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 when 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.”