The Hunt

by Chloe Neill

  “Keeps the rain off,” she said. “And Containment doesn’t even look twice. Chick in glasses on a golf cart apparently doesn’t inspire a lot of concern. Anyway, there’s movies in the box.” She looked around at the group. “See if Moses can get a player up and running. It’ll be getting dark soon, anyway.”

  The chatting and plotting began. What would they watch, what would they eat, who got the limited couch real estate in Moses’s living room.

  They were all eager for company, for normalcy. I understood the urge, and usually I would have been up for it. But not tonight. It was still early, but I was wiped out, emotionally and physically. Murders, battles, and confessions from Liam had left me completely drained—not to mention the hangover from Liam’s unexpected magic. That was going to need some time of its own.

  I had a lot to think about, and I needed time and space and quiet to do it.

  I could feel his gaze on me, the hope in it. But he was going to have to let that simmer a bit. God knew he’d made me do some simmering.

  “Rain check,” I said. “I’m going to see Lizzie, remember?”

  Moses looked back at me, his brow furrowed with disappointment. “Damn it. It’s family movie night.”

  I smiled, but shook my head. “Things to do, people to see.”

  Moses wrinkled his nose, like I’d mentioned taking out the garbage. “Spoilsport.”

  “I am,” I agreed. I looked at Gavin, Liam. “We surveil at dawn?”

  “Fine by me,” Gavin said.

  “Same,” Liam said.

  “Why don’t I drive you back?” Darby said to me, gesturing toward the window and the UV that sat at the curb. “I could zip you wherever you need to be.”

  “Actually,” Liam said, glancing at me, “I’ve got some business to attend to, and I think you might be interested in it. You game?”

  The spark in his eyes piqued my interest. “Depends. What’s the business?”

  “We need to see a girl about a knife.”

  • • •

  We escaped from the house after Moses gave Liam his own portion of crap about skipping family movie night, then stood on the curb, looking at Darby’s UV.

  We’d carried the VCR tapes inside; in exchange she’d given us the key. But we hadn’t yet climbed in.

  “It would be a walk.”

  “How long?”

  He considered. “About a mile.”

  I did the math, thinking about the three miles I’d need to walk round-trip tonight to get to Devil’s Isle, the walking I’d already done today. “I can’t ride in this thing. Let’s walk.”

  “Agreed.” Liam got the key back to Darby, and then we started walking.

  “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “To see Blythe.”

  Blythe was a bounty hunter, a striking woman with dark, choppy hair and sharp cheekbones, generous lips, and plenty of silver tattoos. Very gorgeous and, if I had to take a guess, very impulsive.

  She was also Liam’s ex-girlfriend.

  “You gave her the knife.”

  “Yeah.” Liam ran a hand through his hair, looked a little sheepish. I figured that was the correct response. “All due respect to my brother, I hated that knife. Handle was awkward, blade wasn’t balanced, and you couldn’t hide it worth a damn.”

  “So you gave it to your then-girlfriend?”

  “Technically, I think she stole it.”

  “Of course she did.” I didn’t know much about Blythe, but that seemed to fit. “And why am I along for this particular ride?”

  He kept his eyes on the road ahead of us. “You wanted me to trust you, to trust myself. This seems as good a first step as any.”

  • • •

  In a city of gorgeous, empty houses, from the historic to the glamorous, Blythe lived in a third-floor apartment in the middle of an otherwise abandoned complex. There was no architecture to speak of, the swimming pool was empty but for a rusting Chevy Suburban, and the courtyard was overrun with weeds.

  “Why here?” I asked.

  “Anonymity,” Liam said. “She’s in the middle of the complex, on the top floor. Gives her visibility, but keeps her from standing out.”

  In any other place and time, I might have said she was paranoid. But not in the Zone. Not in New Orleans.

  We took the stairs to the third floor and the outdoor hallway populated with front doors. Liam stopped in front of one—number 313—that didn’t look any different from the others. Double anonymity.

