Page 32 of The Seeker
“I have an idea I want to check out. For… my research.” Rhys turned around and started walking back toward Ursuline Avenue. “I’ll see you. Call me if you need anything.”
“Later.”
Rhys didn’t turn to look as Zep continued down Bourbon, following the tourist traffic. He walked the opposite way, heading toward the Esplanade and the Faubourg Marigny. He was almost sure it was where Meera lived.
He ignored the annoying voice in his mind asking him why he needed to know where she lived.
Naked chess.
Not naked chess. This wasn’t about his libido. It wasn’t. Meera was living anonymously in a city that could be dangerous. She needed his protection.
Rhys crossed the Esplanade and turned right on Kerlerec Street before he cut across to Frenchmen. The music and the crowd wasn’t as loud as Bourbon Street, but the street was filled with tourists. It was so packed he could hardly see anything.
The fourth time he was shoved off the sidewalk by a group of revelers, he nearly gave up. What had he been thinking? The city was small, but not that small. And he didn’t know Meera that well. Just because he was drawn to this neighborhood didn’t mean she was. He’d run into her because she was looking for him.
Rhys leaned against the wall near the Three Muses and listened to the singer who’d sung to him and Meera earlier in the week. He watched the crowds flow around him, his senses tuned to detect anything angelic.
Nothing.
Then he remembered the way Meera had concealed herself in shadow and wondered if she was watching him in that moment. He could feel a faint prickle on his neck. Was it his own imagination or something else?
Where are you, Meera Bai?
He wandered over to the art market and walked through stalls selling everything from wire sculptures to earrings made of spoons. There were delicately painted teacups, screen-printed T-shirts, and watercolors of the city.
She likes this. She likes life and color and variety. She likes the chaos and humanity.
Her life had probably been ordered beyond what he could imagine. While his own schooling had been more rigorous than most young scribes, Rhys had also been a boy who grew up with a class of other small troublemakers around him. He’d acted out and been punished harshly, but he’d acted out. He’d had his rebellion.
This place is hers.
The thought made Rhys smile. He left the art market and wandered back up Frenchmen Street, heading toward the sound of trumpet and clarinet. A jazz band was playing on the corner, and tourists crowded around them, shouting encouragement and tossing coins and dollars in the bucket they passed.
A red flash from the corner of his eye made him turn, but it was a human woman in a bright red dress. She looked nothing like Meera, but she was short and laughing on the arm of a man who led her away from the crowd.
Just a man?
Rhys followed them for a block until they turned into a club and he was sure it was nothing more than a human couple out for a date.
He was paranoid, seeing threats where none existed. He’d been in unfamiliar territory for too long without a mission he could sink his teeth into. He had no direction, no goal, no—
Sandalwood in the air.
His heart leapt at the scent of Grigori drifting from the shadows. Rhys turned and followed the trail down an alley and toward a residential area.
The Grigori was walking alone, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t appear to be hunting, but he did look like he was searching for something. He was a handsome man with light brown skin and dark curly hair that reminded Rhys of the Grigori in Istanbul. He was of medium height and build. Like all Grigori, humans would have found him attractive.
The Grigori had been on Frenchmen; why hadn’t he taken a human?
A faint hope sprang up in Rhys’s chest that this was a free Grigori. Perhaps this man was the reason New Orleans was mostly free of attacks. Maybe there were free Grigori in the city who had claimed the space for their brothers and had forced the Fallen sons to run.
The strange Grigori stopped in the middle of the road, shook his head, then turned a different direction. Walked down another alley, then back again.
What was going on?
Rhys followed the Grigori north and east of Frenchmen, deeper into the Marigny. The man stopped and closed his eyes.
A homeless man on the corner shouted at him. “Hey buddy, you got a buck?”
