WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2005
“The east bank of New Orleans may not have safe tap water for up to two more months, Sewerage & Water Board officials revealed Tuesday, further jeopardizing plans to begin a staggered repopulation of unflooded Uptown neighborhoods …”
—THE TIMES–PICAYUNE
T
he murdered soldiers were not wizards, but the Elders were “concerned that spillover from the breaches with the Beyond might be inadvertently impacting the nonwizarding population.” Which was a bureaucratic way of saying they didn’t want human cops dragged into anything related to magic. So in true Elder fashion, instead of doing the expedient thing and sending us out to track down the voodoo bad guys, they told us to sit tight while they rattled some red tape.
Great.
That
would help find Gerry. To stay busy till the magical desk jockeys got their horses lined up, I began sorting through the boxes filled with Gerry’s books and papers. At the bottom of the third box, stuck between
The Way of All Vampyres
and a tome on wizarding history, was Gerry’s last journal.
I thought about calling Alex, but the citywide dusk-to-dawn curfew had already gone into effect and he’d headed back to wherever Alex went at night. I’d eaten dinner, checked my wards, showered, put on a tank top and shorts, and settled in the library. Gandalf snored in front of the fireplace and Sebastian watched
me suspiciously from atop my worktable. Calling Alex would ruin our little picture of domestic bliss.
I turned to Gerry’s last journal entry, September 13, the day before he disappeared.
Helicopter noise driving me mad, but rescuers finally stopped pressuring me to leave. They dropped water and military rations for me this a.m. Interesting visit from Beyond. Levees not the only hurricane breaches!
That was it. No sense of fear or urgency. Obviously, he didn’t have to leave in search of food. Whoever visited him from the Beyond must be behind his disappearance, and maybe was somebody he’d dealt with before since he wasn’t upset. To me, that said Jean Lafitte or Marie Laveau—and Marie personified New Orleans voodoo. Besides, I’d have lifted something from Lafitte’s emotions when we’d played tussle on my living room floor if he’d been involved in any shenanigans other than his own lust for vengeance—or, well, just lust.
Marie, though, also had approached Gerry in the past, looking for an inroad back into modern-day New Orleans. Maybe after the hurricane, she came back, offered Gerry a deal, and then double-crossed him. Then he’d gone into hiding to get away from her and figured out some way to make himself undetectable.
It was all speculation, but I hadn’t heard a better theory yet.
I was still pondering the possibilities the next morning at breakfast. I’d dropped my wards, let Gandalf out, and was sitting at the kitchen table reading Gerry’s journal and celebrating the return of electricity and air conditioning when Alex waltzed in the back door, my neighbor Eugenie hanging on his arm and every word out of his mouth. He was in dark and dangerous
flirting mode—something he hadn’t used on me since our first meeting, thank God.
Eugenie had been playing with her hair color again and was tugging at blue-tipped spikes with the hand that wasn’t latched on to Alex. Her shorts were too tight, her top too low-cut, and her laugh echoed through the house. I wrapped my arms around her in a hug because I had missed her so much. Whenever she thought he wasn’t paying attention, she’d look meaningfully at Alex and raise her eyebrows. I ignored her.
Someone pounded on the front door, startling all of us.
“I’ll get it,” Alex said. “Probably the National Guard again.” Soldiers had been coming by several times a day since Monday, telling us to evacuate in advance of Hurricane Rita. The storm had grown to Katrina proportions in the Gulf, and the New Orleans civilian population—not counting journalists—was estimated at fewer than fifty. Alex had taken to pulling his FBI badge out to get rid of them.
Eugenie planned to leave again this morning, headed back to Shreveport until Rita blew through. She’d just sneaked into town long enough to check her house.
“Honey, my roof is trashed worse than the Quarter after Mardi Gras. Water came in everywhere upstairs,” she said. “My insurance guy says it’ll be a month before he can even come out and look at it.”
I held my breath, hoping she wouldn’t call on my supposed expertise in risk management to assess her insurance company’s liability. Since the cedar hadn’t done any damage to my own roof, I’d decided not to bother filing a claim.
She had more important things on her mind. Eugenie loved romance and was still fixated on Alex. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Where did you find that great big pretty man? You been holding out on me.”
The sight of Alex had apparently pushed most of her
insurance concerns aside, and I wondered what he would think about being called pretty. Probably pull a gun on her.
“He’s just a friend. Came down from Picayune to help me clean out Gerry’s house.”
Eugenie’s green eyes narrowed. “Darlin’, anybody with that nice little butt ain’t friendship material. Besides, he don’t consider
you
a friend. Says you two been seein’ each other.”
I scowled in the direction of the front door. “Oh, did he?”
“Now, DJ. Don’t blow it. That one’s a keeper, and you’ve gotta admit your track record with guys is, well, sorta pathetic.”
She was being kind. It was worse than pathetic. “Yeah, well, we’ll see.”
We did a quick comparison of evacuation horror stories, and she won for most horrific. She’d been stuck for a month in a two-bedroom house in Shreveport with her Junior League sister, her pontificating attorney brother-in-law, their five-year-old-going-on-twenty twin daughters, and a pair of yappy mini schnauzers.
“I was a big hit with the girls after I gave them my makeup bag. Plus, it made my brother-in-law so mad his face turned purple.”
A pang of sadness hit me, listening to Eugenie talk. It felt so normal, like nothing had changed. But everything had changed.
After a few minutes, Alex returned from answering the door and sent Eugenie into a virtual swoon, especially since I’d let it slip that he was an FBI agent. He wore a cream-colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and tight jeans worn to a light blue in all the right places. It was the first time I’d seen him out of basic black, and I had to admit he could be a keeper except for a few control issues and that bit with his secretive personal life. And the grenades.