  He knocked on the door. There was a thump, then shuffling, the jangling of a lock.

  The woman who opened the door had tousled hair and wore a tank top over a hot pink bra and mid-calf silver leggings. Her feet were bare, her eyes lined with kohl. A silver snake covered her right biceps, and a silver dragon wound around her left.

  “Well, I declare,” she said, in an exaggerated accent that was more ’Bama than bayou. “Look who’s here. Liam Quinn, the prodigal son returned.” She slid her gaze to me. “And little Saint Claire, who I understand isn’t so saintly anymore.”

  I smiled. “Would you like to see an example of my work?”

  She smiled back. “Not unless you want to see how my cuffs work. I’m still on the job.”

  Liam ignored the bait. “Can we come in, Blythe?”

  “Why?”

  “Broussard. We need information.”

  She looked at him for a moment. “Were you followed?”

  “Are you under the impression I forgot how to do my job?”

  “Just checking,” she said. “A girl’s gotta be careful these days.” She waved us in and gave the hallway a second look before closing and relocking the door.

  The entry opened into a narrow hallway that led to a small living room. There was a small kitchen on the other side of the entry, and a hallway that ran to the left, which I assumed led to a bed and bath.

  The architecture was Generic Apartment. On the basis of what I knew about her so far, the décor seemed to be completely Blythe: Southern, rock ’n’ roll, postwar, and a little bit trashy.

  There was a motorcycle in the living room, squeezed in beside a worn love seat and a bergère chair covered in rose velvet. The walls bore enormous paintings of fancy men and women at a garden party, all completely naked from the waist down. Ironically, Blythe’s clothes—shirts, undergarments, dresses, and pants—were scattered across everything in the room.

  “Sorry about the mess,” she said, and walked around the bike to perch on the love seat’s rolled arm. “Until very recently, I was entertaining company.” She winked bawdily, and I wasn’t sure how much of the persona was an act and how much was just her vibrant personality. “You want a drink?”

  “We’re good,” Liam said.

  “You kill Broussard?”

  “I did not.”

  “I didn’t figure you for that. Wasn’t really your style. What information you want?”

  “I need to know what happened to my knife.”

  Her face went completely blank. “What knife?”

  “Antler handle. The one my brother gave me. Curiously, it was missing one morning after you visited.”

  “That must mean it was a good visit.” She pushed off the love seat, walked into the kitchen. She emptied out a glass, poured a finger of rye whiskey into it, and gulped it.

  “Damn,” she said with a wince. “Not nearly late enough for rye.”

  “The knife,” Liam prompted.

  She held up her hands. “I’m not saying I took it. But if I did, I don’t have it anymore. Had a sweetheart, gave it away.” She put the glass down, looked at Liam. “It wasn’t a very good blade.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Who were you dating?” I asked.

  “A very delicious agent named Lorenzo.” She patted the kitchen countertop.
“We had some very good times.”

  “Don’t need the play-by-play,” Liam said. “Last name?”

  “Caval. Lorenzo Caval.”

  Bingo.

  “I don’t suppose he has a brother named Javier?” I asked.

  “Matter of fact, that’s Lorenzo’s younger brother.” She frowned. “Why do you ask?”

  “Javier’s dead.”

  Liam’s voice was plenty serious, but Blythe didn’t get it. “Quit fucking around.”

  When Liam stayed quiet, her smile fell away, and so did some of the cockiness, the faux accent. “You’re serious.”

  “We are,” Liam said. “Found him dead in a Containment safe house. By the look of things, he took out Broussard, and someone took him out.”

  “Jesus,” Blythe said, and turned around, leaned back against the cabinet, crossed her arms. “I knew they were involved in something, but not something that would get them killed.”

  “What kind of something?” Liam asked.

  “No idea,” she said, and shook her head when Liam gave her a dangerous stare.

