’t worry about hiding her emotions. She walked right in, began moving from item to item, trailing small, slender fingers over everything.
“No Gavin?” I asked quietly as Nix pulled open a drawer in a tall chest, checked the contents, closed it again.
“He has a previous engagement.”
She flipped through a shoe box of postcards.
“What does he do?” I asked.
“Most of the time, whatever he wants.”
That was all Liam said, but his tone made it clear that he wasn’t thrilled about it. Not that he told me what “it” was. If I ever needed a man to keep a secret, Liam Quinn was the obvious choice. I could fill a book with what I didn’t know about him.
“And more specifically?” I asked.
“He’s a tracker. He travels mostly in the Zone, finds things, people who don’t want to be found.”
“For PCC?”
“Sometimes. Not always. He’s got good skills, but he’s . . . unsettled.”
“Yeah. I got that from your talk with him. Bad blood between him and Eleanor?”
Liam shook his head, eyes tracking Nix as she made her way through the room. “No. Just a little war guilt. Feels like Eleanor was hurt because of him. Puts off visiting her because that’s how he copes. Tête dure.”
“What’s that mean?”
Liam chuckled, glanced down at me. “It means he’s got a head as hard as yours.”
“And yet you’re intrigued by me.”
“That’s one of the possible ways to describe it.”
“There you go with the flattery again.”
Nix walked back to us before Liam could reply. “I like your inventory.”
“Thank you. I do, too.”
“You can move things?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“How long ago did the magic appear?”
“Eight months.”
“Sudden or buildup?”
“Um, sudden. I stopped something that was falling on me.”
“And since then?” Her questions were quick, businesslike. It took me a moment to realize I was being interrogated. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who needed assurance about this partnership. She was putting herself in a really dangerous position, too.
“It happened once when I wasn’t thinking about it. Other than that, I haven’t really tried much.”
“And how do you feel afterward?”
“Dizzy. Hungry.”
She nodded. “Humans weren’t built for magic. It takes a toll on your body, which grows exponentially the more you absorb.”
“Your body is a sponge,” Liam said. “That’s your little biological gift.”
“And I’m so grateful for it.”
Nix ignored the jokes. “You have to learn to get rid of the magic, but in a way that won’t make the situation worse, or expose you publically. You have to learn to cast and bind it.”
“Wait. So if the thing that saves me is getting rid of the magic, and actually using it gets rid of it, why can’t I just do that? Why do I have to do something else?”
“Both methods discharge a certain amount of magic, yes. But not in the same way. It’s the difference between opening a dam on the Mississippi River and blowing up a levee. Water moves both ways, but one is much safer than the other.
“This is a process,” she continued. “A requirement for the rest of your life, if you want to stay sane.”
I had a friend in elementary school who’d been diabetic. Every day, she monitored her blood sugar levels, gave herself a shot of insulin. She acted as though it was no big deal and for her, by that point in her life, it probably wasn’t. That was the attitude I needed—positive resignation.
“I don’t want to become a wraith,” I said, and glanced at Liam. “And I certainly I don’t want to hurt anyone—there’s been too much of that already. So yeah. I’ll learn. It won’t hurt, will it?” I wasn’t big on pain.
Nix’s smile was sympathetic. “Not nearly as much as magic destroying your body from the inside out.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “Then let’s get started.”
She nodded. “Let me just get comfortable.” She shook her shoulders, and the image of the long-haired girl human who’d walked into the store fell away like curling bark. It left behind a woman with delicately tipped ears, long fingers, and a faintly green cast to her skin.
I fi
gured Liam would bring a Sensitive skilled at hiding her magic and who’d learned how to keep her levels balanced. But that wasn’t who Nix was . . .
“You’re a Paranormal.” I heard the anger in my voice, was embarrassed by the judgment in it. But this wasn’t a visit to Devil’s Isle, where Paras were supposed to be. This was my home, and Liam had brought a Para here without so much as a word.
I slid my gaze to him, let my lifted eyebrows ask the obvious question: Why is she here?
“I’m what humans might have called a wood spirit or a dryad,” Nix said. “And, contrary to popular belief, not all Paranormals hate humans. And not all of us chose war.”
“You had a funny way of showing it.”