“Who was at the door?” I asked. “Another evacuation warning?”
“Yeah.” He dug in his briefcase and fished a protein bar out of his never-ending supply. If Eugenie was going to crush on Alex, I needed to warn her about his tendency to turn monosyllabic without notice.
“So, Alex honey, what does a big FBI agent keep in his briefcase?” I swear Eugenie batted her eyelashes at him. See, that was the difference between us. I sneaked around and plundered through his briefcase when he wasn’t looking, and Eugenie just asked him. Maybe my distrustful nature was hampering my love life.
He gave her a smoldering look. “If I told you, I might have to shoot you.”
“I bet you have a real big gun.” She flashed a dazzling grin his way.
I was going to barf.
He did the slow, lazy smiling thing guaranteed to make her feel warm and fuzzy the rest of the day, and poured himself some coffee.
I had pilfered through his briefcase the day I stole the tracker, so I knew the only things in there were a cell phone, a box of protein bars, a couple of knives, some ammo clips, and a gun. A moderate-size gun.
Eugenie finally got tired of flirting and headed across the street to pack for Shreveport. As soon as the door closed behind her, Alex went into the living room and came back with a large cardboard box. In large, flowery script, it was addressed to “Drusilla Jaco and Alexander Warin, Sentinels.” In the return address space was one word: “Elders.”
“Where did that come from? It was at the door?”
“No, that really was a soldier telling us to evacuate, but you got a call from the Elders while I was in the other room—your cell was on the coffee table. They sent this to the transport in
your library.” I’d left the courier transport open the night they sent the list of wizard addresses. One never knew when a transport to headquarters might come in handy, especially these days. Edinburgh might make a good place to hide from Jean Lafitte. Or Marie Laveau.
Alex pulled out a penknife to cut the box open, and we peered inside at what looked like a large light table, the kind used by photographers and graphic designers. Only there was no plug.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“The screen on it looks sort of like Gerry’s big tracker. Maybe it’s a smaller version.”
Alex held up his hands. “I’m not touching it. I broke the one at Gerry’s house.”
I lifted it from the box and took it to the office desk. We stood on either side of it, waiting expectantly. Nothing happened.
“Maybe I have to activate it. I might have enough juice since this one’s smaller.” I touched the edges of the screen and willed a bit of magical energy into it. Within seconds, it lit from below and a series of dark lines began forming an image. It was like holding an oversize Etch-a-Sketch while someone operated it from underneath, only in blazing color.
“Glad mine runs on double-A batteries,” Alex said, leaning over to look at the screen. “What are we looking at?”
“A map of New Orleans.” I looked at the familiar crescent shape of the Mississippi River as it wound through the city. The map marked each of the seventy-two distinct neighborhoods, including current flood levels and habitation. In Uptown, my house popped out in purple, the magical version of YOU ARE HERE.
Alex dug in the box, pulled out a folded sheet of paper we had missed earlier, and read it aloud.
Now that most areas have been drained of floodwater, please begin investigating temporal or lateral breaches between New Orleans and the Beyond, as time permits. Blinking signals will indicate breaches. Until permanent repairs are made, please note that most signals will be false alarms.
“Wonder why they didn’t send this earlier?” Alex asked.
“Maybe the breaches are mostly in areas that were flooded and we wouldn’t have been able to get to them,” I said, looking at the map. “Or maybe there were so many false-alarm breaches they thought it would be a waste of time.”
He moved beside me, shifting the screen to look at it more closely. Red stars had begun popping up on the map, and all of them were blinking.
“Good grief. All those are breaches?” I counted the blinking stars—sixteen of them. The stars were bigger than the street names so I couldn’t tell their exact location. Using my index finger, I stabbed at one in frustration. With a soft whirring noise, a portion of the map rose from the grid. The blinking light disappeared and in its place was an address in the Central Business District.
Alex wrote down the address on a notepad while I punched the second blinking star: a spot in the French Quarter. We wrote down all sixteen addresses. One was in Lakeview—Gerry’s house.
“I want to check Gerry’s first,” I said. “We can tell from your portable tracker if it’s the old one from whatever showed up there after the storm, or if it’s new.”
Alex set his notepad down and stared at me. “What are you talking about? How do you know for sure anything showed up after the storm?”
Oops. I’d meant to tell him about finding Gerry’s most recent journal. I really had. Eugenie had distracted me. “Gerry
had a visitor the day before he went missing. That’s all I know.” I went back in the kitchen and brought it to him.
“Why didn’t you call me?” He frowned as he read the last entry. “Are you sure this is all you found?”
“Yes.” I turned to go upstairs for my backpack. He wasn’t the only one who could converse in single syllables.
I’d planned to spend the morning calling the last people Gerry had talked to before he disappeared—I’d pulled their names from the journal. Instead, I’d check out a few breaches with Alex and see if I could wipe the suspicious look off his face.
I slid small vials of salt and mercury in my pocket, then checked the contents of my backpack: premixed potions for camouflage and immobilization; elixir of magnolia root and liken-grass for memory modification; and duct tape and WD-40. Anything magic couldn’t fix, duct tape and WD-40 could.
My nerves jittered as I gathered my supplies. This is what I’d been waiting for, wasn’t it? The chance to prove I could handle runs on my own? Oh God,
please
don’t make me have to be rescued by the enforcer.
I took a few deep breaths, grabbed my bag, and got downstairs just as Alex came in the back door. I stopped and gawked.
He’d slipped on a black sports jacket and was checking the clip on a big black pistol. Not the little one from his briefcase, but the one from our first meeting. I had no idea where he’d been hiding it. He probably had weaponry stashed all over my house.