02 Seekers (14 page)

She rolled her eyes. “The Adamses?” she asked.

“Maybe…if we can find a phone. But if we are being watched or followed, they’ll trace the call.

It might put them at risk.”

“They know the risks,” Alex said. “And they’ll want to know about this.”

We were walking as fast as we could without attracting attention, our destination the same row of shops we had originally snuck out to when Margaret had caught us, but I felt we weren’t moving nearly fast enough. My eyes roved around the streets, along the rooftops, everywhere, for a sign of someone, anyone, friend or enemy; a sign that the world of Watchers was still real and hadn’t been erased with the fire. I was grateful for one thing as we walked: Alex’s

admonishment that we needed to be doing something had cleared my mind and all the noises of the streets had faded. The purpose of protecting her, of staying alive long enough to find help, had created the block I never could imagine for myself.

“Clare…what if…you don’t think they’re dead, Jackson and Margaret?” Alex asked me as we

walked.

I remembered the firefighters talking about the pile of ashes. Daniel had explained to me how the only way to keep a Watcher’s dead tissue from reanimating in a “Dawn of the Dead” tribute was to burn the Watcher until they turned into ash. It was why fire was our biggest enemy.

“No. They’re not dead,” I said. “Come on, they’ll be here.”

It was better to hope than to give in to the reality that two friends had been killed and we had been left alone to the brutal streets of a strange town we knew nothing about. It was better than accepting the alternative: that nothing would ever be the same again. While on most days I scorned people who trusted their whole lives to hope, instead of skill or actively pursuing their destiny, I was clinging to hope like an old friend I had spent long days with. It was the only thing that kept me from resigning me to the dark nature of our situation.

There had to be hope somewhere…

Chapter 8

We circled around the shops near Bourbon Street looking for Margaret and Jackson – near the shops we had snuck out to so many weeks ago. We made a sandwich shop our base of operations and met back there every ten minutes or so. We waited there all day…until the shop closed its doors, and the hostess ushered us out of her outdoor seating with pursed lips and a stern frown.

She thought we were freeloaders and a nuisance to decent, hardworking people. It was proof we looked the part of beggar. I eyed Alex to be sure. Some of the ash had fallen on her face from the fire. Sweat from a day full of walking in the heat smudged the dirt, aiding her appearance of dirty. She was in full vagabond disguise. I figured I always looked the part – at least, a lifetime of wandering parts of cities I probably shouldn’t have had given me the ability to always blend in.

The sun was sinking below the horizon as we walked away – the muggy air rich with scents and sound – the slim breeze which blew around not enough to wipe away the encompassing heat. My shirt was soaked through, my hair a sieve for the sweat and dirt dripping down my neck. The city was starting to get a different feeling now that the darkness was taking over the light. In the light I hadn’t seen what people talked about as New Orleans being a city of mystery. The dark,

though, was entirely different – I could feel the city waking up in ways no person could ever truly understand, even if they spent a lifetime living it. The very air felt alive. The feeling wasn’t all good.

Predators circled around the partiers, searching for prey; pickpockets merged with tourists, bums begged on the street corners. Through my gift, I heard shadowed thoughts of darker doings in unseen places. I wanted to help, but I was superhero-less and limited by my inabilities. Besides, protecting Alex was the most important thing, not getting into wayward fights with people who were older, meaner, and more resigned to murder. It felt wrong, like I was fighting a war against my very nature.

“They didn’t show up…” Alex said as we slowly walked in a direction neither of us had had

consciously picked.

“Maybe they didn’t know where we were. They could have been looking for us in another part of town.”

“If they were looking for us, they would have found us,” she said slowly.

I’d been thinking the same words all day. They always found what they were after.

“What now? Do we call Dad? Do we leave?” Alex asked.

“You can do whatever you want,” I said. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

“Excuse me?”

I’d been thinking about this a lot as well, during our wait. “I’m not going to run away at the first sign of fire,” I said.

“Choice of words…” Alex warned.