“Perhaps you aren’t trustworthy enough to know the truth.”
I kept my steady gaze on hers. “Two Paranormals, a bounty hunter, his brother, and his grandmother now know that I’m a Sensitive. I’ve walked into Devil’s Isle, and I’ve outright lied to Containment.”
Then I shifted my gaze to Liam. “You have enough information to put me away for the rest of my life. You wanted me to keep an open mind, and so far, I have, because I don’t want to hurt anyone, and I don’t want to go to Devil’s Isle. But if you want me to keep believing in you, trusting you, then you need to explain what’s going on.”
Liam and Nix shared a look, and he nodded.
“Tell her.”
Nix sighed, clasped her hands in front of her. “Very well,” she said, then looked at me.
“Humans like to see the world as black and white, good and evil. It’s a lot easier to wage a war against magic when you’ve decided everyone with magic is your enemy. But that’s not how it happened.
“An assembly of Paranormals we call the Consularis ruled the Beyond peacefully for many millennia. That is no longer the case. There is rebellion—those who want to overthrow the Consularis, no matter the cost to law, to order, to peace. They call themselves the Court of Dawn, and their power has been growing stronger with each new generation. But they are still dwarfed in number by those aligned to the Consularis. When the Court determined they would not be able to rule the Beyond—”
“They decided to take our world instead,” Liam said.
Nix nodded. “The Court broke the Veil. But that is not all—they used power and magic to compel others to fight. They conscripted loyal citizens of the Consularis into the battle to help them take your world.”
“What do you mean ‘conscripted’?” I asked.
“Magical compulsion,” Liam said. “The Court decided there weren’t enough of them to fight humans. So they built their army with Paranormals who didn’t want to fight.”
Something settled hard and heavy in my stomach, weighted by the sudden possibility I’d hurt Paras—killed Paras—who hadn’t actually been our enemy. “Containment didn’t tell us that.”
“Containment didn’t know until the war was over,” Liam said. “For most, the compulsion didn’t end until the Veil closed again. By then, most remaining Paras were in Devil’s Isle.”
“So now they’re all in there together,” I realized. “The Court and the Consularis.”
Nix nodded. “Yes.”
“It’s almost impossible for Containment to know now who was conscripted and who wasn’t,” Liam said. “If they asked the Paras in Devil’s Isle if they were Consularis, and the Paras thought saying yes would get them freedom, they’d all say yes.”
Still. “So why don’t the conscripted Paras rebel now? Why don’t they break out of Devil’s Isle?”
“Where would they go?” Liam asked. “The Veil is closed. They can’t go back to the Beyond. And some of them don’t want to leave. There’s war in the Beyond, or so we assume. Devil’s Isle isn’t the nicest place to be, but it’s home for a lot of them. It’s relatively safe, and it’s relatively stable. I’m not saying they’re thrilled about being there, but they understand the grass isn’t always greener.”
“You’re talking about Moses?”
Liam nodded.
I walked to a church pew made of gleaming oak, sat down. I needed to digest this. To think about what they’d said—and measure it against what I knew and what I’d seen of war.
I sat silently for a few minutes, until the worst of my guilt had subsided a little. “How many?” I asked, glancing over at them. “How many Paras were conscripted?”
“The estimate is four thousand,” Liam said.
Damn. Four thousand people forced to fight against their will, some of them undoubtedly killed in battle, even though they hadn’t really wanted to hurt us. Or they’d survived like Moses, been locked away in Devil’s Isle without a way to claim their innocence.
I blew out a breath, ran my hands through my hair, tugged like it would clear the doubt out of my brain, the new and sharp-edged guilt.
When I could breathe again, I sat up, looked at Nix. It wouldn’t help to drown myself in pain that belonged to someone else.
“You said ‘they’ couldn’t surrender, not ‘we.’ You weren’t one of those who had to fight?”
She shook her head. “I was fortunate. My people take many forms. Some are connected to water. Others, like me, to wood. I came through the Veil near Bogue Chitto.”
Bogue Chitto was a park and wildlife refuge north of Lake Pontchartrain, surrounding the Bogue Chitto River. Or it had been before the war. Now it was an unmonitored wilderness.
