New Orleans hit different from Iceland.
Where Iceland had been wide and cold and stripped down to its essential self, New Orleans came at you from every direction at once. The heat was the first thing, thick and present even in winter, wrapping around you the moment you stepped outside like the city was making sure you knew where you were. Then the sound, music bleeding out of doorways and drifting down streets, layered and alive, the kind of sound that didn't stop for night or weather or anything else. Then the color, buildings painted in shades that had no business being that saturated, ironwork on every balcony catching the light, streets that turned into other streets without warning.
Samantha stepped out of the transport and looked up at the sky above the French Quarter and blinked slowly like she was recalibrating.
"It's loud," she said.
"It's wonderful," Courtney said beside her, turning in a slow circle with her face tilted up.
"Those things can both be true," Niall said, echoing Courtney's words from Iceland with a satisfied smile.
Courtney looked at him.
"You've been waiting to say that," she said.
"Since Iceland," he confirmed.
They had two rooms at a small guesthouse three streets back from the main drag, narrow and tall with creaking floors and ceiling fans turning slowly overhead and windows that looked out onto a courtyard full of overgrown jasmine. It was the kind of place that had been there long enough to have opinions about things.
Thomas had chosen it because it was quiet and unobtrusive and the owner, a small round woman named Celeste who wore her gray hair pinned up and asked no questions, had looked at the group of them with the particular expression of a person who had seen stranger things than this and simply handed over the keys.
They settled in quickly. Weapons under beds, bags against walls, the practiced ease of a group that had learned to make any room theirs in under ten minutes.
Then they got to work.
Finding Jasper Vale was not going to be the same as finding Samantha. Samantha had been waiting on a rock above the sea with her father already prepared and the signal clear and close. Jasper was in a city of four hundred thousand people, a city that was specifically and deliberately full of things that could mask and muddy a signal, old magic and old earth and old grief soaked into every stone and every street going back three hundred years.
"This city is loud in ways that have nothing to do with the music," Katherine said on the first evening, sitting on the edge of the bed with her eyes closed, trying to reach for the signal and finding instead a wash of layered presences that blurred everything together. She opened her eyes. "I can feel him but I can't locate him. It's like trying to hear one specific instrument in an orchestra from outside the building."
"So we do it the other way," Dean said from the chair by the window. "We find Grace Dove."
"Vale," Carlyle corrected.
"Grace Vale," Dean said. "We find her first. She's been here long enough to have a life, a fixed point. That's easier to locate than a kid who moves around."
Thomas nodded. "Same method as Iceland. Careful questions in the right places."
"Different kinds of places here though," Engel said from his position leaning against the wall. He had been quiet since they arrived, taking in the city with the attentive stillness of a man cataloguing information. "New Orleans is a city with layers. The surface and the underneath. Grace will be in the underneath."
"The underneath," Kristen said. "Meaning."
"Meaning the part of the city that knows what it is," Engel said. "The parts that have always known things move through here that most people can't see. People who live in those parts don't advertise themselves but they know each other." He looked at Thomas. "You need someone who speaks that language."
"KaSandra gave me a name before we left," Thomas said, pulling out his phone. "Someone here who might point us in the right direction."
"Who?" Tierney asked.
Thomas looked at his phone. "Someone called Mama Rue."
The name landed in the room and Engel looked up sharply from the wall and something moved across his face that was close to respect and close to caution and settled somewhere between them.
"You know her?" Dean asked him.
"Of her," Engel said. "Most people who pay attention know of her." A pause. "She is very old and very honest and she does not help people she doesn't want to help. If KaSandra sent you to her it means KaSandra believes you are worth her time." He looked at Thomas. "Don't waste it."
The next morning Thomas and Dean went out early while the others stayed at the guesthouse, and Samantha sat in the courtyard among the overgrown jasmine and tipped her head back and let the southern air move over her with an expression that was curious and slightly overwhelmed and quietly delighted all at once, as if the warmth itself was a new language she was starting to learn.
Katherine sat across from her with a cup of coffee and watched the city come awake around the walls of the courtyard, the sounds of it filtering over the old brick.
"Different from home," Katherine said.
"Very," Samantha said. She was quiet for a moment. "I don't think I've ever been anywhere that felt like it had this many stories in it."
"New Orleans has been through a lot," Katherine said.
"You can feel it," Samantha said. "In the ground. In the air." She paused. "I don't know how Jasper lives here."
"What do you mean?"
Samantha looked at her. "If I can feel what I feel here, someone who sees and hears the dead." She shook her head slightly. "This city must be so full for him."
Katherine hadn't thought about it that way. She turned it over now and felt something shift in her understanding of what they were walking into. A boy with the ability to see and communicate with ghosts, living in one of the most haunted cities in the country, in streets soaked three centuries deep in history and loss.
"That's why his mother chose here," Engel said from the doorway behind them, a cup of tea in his hand, quiet enough that neither of them had heard him come out. "I've been thinking about it since we landed." He stepped into the courtyard and sat down. "Grace didn't choose New Orleans despite what Jasper can do. She chose it because of it."
Katherine looked at him. "Because here it's normal."
"Because here," Engel said, "a boy who talks to things other people can't see is not strange. He is simply part of what this city already is." He looked at his tea. "She gave him the only place in the world where his particular way of being might not make him feel like an outsider."
The courtyard was quiet except for the jasmine moving in a slight warm breeze and the distant texture of the city beyond the walls.
Katherine thought about a woman changing her name and bringing her son to the most haunted city in America so he could feel like he belonged somewhere.
She thought about what that kind of love looked like from the outside, quiet and specific and shaped entirely around the needs of someone else.
She thought about what it was going to cost Grace Vale when they knocked on her door.
Thomas and Dean came back at noon.
Dean came through the courtyard gate first and looked at Katherine and gave a single nod that meant they had found what they were looking for.
Thomas came in behind him and sat down at the courtyard table and looked at the group gathered there.
"Mama Rue knows Grace," he said. "She knows Jasper too." A pause. "And she told us something."
"What?" Tierney asked.
Thomas looked at Katherine.
"She said Dean needs to be the one to approach Grace first," he said. "Alone."
Everyone looked at Dean.
Dean was quiet for a moment, his expression doing something that Katherine couldn't fully read.
"Did she say why?" Tierney asked.
Thomas looked at his phone where he had written it down, and read it exactly as Mama Rue had said it.
"Because Grace Dove will not open her door to a stranger," he read. "But she will open it to an old friend who finally came home."
The courtyard went still.
Dean stood very quietly with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the overgrown jasmine on the wall and didn't say anything for a long moment.
Then he said, "Grace and I grew up together."
Nobody spoke.
"I haven't seen her since before Jasper was born," Dean said. "Since before everything." He looked at Tierney. "I didn't know she was here. I didn't know she had a son." He paused. "I didn't know she was one of them."
Tierney looked at him steadily. "But you know her."
"I know her," Dean said quietly.
He looked at the gate that led back out to the street and the city beyond it, and something in his face settled into the particular expression of a person about to walk back into a part of their life they had believed was gone.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?" Katherine asked.
He looked at her.
"I'll go," he said simply. "I'll go find Grace."