“Sorry. Point is…I’m not leaving. I have to know if Margaret and Jackson are dead. If they are dead, I will make sure I find their murderer. Then, I’m going to find Daniel and make sure he’s okay, this stupid mission be damned.”

“But what about money? Dad cut me off…took all my credit cards. I just have the money I took out of savings. How much do you have?”

“About a hundred.”

“That’s not enough to get another hotel, and it’s not enough to feed ourselves for more than a couple of weeks,” Alex pointed out.

I breathed a sigh of relief at her words, even though they were a reminder of our bad situation.

She was staying; I had hoped as much. I wanted her to be safe, but having a partner was a lot better than contemplating the search alone.

“We’ll make do,” I said.

“
We’ll make do
!” she hissed at me, annoyed with my blasé attitude.

“I don’t know what we are going to do permanently for a place to stay, but I think I can find us a place for tonight,” I continued, ignoring the hiss.

“Are you going to wave your magic wand?” she asked sarcastically.

“Don’t be silly. I broke my magic wand ages ago,” I replied.

My eyes turned skywards as I searched the roofline for a decent looking building. I walked away from the major thoroughfares and headed in the general direction of our once-elegant hotel. We would get caught if we stayed in tourist central…and not just by the police. There were others other who might be looking for us. Alex followed me quietly, either lost in thought or fuming over my indifference to planning. I was too busy looking to make sure.

“There.” I pointed at a stone building, which was three stories high and had other buildings jammed up against it.

“What’s there?” Alex asked.

I looked both ways down the closed-in street for cops or any curious passersby. The streets were empty. “Did I ever tell you about when I lived in New York?” I asked.

“Just vague things,” Alex replied.

“Ellen always worked odd hours when we were living there…when she could get hours.

Whenever I knew she would be gone at night, I would go out and find a building to climb to watch the city. You’d be surprised at how many people ignore what’s on their roofs.”

“Did you ever get caught?” she asked.

“Once,” I replied. “The cop let me go, though.”

“That was nice of him,” she said.

“Not really. I let him know about the drug dealers across the way, and he went to bust them mid-deal. I ran off before he could find me again.” I set the sword against the edge of the building.

“See that fire escape?”

“Yeah….” She looked up at it, then at me, her face suspicious.

“I’m going to boost you up, and you’re going to let the ladder down for me.”

“Why can’t I boost you up?” she asked.

“You think you can lift me?” I asked, measuring my tall frame against her petite one.

She tilted her head to measure the distance up. “All right, just be careful.”

I rolled my eyes and put my hands together in a brace for her foot. She pushed down on my

shoulders, then on my head, as she reached for the ladder. She caught it, after managing to hit me in the face more than once, and swung up. A second later, after some cursing and a hiss to be quiet from me, the ladder descended. I grabbed the sword and followed her up, my climb a lot easier than hers had been. Together, we pulled the ladder up and latched it, so no one would follow us – no one human, at least. Alex in front, we climbed the metal stairs all the way to the top of the building. The roof was littered with trash and natural debris from storms. In the corner was an old couch someone had left to rot. A heavy door in the floor was the only other access point.

“Home, sweet home,” Alex said dryly.

“Better than the ground,” I replied.

She pushed on the torn fabric of the old sofa. “At least it’s dry.” She measured the distance. “It’s not big enough for the two of us.”

“You go ahead and sleep. I’ll keep watch,” I told her, having not planned on sleep.

I knew the kind of people that roamed the darkness. I also knew that coming up here would only stop the human kind. The fight I had witnessed was proof of that. Sleep would not only be

impractical, but deadly.

“You’ll wake me up when it’s your turn?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I agreed.

She lay down, after trying to dust off the soaked through mold and dirt, and made quiet

discontented noises. It took her a while, but a long day of running around, tension, and utter terror had exhausted her to the point where she could have slept anywhere. Soon, her steady breathing was another sound in the full night.

