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)
He was part of the composition.
FIVE
His forearm woke him shortly after he’d fallen asleep.
Bastien lay still, cataloging the sensation. During the night the warmth had spread outward, a faint radiation that reached his elbow and the heel of his palm. Not pain. Not yet. But the pressure carried a density absent before Marguerite Deschamps’s body entered the sequence.
Four murders. Four bloodlines touched. Four responses from whatever lived in his flesh.
He pressed his hand against the darkened skin. A pulse answered his fingertips. The rhythm had shifted — slower now, more deliberate, as though the thing beneath had moved from observation to participation.
He showered and dressed in the gray light of early morning, choosing a long-sleeved shirt without considering why. The forearm stayed covered. He had not decided whether that was instinct or strategy. He let the question sit for now.
Four faces watched him from the corkboard, pinned in chronological order. Armand Fontenot, Solange Vidal, Thierry Arceneaux, Marguerite Deschamps. Their expressions frozen in that shared moment of recognition. They had all known their killer. They had all understood, in the final seconds, exactly what approached.
Bastien stood before the board and let himself feel the heaviness of his failure. He had predicted the fourth victim. He had identified the location. He had arrived too late because the killer anticipated his arrival, planned for him to stand in that cemetery alcove and feel his own flesh burn with magic placed there without his consent.
A throb from his forearm. Acknowledgment or mockery, he could not tell.
He needed answers he did not possess. Crime scenes had revealed everything about method and nothing about motive. Bloodline research had uncovered a pattern stretching back to 1847, to a tribunal that failed and a family destroyed, but the connection between historical grievance and present killing remained obscured. And the mark refused to yield its secrets despite three attempts at cleansing, at diagnosis, at any form of magical interrogation he could attempt alone.
One person in the city might see what he could not.
Rampart Street lay twelve minutes away, across the old boundary line that had once divided the French Quarter from the neighborhoods beyond. The street had marked territory for two centuries, a border between what belonged to the original colonists and what belonged to everyone else. Now it marked the edge of Maman’s domain.
Delivery trucks idled outside restaurants. Sanitation workers collected evidence of the previous night’s revelry. A saxophone player sat on a milk crate outside Café du Monde, running through scales that would become jazz by the time the tourists woke. The city performed its daily resurrection, and Bastien moved through it carrying death in four photographs and something worse burning beneath his sleeve.
His phone sat in his pocket. Delphine had texted at some point during the night—a photograph of a water-damaged ledger she’d found in the Archive basement, three question marks, and a sleeping emoji. He had not responded. The investigation had consumed every hour since he’d left her building at dawn, and now morning had arrived again without him finding words that bridged the gap between what she knew and what he was carrying. He would call her when he had something that wasn’t just speculation.
Later, he told himself. The word had a particular taste this week.
Maman Brigitte’s shop occupied a building whose façade had weathered two centuries without losing its character. Brick darkened by time and humidity, shutters painted green for protection that extended beyond superstition, the entrance set three steps below street level where the doorframe bore carvings that most visitors mistook for decoration. Iron hinges worn smooth by countless openings, metal polished by generations of hands seeking the wisdom contained within.
Wards inscribed into the wood pulsed faint blue as Bastien approached. Recognition. Passage allowed. He crossed the threshold and felt the temperature drop ten degrees, the air cleaner, the pressure shifting as though he had stepped into a space that existed adjacent to the ordinary city rather than within it.
The ceiling pressed low by exposed beams and walls were lined with shelves reaching into shadows the electric lights never quite dispelled. Carved bones hummed on the highest shelf, vibrating at frequencies below hearing but above instinct. Crystals in a glass case threw shadows that moved independent of the light source. Bottles crowded every horizontal surface, their contents shifting and settling without being touched, liquids that responded to proximity rather than physics.
Sage and smoke layered the air, mixed with old paper and dried herbs, and something underneath that smelled of ozone before a storm.
Maman emerged from the back room before he could announce himself. Her silver braids caught the dim light, woven through with threads of purple that had not been there last month. Her eyes found his face and read information that existed in dimensions beyond the visible.
“Sit, cher,” she said, her voice carrying the authority of someone who had been practicing this work since before the Civil War. “You look like you been carrying something that don’t belong to you.”