Two streets short of St.
Anne’s, the patrol turned around.
Ezra watched it happen from a doorway on Chartres on his third evening in New Orleans.
Three of Marcel’s nightwalkers came up the block at their usual interval, and then the man on point checked his stride.
“Not tonight.”
“We’re supposed to sweep through to Burgundy.”
“We sweep to Burgundy the long way round.” He was already turning.
“You want to explain to Marcel why you walked a patrol under that roof, go ahead. I’ll stand here and watch you do it.”
“It’s a church.”
“It’s her church. Nine years I’ve been on this rotation and Marcel has never once put a man under that window. Not once. You want to be the first, be my guest.”
“Nobody told me that.”
“Nobody tells you anything here. You watch where the old ones don’t go, and you don’t go there.”
The line curved off down a side street without breaking rhythm.
A river parting around a stone.
They hadn’t looked at the building once.
They had gone out of their way not to look at it.
A hole in the coverage was a signal.
Something inside St.
Anne’s had the respect of creatures who respected exactly one thing.
He came at it from the east, up a side street that gave him a narrow angle on the roofline without putting him in the church’s direct sightline.
He was learning this city as terrain rather than as a place, sorting which shadows belonged to buildings and which belonged to things that weren’t buildings.
St.
Anne’s went up over the Quarter like something New Orleans had forgotten to demolish: Gothic revival, stained glass gone black from the inside, a spire holding the last of the light for a full minute after the streets had lost it.
The attic window was dark when he found it.
Then it wasn’t.
The candlelight didn’t flicker.
It pulsed: on for four seconds, off for two, on again, a rhythm with intent under it.
Somebody up there was channeling, pulling from a well that ran deeper than the room she was standing in.
Ezra put his back against the brick across the street and read the board.
Davina Claire.
#7.
Then #5.
Then #9.
Then #6, then #4, then back down through the sevens while the candle went on and off.
Not climbing.
Spiking.
The number jumped every time the light pulsed and fell every time it went out, and the falls didn’t quite return to where they’d started.
Power that answered to a girl who was barely under control herself, kept breathing because everybody needed what she could do and nobody had ever asked her whether she wanted to do it.
He held the count in his head while the number moved, because the movement told him more than the number did.
Nothing else on the board behaved like that.
Klaus’s line sat where Klaus’s line sat.
Marcel’s line had wavered once all week and only by a hair.
Hers went up four places on an intake of breath and came back down two, and the two she didn’t come back down weren’t going anywhere, and if that pattern had been running for three years then somebody in this city was sitting on an asset that was quietly growing past the container they’d built for it.
He gave it ten minutes.
Long enough to see her cross the window twice — a silhouette, thin, sixteen at most, carrying something in both hands.
A girl.
Not a weapon, whatever the whole city had agreed to call her.
Long enough, also, to recognize the architecture of his own cage in somebody else’s.
“You’re going to get moved along, sugar.”
He hadn’t heard anyone come up the block.
Two women stood at the mouth of the side street, and he knew the voice from a corner table at Rousseau’s, the Tremé accent, the ice-machine register.
Sophie Deveraux had a paper sack of groceries on one hip and had plainly been walking this street for a reason that had nothing to do with groceries.
“I’m looking for Jackson Square,” Ezra said.
“You’re looking at a church.”
“It’s a nice church.”
“It’s a church with a lot of people not walking past it.” Sophie came a step closer.
“You notice that part?”
“I noticed the block emptied out.”
“Emptied out.” She turned the phrase over like she was checking it for weight.
“How long have you been in this city?”
“Three days.”
“Three days, and you found the one street in this Quarter that clears after six.” The second woman had stopped smiling.
“That’s either very good luck, or it isn’t luck.”
“There’s a bar on Chartres with a two-dollar happy hour and a bathroom you can use without buying anything,” Ezra said.
“Found that in an hour. I’m not clever. I’m broke, and I walk.”
