Hell. Maybe if I could learn how to deal with the magic, keep myself from becoming a wraith and being locked into Devil’s Isle, I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.

I looked back at Liam. “What, exactly, do you have in mind?”

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

•   •   •

We walked deeper into the neighborhood in silence, down a narrow street of film-covered buildings, with residents huddled pitifully in doorways. There were more temporary shelters in this part of the Marigny, more Paras milling around with vacant expressions—or clear hatred in their eyes. A man with cragged gray skin leaned against a wall, small, dirty wings folded behind him, peeking through a dirty gray trench coat. His copper eyes, pupils slitted like a snake’s, watched us warily as we moved.

This was a prison, and we were the captors, which made us the enemy.

Liam stopped at a town house surrounded by a chain-link fence. There was a long two-story building on one side with a balcony that wrapped around the second floor, and on the other side a pile of rubble that no one had bothered to clean up.

Liam unlocked the gate, pushed it open, gestured for me to go inside. He looked around warily before closing and locking it again. I followed him into the building, which smelled like cinnamon and smoke—and up a narrow staircase to the second floor. The stairs dead-ended in a door, which he unlocked with a series of keys.

The door opened into a long, narrow apartment. There was a living room with a couch and bar at one end, a kitchenette and small table and chairs at the other in front of a large bank of windows. A doorway in the exposed brick wall probably led to a bedroom or bathroom.

There wasn’t much furniture, and it was an odd mix of styles. An old-fashioned cane-backed couch sat opposite the bar and brick wall, its cushion a deep emerald velvet. The wall behind it bore the remnants of a landscape mural, heavy on the greens and blues. The bar had a counter in front and cabinets behind of gleaming wood, topped by a wood-framed mirror. The bar and the bottles of rum and bourbon on the shelves had probably been salvaged from a watering hole that hadn’t survived the war.

I glanced back at Liam, found his eyes on me. “This is your place,” I realized.

“It is.”

But he was human. “You live in Devil’s Isle?”

“I lived in the Marigny before the war. Didn’t see any reason to stop.”

“And Containment didn’t object?” I still felt I needed to understand his connection to them.

“They like keeping an eye on me.”

I walked to the painted wall, crossed my arms as I looked over the scene someone had carefully painted onto plaster. It looked like an afternoon in Regency England. A dozen men and women in white lounged near a lake, baskets and blankets spread on the ground for a picnic, a large house in the background. The paint was faded, the house partially chipped away, some of the partygoers missing their painted limbs.

There was probably a metaphor for war in there somewhere.

“You live in the Quarter?” Liam asked.

“Above the store,” I said, glancing back at him. “I was seventeen when the war started. I didn’t know my mom. I lived with my dad, helped him run the store. Now he’s gone, and it’s mine.”

“I’m sorry.”

I nodded. “There are happier stories, sadder stories. War does that.”

“Yeah, it does.”

I turned around. “What about you? Your family? Are you close to them?”

“Some more than others,” was all he said.

I nodded, and in the silence that followed, asked, “Why are we here?”