  Blythe groaned, turned back to the counter, and poured another finger of whiskey into the glass. “I don’t know. My job is to stay on Containment’s good side. Not the other way around. I take legit bounties, and I don’t get in anyone’s way.”

  “They had something going with Containment,” I said.

  “They’re agents. Of course they had something going with Containment.” Blythe knocked back the whiskey like it was bad medicine, slammed the glass down hard enough to make it ring. Then she sighed. “Like I said, I don’t have details. They were both impulsive. Lorenzo more so than Javier. Lorenzo figured he was some kind of Special Ops badass.” She looked back at us, eyes narrowed. “Was he?”

  “It’s possible they were involved in a Containment research project. We don’t have all the details, either.”

  “I know Lorenzo doesn’t like Paras,” she said. “Their mom was a single parent, and she was killed in the war. Lorenzo idolized her, from what I could tell. Took her death hard.”

  “You know how or when he got involved with the project?”

  Blythe shook her head. “That was before my time. But I had the sense it had been a while, that he was pretty enmeshed in whatever it was. He was what I’d call a ‘soldier’s soldier.’ Liked fighting, liked battle, liked having enemies. And then there was the money.”

  “Money?” Liam asked. “From Containment?”

  “Don’t know where it came from. Just that he had plenty of it. I do remember him and Javier fighting about it one night. We were hanging, having some drinks, and Javier said something about the money, how good it was.” She frowned, crossed her arms, concentrated on the floor as she replayed the memory. “Lorenzo freaked out, started saying how it wasn’t about the money but the principle. Started throwing shit around. Not my kind of scene.”

  “Violent?”

  “I’d say Lorenzo liked violence, if that’s a different thing.”

  Liam nodded, considered.

  “Did you talk about Broussard to Lorenzo?” I asked, and her gaze shot to mine. There was an expression of amused puzzlement on her face, like she was trying to figure out the joke.

  She shrugged. “Probably. We’re colleagues, after all.”

  She didn’t get the meaning behind my question. But Liam did. “Someone wrote ‘For Gracie’ on the wall above Broussard’s body and planted the knife to make me look guilty. Which means he understood I had a beef with Broussard and what I cared about.”

  Blythe’s gaze dropped, moved nervously around the room. “Damn it,” she murmured. “I don’t know. Probably?” She looked up at Liam pleadingly. “Maybe I blew off steam. I don’t know. People talk.”

  I took that as a yes, and watched Liam’s face harden into stern lines.

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  She shook her head. “It’s been five or six months.” She shrugged. “I lost interest, ghosted him. He was a very serious guy, and I am not a very serious girl.”

  “Address?”

  Blythe rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, then relented. “He’s in the barracks in the Quarter.”

  “The former Marriott?” Liam asked.

  She nodded.

  “All right,” Liam said. “Thank you for the information, Blythe. We appreciate it.”

  “I don’t want it coming back on me.”

  “It won’t,” Liam said. “We’re breaking it all down.”

  • • •

  “She’s got issues,” I said. Thunder rumbled ominously above us as we headed back toward Moses’s house. “Partying hard-ass layered over someone who’s more broken than she wants to admit.”

  Liam glanced down at me. “How’d you get that in a twenty-minute conversation?”

  I shrugged. “A lot of agents came into Royal Mercantile. They all dealt with the pressure, with the stress, differently. Some were quiet. Some, like her, were loud. But most had the same gooey centers.”

  “The Caval brothers do not have gooey centers.”

  I held up a hand for a high five. “That’s an award-winning segue.”

  Liam slapped my palm. “It was good. But serious. Both Caval brothers were involved in this. And getting paid for it.”

  “Javier Caval is dead. Lorenzo Caval had your knife.” I grimaced. “Javier Caval kills Broussard, Lorenzo Caval kills Javier? That’s pretty dark.”

