We rumbled back to the French Quarter and the Devil’s Isle gate, white clouds moving above us. We had headlights again by the time we reached Canal Street. I downed the rest of the water on the trip, along with an ancient stick of beef jerky Liam found in the glove box. It took the edge off the dizziness, but I was going to crash hard later.
I told Liam about the girl, what she’d said, as lightning forked across the sky. A storm was coming.
“If that means anything,” he said, “I don’t recognize it.”
So much for that clue.
He parked the truck near the gate, frowned at me. “You want to stay here?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“It might be tough to see—to watch. They’ll probably jacket her. And if she wakes up, they’ll have to sedate her. She probably won’t react well to that.”
I could see the war in his eyes. There was always a chance I could end up in Devil’s Isle, too. And if I did, he was the one who’d have to bring me here.
If things had been different . . .
But they weren’t. There was a big part of me that wanted to say no, to stay in the car and let him take care of this part of it. But that wasn’t fair to him, and denial wasn’t going to do me any good, either.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’m not afraid.” It was a lie, but I thought he needed to hear it.
“Okay. Then let’s hurry.” Liam lifted the girl into his arms effortlessly, walked toward the guardhouse.
The guard, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, kept a nervous hand on the gun at his waist. “Stop,” he said, holding up a hand. “Stop right there.”
“I’m Liam Quinn, and I’m a bounty hunter.” He nodded at the girl. “As you can tell, she’s a wraith. And we’ve got about five more minutes before the tranq wears off. I need to get her to the clinic and in a jacket before that happens.”
“I—I need some identification.”
“It’s in my pocket.” He nodded toward me. “Claire. Back right, please.”
I nodded, slipped the wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. I pretended not to notice the rest of the architecture.
“Four minutes and forty-five seconds,” Liam said as I held the wallet out to the guard for scanning. When he was done with it, I put it back in my pocket. We could settle up later.
“What about her?” the guard asked.
“She’s my trainee. Four minutes and thirty-five seconds. I’ve got a weapon, and you can remove it, or I can keep it on in case she loses it before we get there.”
The guard looked nervously at me, Liam, the girl in his arms. “Fine. Okay, fine.”
We headed in the opposite direction of Eleanor’s house, closer to the Quarter than Bywater this time. And it wasn’t as late as the last time we’d come through, and there were more Paras out today. Mostly adults, a few children. A family of Paras with striking red skin and spaded tails, two children chasing each other on a long stretch of grass that had once been Elysian Fields Avenue. I didn’t know enough about the Beyond to know if that was horribly ironic or poetically appropriate.
The clinic was only a few blocks from the gate, but we were jogging by the time we reached it. It was a two-story town house on Frenchmen Street that faced Washington Square. Two pale blue floors of windows with white shutters, a wrought-iron balcony surrounding the top floor.
“It’s not very big,” I said.
“This is just the first building. They use all the buildings on the block, keep everybody separated.”
He reached the door, pushed it open with a foot, maneuvered the girl inside.
I didn’t remember the building from before the war, but it looked like an office. The door opened into a small hallway with an empty reception desk and couple of old chairs. Ancient and scarred hardwood floors led down a corridor, with other rooms leading to the right. It was still an old building, and the walls and ceiling were thin. Thumps and muffled voices—some of them very unhappy—echoed through the room.
The girl began to stir.
“Lizzie!” Liam called out, over the din of sound. “I need you!”
There were footsteps, and then a woman appeared on the threshold in brilliant orange. She was slender, a few inches over five feet, with tan skin. Her thick, dark hair was cropped into a bob just above her shoulders and streaked with yellow and orange. Her nose was small and straight, but her irises were the color of flame, and they shifted and shimmered just like forks of fire. There were streaks of color along her neck that disappeared into her top, reappeared below the sleeves to travel to the tips of her fingers. Just like fire, they shifted and moved like flames dancing across her skin.
Lizzie definitely wasn’t human. A fire spirit of some sort, by my guess.
She spared me a glance, looked at Liam. “I hope you tranq’d her this time.”