Sophie looked at him longer than the answer deserved, and Ezra let his shoulders round and let his eyes go to all the wrong things: the stained glass, the gutter, the sign about mass times that hadn’t been changed in a decade.
“Jackson Square’s four blocks that way,” she said at last.
“Go around the front of St. Anne’s. Not the side. Front’s fine. Side’s private property.”
“Private property with a candle in it.”
“Priests keep late hours.” She moved the sack to her other hip.
“You want to know what I’d do, in your shoes? I’d go buy a beignet. I’d take a picture of the cathedral like every other man in your shoes has. Then I’d go back to whatever room I’m renting and sleep, and in the morning I’d still be somebody nobody in this city has any reason to think about.”
“That sounds restful.”
“It’s the most restful thing there is.” She started past him and then didn’t.
“You said three days. Three days from where?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It always matters.” But she let it go, and he understood that to be a decision rather than a courtesy.
“Move along, sugar.”
He moved along.
Twenty yards down he glanced back and saw that neither of them had gone anywhere.
Sophie had her chin up at the attic window and her lips were moving, and the woman beside her was counting the building’s windows on her fingers.
They weren’t guarding the girl.
They were measuring her.
That was the thing about Davina Claire, and he had the whole picture inside of a block.
She was the most watched asset in New Orleans, and every single set of eyes on her wanted a different corpse.
Marcel wanted her breathing, because a witch in his pocket meant he could rule the Quarter without borrowing the Mikaelson name to do it.
The covens wanted the Harvest completed, which meant they wanted her dead in the specific manner that would send her power back to the Ancestors and stabilize magic that had been thinning for three years.
Sophie wanted whatever Sophie wanted this week, which was a moving target with a Mikaelson-shaped hole in the middle of it.
And the Ancestors, the consecrated dead out at Lafayette, the voices under the stone, wanted her dead on the correct side of consecration, because every morning she woke up was another morning the Harvest stayed unfinished and the balance stayed broken.
Everyone had a use for her.
Not one of them had asked.
That was the arithmetic that struck him hardest, standing across a street from a candle.
Four separate powers had spent three years arguing over a sixteen-year-old, and the entire argument was about method.
Not one faction in New Orleans had put forward a position in which she got to be a person with a Tuesday.
Marcel came closest, and Marcel’s version was a locked room, and he called that mercy and probably believed it.
He couldn’t go near her.
That part wasn’t a judgment call, it was arithmetic.
He had no True-Rank Sight, no Prerogative, nothing that would let him prove a single word of what he was.
Walking up to the most surveilled door in the Quarter and saying I’m the one at the top of a board you can’t see would take him from invisible to interesting in one sentence, and interesting was a death sentence for a mortal in this city.
Contact was suicide.
Contact was also, eventually, necessary, and he set that contradiction aside intact rather than pretending he’d resolved it.
But he marked her.
Not as a target.
Not as a threat.
As the one player in New Orleans whose wound rhymed with his: instrumentalized, watched, priced strictly by output.
A door he’d knock on the day he had something in his hand besides a pulse.
And when he knocked, he’d have to bring her a version of the offer that was different from all four of the others, which was harder than it sounded.
Marcel offered safety.
The covens offered belonging.
Sophie offered purpose.
Every one of those was a leash with a nicer name on it, and a girl who had been handled by professionals since she was thirteen would smell the fifth leash coming from the bottom of the stairs.
He didn’t have the offer yet.
He wrote down that he’d need one.
The candle pulsed again.
Down the block Sophie Deveraux said something to her companion, and the two of them walked off toward Rampart without hurrying, which was considerably worse than hurrying.
Ezra went back into the Quarter with the knowledge of the girl sitting in his chest like a second heartbeat.
Behind him, above the street, in the attic of St.
Anne’s, Davina Claire knelt on bare boards with a stub of chalk and drew a line, and then another line to meet it, sketching out a working nobody had ever taught her.