“It was the best possible luck,” she said. “The wood eventually gave me strength, allowed me to fight the compulsion, although it was a struggle. I stayed there for many years with others, hoping to find a way home, a way through the Veil. That hasn’t happened yet. But we have found friends, made new lives for ourselves.”
She was a wonder. “I don’t think I could be as gracious as you.”
“I wasn’t always gracious. There were times when I wanted to fight for my freedom.” Nix’s gaze narrowed, flashed with something sharp and dangerous. “But not against humans. They may be naive, but they are not my enemies. They did not bring me here.”
“You live as a human?”
She nodded. “I can pass when necessary, but I do not stay in the city often. We have a community. It is hidden, and it is safe.”
She walked to a rolltop desk, trailed fingers across the ridged shell. “There is a lot of wood in here. Cherry. Mahogany. Oak. It is happy to be appreciated, to be loved. And there was much love here.”
She glanced my way, and the expression of utter certainty on her face brought quick and surprising tears to my eyes. By that look, she acknowledged my family and remembered them.
“Yeah,” I said, blinking to keep the tears from falling. “There was. Thank you for that.” I looked away, embarrassed by the sudden emotion.
“Thank you for caring for these things.” She smiled. “But we should get started.”
She picked up a Newcomb vase—a tall, narrow design in pale green with deep blue flowers—and checked the mark on the bottom like a seasoned pro, set it down again.
“What are you looking for?”
She looked back at me, hair falling over one shoulder. “A casting and binding object. Ah,” she said, and picked up a small black-lacquered box. She opened it, peered inside. A moment later, apparently satisfied with whatever she’d found, she nodded.
She brought it back, handed it to me. “Magic is energy, yes?”
I smiled thinly. “That’s what I hear.”
“You must regulate that magic. You will cast the extra magic into this box—remove it from your body so that it does not harm you. Later, you will learn how to bind it. That’s too much for one evening.”
I glanced down at the box. It was pretty—layers of gloss over black, with a pattern of thin, waved lines in gold beneath—but not that big. Maybe four inches by six. “It doesn’t look like it would hold a lot.”
Nix laughed, the sound as bright and happy as silver bells. “Magic doesn’t have mass. Not in the way you’d define it. It will fill and infuse t
he box many times over before you need another container.”
She put the box on the floor, gestured to it. “Sit comfortably.”
If my dad could see me now, I thought, and lowered myself to the floor.
“She didn’t mean on the box,” Liam said with a grin.
“Yeah, thanks. I figured that out.” I sat a few inches from the box, crossed my legs.
Nix took a seat on the floor on the other side of the box. She sat as beautifully and effortlessly as a dancer, folding her legs beneath her, delicate hands in her lap.
Liam, who’d become silent as he watched us, moved closer, leaned against the edge of a console table.
“Tell me how you move things,” she said.
“Accidentally?” I said, and explained the star and the owl. “If I’m doing it on purpose, I just imagine the air is full of magic, and I try to gather it together. Then I pull. But not very well. Are we going to work on that? My aim is not good.”
“It really isn’t.”
I glanced up at Liam, prepared to give him a dour look. But he was grinning, and it was a pretty good smile.
“No,” Nix said, drawing my gaze to her again. “That is for you to practice. I am here to keep you alive.” She gestured to the box. “Imagine, as you gather up magic, that you’re taking the extra magic inside of yourself and putting it in the box.”
“How will I know if I did it?”
Liam lifted a hand. “You won’t become a wraith.”
I was clearly encouraging him by snarking back. So this time, I ignored him.
“Liam is right, in his fashion,” Nix said. “As you become more sensitive, pardon the expression, you will learn to gauge the level of your magic and adjust it as necessary. Now,” she added, nodding toward the box, “you try.”
I leaned over a little, focused my attention on the box, blew out a breath. I was about to perform a magical act in front of an audience.
I was nearly to the point of feeling out the magic in the air when my brain started working.
I bolted upright. “Wait. Wait. I can’t just pour magic into a box in here. We’re, like, forty feet away from a Containment monitor.”
“You think I did not consider that?” Nix sounded entirely unimpressed with me. “I would not have dropped my human shadow if the building was not insulated.”