Instead of heading down Royal Street, I walked around the Square to Decatur. It was only a block out of the way, and I liked the route better—I liked seeing the river and imagining the world hadn’t really changed, that life as we’d known it hadn’t really ended. That my father and I still lived in a house in Central City, and I was worrying about dating and getting a good job. That a giant prison wasn’t lurking behind me.
When I was younger, I’d roam through the store’s antiques, making up adventures. I’d always thought it was cool that so many people who lived or worked in the Quarter knew my dad, considered him a friend. It was like being part of a secret club—the secret guild of folks who weren’t just tourists but who knew New Orleans. I guess I had a little of that now—Burke seemed to know who I was, for example. But it wasn’t the kind of familiarity I’d expected. And now it was dangerous.
I turned up Conti, reached the building that held the Louisiana Supreme Court, an enormous marble structure that took up an entire block between Royal and Chartres. It was square on the Royal side, and rectangular on the Chartres side with rounded towers on each end.
I’d heard the city had spent tons of money restoring it in the late nineties, only to have most of the back half destroyed in the war. Now the building was abandoned, and the few surviving palms and magnolias around it overgrown. The windows were supposed to be boarded over, but plywood was a valuable commodity, so it disappeared more often than not. This time, someone had gotten creative, removing the plywood from enough windows in one curved flank that the dark holes looked like a grinning skull.
You could take the people out of New Orleans, but you’d never get all the crazy.
I rounded the corner, saw movement near one of the magnolias. From the very unfortunate groans, War Night or Drink or both had gotten the best of someone.
I nearly smiled in sympathy before she burst out of the foliage. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and she was screaming like a maniac.
She didn’t see me in front of her and hit me full on, so we struck the sidewalk together like felled trees. Pain sang through the elbow I’d inadvertently used to break my fall, and the skin scraped against still-hot asphalt. She tried to get to her feet, kneed me in the stomach.
I grunted, tried to help her up, but she wore only shorts and a tank top in the heat, and her skin was slicked with sweat. “What the hell?” I asked.
She didn’t respond, and she was panting when she finally crawled off me, climbed to her feet, and loped into the street. She was limping.
I sat up to watch her, confused. Did she need help, or was she just walking off the effects of a long and boozy night?
But when her gaze met mine, her eyes were wide and terrified. She hadn’t been drunk, I realized; she’d been afraid.
She knew had been my first paranoid and totally irrational thought. She’d somehow realized I had magic, thought of war and terror and death.
But it wasn’t me she was afraid of.
He emerged through the darkness like a horrible ghost, whipping past me like a raptor and leaving behind the scent of something sour and spoiled. The magic had left him desiccated and skeletal. He looked brittle, with pale, nearly translucent skin and hair that had gone white.
He was a wraith. And he wasn’t alone.
A second monster, another male, streaked after him, joined the first one as they followed the woman into the street.
Their withered and angular bodies were partially covered by dirty scraps of cotton and denim, probably the remnants of the clothes they’d been wearing when they finally crossed the line between Sensitive and wraith.
Fear flooded me, and with it, memories of war. Of the blood-hungry Valkyrie I’d killed with my own two hands. Of the angel I’d seen standing atop the Superdome, calling out to his troops with a golden horn, his ivory wings streaked with blood.
I glanced up at the building on the corner. The light on the magic monitor that hung ten feet above the street blinked green, activated by the wraiths’ abundant magic, the energy they’d absorbed from the Veil. Containment had been notified. Agents would be on their way, so I shouldn’t get involved. That was always my father’s advice.
One night, a few weeks before the Battle of New Orleans, he’d stood beside me while we watched a Containment vehicle rumble down Royal. In the back, clutching each other with obvious fear, were male and female Paras whose naked skin glowed pale green in the twilight.
“Will-o’-the-wisps,” he’d said. “Or what we’d call will-o’-the-wisps, at any rate.” That had been before the gaslights were turned on again, and it didn’t take the truck long to disappear from sight.
“They look scared,” I’d said. They hadn’t looked like the enemies we’d faced, the Paras who’d threatened us with weapons and death.