Chapter 5
FIVE
He climbed the stairs meaning to win the argument before it started. He lost it before he reached the top.
Delphine already had her shoes on. She stood in the front room with her bag over her shoulder and her chin set at the angle he had learned to respect, the angle that meant the discussion had ended in her mind before it began in his.
“No,” he said.
“You have not heard the question.”
“I have heard it for two centuries in one shape or another. Stay home. Stay safe. Stay where I put you.” He crossed to her anyway, because his hands wanted her near even while his mouth argued.
“There is a fire across the city and a person setting them, and I am asking you to let me work it without splitting my attention.”
“And I am telling you I will not sit alone in this apartment with the lights on, jumping at the radiator, waiting to find out whether my own head turns on me again.” Her voice stayed level, which was worse than shouting.
“Yesterday I lost an hour of my life standing on a sidewalk. If it is going to keep happening, I would rather it happen where you can see it than have you come home and find me on the floor. I am not going to let this thing make me afraid of my own city.”
He had no answer to that he could stand behind. She had named the exact arithmetic he had been running since dawn, and she had come out the same side of it he had.
“Stay well back,” he said. “Behind the line, where the air is clean. The moment I tell you to go to the car, you go to the car.”
“Yes.” She rose and kissed him, brief and certain. “See. We can agree.”
He drove them across town toward the second column of smoke with the radio off and her hand resting on his knee.
The route ran out of the Quarter and up through neighborhoods where the supernatural kept to its corners in the daylight.
A witch's veve sat chalked fresh on a blue door.
A thin man loitered in a doorway whose shadow fell a half-beat behind him.
None of it, not the veve and not the dead man and not the old hidden traffic of a city that had always made room for more than the living, so much as turned a head toward the smoke standing up over the rooftops ahead.
Whatever was burning his city drew no notice at all from the things that would have known magic when they smelled it.
The second fire dwarfed the first.
It had taken a corner double deep in another quarter of the city, and it had taken it thoroughly, two stories gutted to a black shell that still breathed heat into the wet afternoon.
A news van had parked across the intersection with its mast up.
Neighbors stood three deep behind the barricades, phones raised, faces lit by a screen instead of the flames now that the flames were mostly down.
The smell reached him a block out, wet char and scorched tar and that low chemical note underneath it that he had learned only yesterday and would now know anywhere.
This one had the look of a proper disaster, the kind the city would talk about for a week.
The double stood gutted against the low wet sky, its windows blown to black sockets, steam and smoke still ghosting up off the drenched timbers.
New Orleans had an old and intimate acquaintance with fire, as it did with flood.
It had burned to the ground twice in the Spanish years and never quite stopped expecting to burn again, and the crowd behind the barricades watched with the hush of people whose city had never once let them forget it could be taken from them in a single night.
Maya met him at the line with soot on her jaw and no patience left for the day. She looked at Delphine, then at him, and chose not to spend a word on it.
“Same hand,” she said. “I have not finished the walk-through, but I do not need to. Multiple origins. A pour along the same kind of line. Set to climb fast and read as an accident once it all ran together.” She wiped her jaw with the back of her wrist and only moved the soot around.
“Same accelerant when the lab confirms it, I will put money on it. Same precision. Whoever this is, they are good, and they are not stopping.”
“Two,” Bastien said.
“Two is not coincidence anymore. Two is a pattern, and a pattern has a person on the end of it.” She glanced at the news van and lowered her voice. “Come look while I still have a scene to show you. After today this block belongs to the cameras.”
He looked back once at Delphine. She had stationed herself well behind the barricade with her arms folded, exactly where he had asked, and she lifted her chin at him to say go on. He went.
He worked the shell with Maya at his shoulder, and he worked it twice, once with the eyes she had taught him to use and once with the senses she would never know he had.
The first reading told the same story as the house on North Villere, written in a larger hand.
Three cones of deep char where there should have been one.
The flat dark tongue of a pour licked along the base of a wall.
A fire built by someone who understood exactly how a room surrenders to heat, and wanted this one to surrender fast.
The second reading told him nothing, and the nothing had begun to grind at him.
He stood in the ruin and reached, wider than yesterday, deeper, hunting the faintest cinder of the unnatural.
A curse would have answered. A spirit would have answered.
Even the cold print of a thing long gone would have left him a thread to pull.
He pressed himself open until the bones behind his eyes ached, and the burned house gave him heat and ruin and ordinary human cruelty, and not one whisper of his own world.
He had spent two hundred years trusting the silence to break for him.
It had become a door painted on a wall, an opening that had never been there.
He surfaced from the reaching to find his head already turned toward the barricade, checking. She was there. He had checked four times since he walked in, he realized, and counted none of them until now. He made himself face the wall and could not keep it up. He looked again.
Maya crouched over her diagram a few feet off. She had watched him drift to the line and back without comment, and she chose comment now, in the flat way she said most things.
“She is fine, Durand. The tape is holding. You can do your job.”
“I am doing my job.”
“You are doing half of it and watching your girl with the other half.” She marked a point on her diagram and did not look up. “I am not judging. I am telling you the part of your brain that keeps checking the door is the part I need on the burn. Pick one.”
She was right, and he could not do what she asked, and both of those things sat in him at once.
The witnesses had the same disease as yesterday's, and a worse case of it.
Maya let him sit in on three statements at the edge of the scene.
A woman two doors down had heard another woman crying inside the house, clear as a kettle, before the roof took the second floor.
A man across the street swore the flames had bent sideways into the wind and held there, against every law he knew, before they straightened.
A boy not yet old enough to drive said there had been a figure standing in the upstairs window with the fire all around it, not moving, not burning, just watching the street, and then the window was empty and the glass was gone.
None of it agreed with any of the rest of it.
A crying woman, a standing figure, flames that broke the rules of air.
Three frightened people and three impossible nights, and not one detail that lined up with its neighbor.
Maya weighed them at nothing and moved on, and the sound part of him agreed with her.
The other part stood very still, because he had now heard, twice, that a woman had been seen inside a fire she could not have survived, and twice his own searches had told him no woman of his world had ever been near it.
It came for Delphine without warning, and he was watching the wrong direction when it started.
The crews had begun knocking down the last hot pockets in the shell, and a fresh roll of smoke broke loose and rolled low across the intersection, over the barricades, into the crowd.
He felt the shift in the air and turned.
She had taken half a step toward the car already, one hand lifted against the smoke, and she drew a breath of it before she could cover her mouth.
Her hand stopped in the air. Her eyes went past him to nothing. The phone in her other hand tipped and fell, and she did not reach for it, and her knees were already going when he reached her.
He caught her against his chest. Around them the crowd read it as a woman overcome by smoke, and a few hands reached to help while a voice called for the medics already on scene.
He shook his head at all of it. He had her.
He knew what this was, and he knew no medic carried a cure for it in a kit.
He lifted her clear of the press of bodies and carried her to the car, and he did not let the firefighters near her, and he drove her home through streets he barely saw.
The light had gone long and gold in the windows by the time she came back to him.
She did not wake crying this time. She surfaced slowly, her face moving between grief and wonder, and when her eyes opened they were wet and shining and, impossibly, glad. She found his face above her and made a sound that was half a sob and half a laugh.
“I remembered us living,” she whispered. “Not dying. This time I remembered us living.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and gathered her up against him. “Tell me.”