I, on the other hand, felt more alive. The tension and the fear had awoken a part of me that had lain dormant since Ellen had brought me to King’s Cross. My body had stopped operating on

normal wave lengths and was searching for ways to adapt to our situation, to swing back into the rhythm and spirit of the city. My brain kept urging me to think two steps ahead, to focus on surviving. It was less a symptom of being a Watcher – more a symptom of having been raised in cities just like this one.

The ledge of the roof was wide and low, offering a perfect vantage point. I settled on it with my legs crossed and took the sword out of the bag. I put it across my legs for easy access. A Spartan breeze played with my hair, mingling the sweat and soot emanating from my body with the

smells of the city. For the first time since the fire, I let the magnitude of what had happened settle into my brain.

Were Jackson and Margaret really gone? Had I done nothing while they had been murdered?

Had I been the cause of their murder? Why had they gone back to the hotel if they were

supposed to be following us? If they weren’t the pile of ashes, who was? What good could we honestly do without the other’s help? Why the fire? Who had set it? Was it meant for me? Was it Marcus? If not, did I have someone else to worry about? Was there an answer?

A single tear of worry and regret tracked down my dirty face; a single tear to mark the

uncertainty I knew we faced, and the sad fear that two people I cared about had been burned from this world. I wiped away the tear in irritation, not wanting to succumb to emotional

hysterics when I had survival to think about, and focused on the future. But somewhere in the city a trumpet player’s sad song reached toward the heaven adding music to my dark emotions. It was as if the player had somehow seen my sadness and decided to share it to the world. The music continued for a long time, reminding me of the sadness I faced. It was hard to ignore.

I sat unmoving on my ledge for hours. The lights danced below as cars moved down the streets and lights turned on and off in the buildings. The water from the river flickered with those lights in a sporadic tempo. The moon arched over the horizon in a slow orbit across my world, marking the time. In deep thoughts about what to do next, and terror based in uncertainty, night slipped quietly back into day.

Alex woke up at dawn. As the light touched her blonde hair in gentle highlights, she blinked awake with a snort. She was disoriented for a minute, not understanding what she was doing outside on a smelly couch, but she caught up soon enough.

“You liar Mc-liar!” she scolded me. She sat up and rubbed at her neck. “You were supposed to wake me.”

“I didn’t get tired,” I told her.

“It’s not about if you got tired. It’s about saying one thing and doing another.”

“I’ll try and remember that,” I replied.

“You look like a ninja,” she told me seriously. She stood and tried to brush the dirt off her clothes, eyeing me with combined amusement and annoyance.

I stood up and jumped down off the ledge, my joints sore from sitting still for so long. With the sword in my hand I started pacing across the roof. “You know how you love plans?”

“Of course I know how I love plans. I live with me,” she replied.

“Well, I took the night to come up with a plan. Wanna hear?”

“Boy, do I!” she said.

“First, we go back to the end of town we were supposed to go yesterday, and we track down that Watcher through talking to the locals. Surely someone has seen something. Then, instead of killing him, we follow him and find out why he’s here and if he set the fire.

“If he did set the fire?”

I didn’t answer, but my hand gripped the sword more tightly. My hand knew what I would do

more than my brain did. “The Watcher might also know where the nest is, which could lead us to Daniel,” I said.

“So your big plan is to find information?”

“It’s all we’ve got,” I said.

“But how do we follow one home…especially the one that tracked Jackson? How do we even

know what this guy looks like?”

“That’s why we are going to blend in with the street population. If those people can’t tell us something strange is happening, and where that strangeness is coming from, they probably

haven’t lived on the streets long.”

“But how are we going to fit into the culture without someone noticing?” she asked. “I’ve never lived on the streets…”

“Kids run away all the time. New faces aren’t that unfamiliar, unfortunately,” I said.

“So…really, you have a plan to keep to the plan we already made,” she said thoughtfully.

I twirled the sword absently. “Yes. But now we do it our way. We find information the best way we know how: through asking people, not tracking them on some laptop.”