“Friends and experience.” His eyes darkened. “If you don’t learn soon, there’ll be no turning back. Once you become a wraith, there’s no reversal. There’s no pill, no cure, that can fix that damage. If you don’t learn, I’ll have to drag you to Devil’s Isle.”
Liam Quinn had a crappy bedside manner, and he clearly wasn’t one to pull a punch. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure anything else would have been so effective. No, I didn’t want to walk into Devil’s Isle as a Sensitive . . . but I certainly didn’t want to go in as a wraith. I hadn’t known there were more of us—Sensitives who’d learned to deal with their magic, who’d kept from becoming wraiths. If there was a possibility I could have a life—a real life—then I’d have to take a chance on Liam Quinn.
For the first time in a while, I felt a little bit of hope. But that didn’t make me reckless.
“Even if I agreed to go, I couldn’t get in without a transit visa. And I don’t have one.”
“You don’t need one. You’re going with me.”
“You said you weren’t Containment.”
“I’m not. I’m a bounty hunter. Containment pays the bounties.”
I mean, it wasn’t the same as actually being a Containment agent, but it still seemed like a pretty thin line.
“Do you kill the wraiths you capture?” The question wasn’t very diplomatic, but then again, I was potentially one of his bounties.
“My job is to capture, not to kill. I promise you that we can discuss the details of my career later. Look,” he said, “I get that you’re still processing what’s happened, but if you want to deal with the video before they watch it, we have to go—now. We’re already cutting it close.”
Final question, just for posterity’s sake. I narrowed my gaze at him. “This isn’t a trick to get me into Devil’s Isle without a fight?”
He snorted. “If I’d wanted to take you in, I’d have taken you in.” There was no doubt in his voice, or in the steadiness of his gaze. And, in fairness, he’d already lied to Containment about my being a Sensitive, when he could have just turned me in for the money.
“Taking you in like this doesn’t do me or you any good. I promise, Claire, you’ll be back in your bed before the night’s over.”
I strapped that courage on a little tighter. “Okay,” I said, and looked up at him. “Let’s go to Devil’s Isle.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Seventeen minutes later, I was staring up at the concrete panels that rose high into the sky around the Marigny to the steel grid that curved above it like the Superdome’s roof.
I’d never been this close to the wall, to the prison. The store was nearly a mile from the gate, and it wasn’t something most of those who’d stayed in the Zone wanted to focus on. Tourists occasionally would trek through the Zone to look at the walls, at the gates. They hadn’t seen the war, and they were curious about it, grim as that was. But we’d seen more than enough.
The Marigny was shaped like a triangle, if someone had sheared off the bottom point. It was a wedge of a neighborhood. Peters Street, which was riverside, made up the short side of the wedge. A wall had once separated the neighborhood from the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad tracks that ran along the river, but most of it had been trashed during the war.
Lakeside, Devil’s Isle stretched up to St. Claude Avenue. The Quarter bordered it on the west, Bywater on the east. And the Containment wall surrounded the entire neighborhood, made of what looked like a Hoover Dam’s worth of concrete.
The wall panels must have been poured into wooden molds, because they’d kept the whirls of the wood’s grain. I reached out, touched one, expecting to feel the rough grit of concrete. But it was smooth to the touch, even where it looked like the wood grain had changed the texture. And it was warm enough that I yanked my lingering fingers back after a few seconds.
The gate was in the middle of Peters Street. It was the only part of the Devil’s Isle that wasn’t surrounded by concrete, or at least not completely. A tall black fence had been mounted into a couple of feet of concrete barrier. The fence had been “requisitioned” by Containment when the wall was being built, from an architectural salvage place in Bywater. It had come from a plantation on River Road, and was incredibly ornate, with ROSEVILLE in gold capitals across the front.
Only in New Orleans would a prison get a Gothic revival.
The gate was closed, a sleek guardhouse sitting outside it, guards standing at attention around it.
I blew out a breath, clenched and unclenched my fingers against very sweaty palms. My body felt suddenly heavy, like it was rooting in place to stay outside those walls. My escape plan hadn’t had a sixth step. And if it had, it wouldn’t have been “walk into Devil’s Isle of own accord.”
But the fear wasn’t all about me. Part of it was about them. About the images that lived in my mind about the war, about the beings who’d fought it, and the prison I’d imagined. I thought of military barracks, utilitarian buildings, sad faces. Beyond that, I had no idea what to expect, and that was as scary as anything else.