  “Yeah, if that’s how it went down, it is dark. But Lorenzo apparently wasn’t above knocking his brother around because of his imagined moral high ground.”

  “The war created lots of monsters.”

  “Yeah,” Liam said. “And sometimes it just gave monsters an excuse.”

  “We can’t go to the barracks.”

  “Finally, a place in New Orleans you won’t go.”

  “There are lots of places in New Orleans I won’t go. But, yeah, I’m not stupid. We pass this information along to Gunnar, and we let him handle it.”

  “That’s very wise, Saint Claire.”

  “Don’t push it, Quinn.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was pouring by the time I got back to the gas station. I grabbed something to eat and balanced out my magic, getting myself ready for my trip to Devil’s Isle.

  Since I was already going, I searched through my cabinets, looking for something I could take to Lizzie. My father had stocked the gas station pretty well. But I’d been here for several weeks, and the stuff Moses and I found usually went right to the clinic, so I’d been working through my own stash. And I couldn’t rely on my garden plot; a tended garden was another sign of activity. I couldn’t risk putting a garden close enough to the gas station to actually make it feasible.

  I still had plenty of MREs and the stuff I couldn’t stand eating any more often than I had to—including the potted meat Moses loved, even though mine wasn’t spoiled. But I figured I could spare another can of crushed tomatoes; it was too hot in New Orleans to make red gravy or soup. I didn’t plan to make pumpkin pie, so the canned pumpkin could go, too. A couple of rolls of gauze, a bottle of alcohol, and one of peroxide.

  It wasn’t a lot, but it was something.

  When the moon rose over a sodden New Orleans, I pulled a jacket over a tank and jeans, stuffed the goods into my messenger bag, and locked up the gas station.

  It was a solid three miles downtown, but I loved walking in the dark, even if I was a little more tired today than I might have been. The darkness made me feel invisible, which made me feel powerful. I could slip around houses, through alleys. As long as I was careful, I could see without being seen.

  I varied my routes toward Devil’s Isle—Bienville, Lafitte, Esplanade, Orleans. Names that were part of the history of the city, even if their streets were mostly empty now. Always a few houses with li
ghts on or candles burning. But most were dark, standing silent and still, as if waiting for the moment when their families would come home again. NOLA was a city that preferred the dark. Shadows softened the rough edges, and moonlight made her sing.

  Tonight, I’d taken Canal, planning to hop over to St. Louis Avenue. If I followed that straight down toward the river, I’d pass St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. Like most native New Orleanians, I had a love for the city’s older cemeteries, for the tall, narrow tombs, the history, the strange dance of voodoo and Catholicism.

  I nearly screamed when a cat jumped in front of me, sleek and black, with eyes that shifted between green and gold in the moonlight.

  He sat down on the sidewalk, stared up at me inquisitively.

  Maybe I should get a cat. Maybe having someone to come home to at the end of the day would do me good. My father had actually stored tins of cat food in the gas station, maybe expecting he’d eventually take a cat there.

  I’d have said having a cat would be a lot less emotionally risky than having a boy, except that I’d had a cat before. Her name was Majestic, and she’d deigned to let me own her until the war began. She ran off after the first Valkyrie attack on New Orleans and never came home again.

  The cat that stared up at me now didn’t have a collar or tags, so I ventured the question.

  “You want to come home with me, live in a gas station?”

  Those clearly hadn’t been the magic words. With what looked like an imperious sniff, the cat lifted its tail and jogged into the silent street, then disappeared into the dark.

  I guess he preferred freedom, hard as it was, to being a captive.

  I adjusted my bag, started walking again. And made it nearly a block before I heard the footsteps behind me.

  My heart began to race. But this wasn’t my first night in the city. If it was Containment, it wasn’t even my first Containment fight of the day.

  But I needed to know either way. I stopped, pretended to tie my shoe, and the footsteps fell silent, too. I stared walking again, and the footsteps picked up again. One block, then another, then another.