Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
That last part was the one he couldn’t find language for.
His forearm throbbed, and Bastien confronted a separate question.
Something unknown sat in his flesh. Something that resisted cleansing, that had appeared without explanation or invitation. No knowledge yet of what it was, what it did, whether proximity to him might transfer the contamination to others. Whether Delphine was safe.
The responsible choice was distance. Cancel their next dinner. Create space. Protect her from whatever he carried until he understood it better. Charlotte and Delia had both died because of their connection to him—not through violence he’d committed, but through the pull of his existence drawing them into orbits that ended in destruction. After Delia, a vow.
And then Delphine had looked up from her research desk, and he had known her. Not as Charlotte, not as Delia, but as herself—the woman she had become in this lifetime, shaped by choices and circumstances that belonged only to her. He had been falling before he understood he was falling. By the time he saw the danger, retreat was already impossible.
He continued to sit in his car and asked himself whether to step back from the one bright thing in his life because of a mark he did not understand.
The mark offered no guidance. Only that throb, unhurried and certain.
Evidence he considered: the mark had appeared after his first exposure to the crime scenes, but it had not grown. Nothing in its behavior suggested contagion or transfer. Not enough to be certain of anything. Not enough to know whether distance was necessary or merely cautious.
But also not enough to justify abandoning something that mattered.
No stepping back. Not yet. They’d come too far, and Delphine would fight him on it anyway. He would monitor the condition, continue the cleansing attempts, consult Maman if the standard approaches kept failing.
If it worsened—if it showed any sign of danger to Delphine—he would create the distance that responsibility demanded. But until then he would revel in the warmth of her presence, the sound of her laughter, the tentative joy of a connection he had not believed he would feel again.
He stood at his office window later, watching the Quarter settle into the late night.
Two problems now, running parallel. The murders — three vampires dead, three unique bloodlines, a pattern that pointed toward something larger. Then whatever occupied his forearm — unexplained, resistant to cleansing, reactive to the murder sites in ways he had noted but not yet decoded.
Bastien pushed his sleeve back and pressed two fingers against the darkened skin, feeling the pulse beneath. No change in response to his touch. Just that constant presence, an awareness that had settled into him unbidden.
It was not random. Whether it connected to the killings or merely coincided with them remained to be seen.
The Quarter’s lights glittered below his window, a constellation of bars and restaurants and lives being lived without knowledge of what moved beneath the surface. Somewhere out there, Delphine was probably still at her desk. Somewhere out there, the killer was preparing their next work.
Both required patience. Both required him at his most clear-headed, most disciplined, most capable of separating what he felt from what he knew.
FOUR
The photographs spread across Bastien’s desk told a story he could not yet read.
He had pinned the crime scene images to the corkboard above his desk in chronological order: Armand Fontenot on the left, Solange Vidal in the center, Thierry Arceneaux on the right. Beneath each photograph, he had written the victim’s name, age at turning, years undead, and bloodline affiliation. The information formed columns, vertical slashes of data that should have revealed a pattern.
Past midnight, and the humidity had not relented. His shirt clung to his shoulders. The thing in his arm kept its own rhythm, persistent, indifferent to the August air pressing through the windows.
Bastien stood back and studied what he had assembled.
The sigils first. He had photographed each carving from multiple angles, measured the spacing between them, noted the depth of each cut. Comparing them side by side, the consistency emerged with unsettling clarity. Seven sigils on each victim, always in the same sequence: binding marks on the outer forearms, containment glyphs at the inner wrists, anchoring signs along the biceps. The Marchande-Levesque symbol carved last, always over the heart. The killer worked from the same template each time, executing with a focus that suggested either obsessive practice or direct instruction.
Ritual, not improvisation. The kind that required study and repetition before it could be performed under the pressure of taking a life. So, a witch maybe? But why vampires? And why these particular bloodlines?
The wounds matched as well. Throat cuts drawn left to right, severing everything that mattered with a single stroke. Heart punctures delivered at the same angle, the same depth, damaging without destroying. Blood drained through channels carved into the ground beneath each victim—channels prepared in advance, days or weeks before the killing. The killer had visited each location beforehand, had knelt in the dark and cut grooves into stone and concrete, had planned each death with the patience of an architect drafting blueprints.