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)
Those had been impacts. Collisions between external magic and the celestial energy his body still carried. They arrived and peaked and passed, and he rose from each one and continued.
This was consumption. The thing in his arm drew from him now, pulling energy from the residual light he had carried since the fall, converting what remained of his celestial origin into fuel for the cage’s architecture. It no longer broadcast his position. It broadcast his substance.
Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
The railing pressed against his shoulder, and the load of holding himself upright became more than intention could carry. The bones of his hand whitened where they gripped the banister. Sweat ran the channel of his spine, and the September heat had nothing to do with it.
The pressure behind his eyes built toward a register the previous spikes had not approached. Maman had described the possibilities—punishment or preparation. The curse answered the question now, and the answer felt terminal.
He tried to stand. His legs took his weight for two seconds and surrendered. His shoulder hit the wall. Plaster dust sifted from the impact point, and he slid to a position halfway between sitting and kneeling that conceded the fight without ending it.
The live oak scratched the window at the top of the stairs. A trumpet played on the avenue, its melody reaching him in fragments the curse’s interference chopped and rearranged.
His hand stayed on the mark.
Get up.
His body did not comply.
Get up.
The command found no purchase. Two centuries of forcing this body through conditions that should have ended it, of standing when the world offered every reason to stay down—and the curse had found the depth below which his will could not reach.
“Bastien.”
The voice arrived from above—the second-floor landing, the kitchen he had walked through twenty minutes ago with a glass of water in his hand and the beacon humming at its baseline frequency. The collapse from baseline to annihilation had taken twenty minutes.
Footsteps on the treads, quick and controlled. Her feet found the steps that did not creak, a path she had memorized across weeks of ascending and descending this staircase beside him, behind him, in the dark when neither of them spoke.
Delphine reached him. Her knees hit the stair one step above his position, and her hands found his shoulders.
“Look at me.”
He tried. Her face occupied the same fractured space as the banister and the walls, overlapping, refusing to consolidate. Her jaw tripled. The same focused expression stacked at three angles. Her eyes—he could not hold them at one fixed point.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” The word scraped his throat.
Her right hand moved from his shoulder to his face. Her palm found his jaw, and her fingers pressed into the hinge where the bone met his ear. She had learned the pressure in the basement on Tchoupitoulas, refined it at the Seventh Ward crime scene, and deployed it now without hesitation.
“Tell me what’s happening.”
“The mark.” His hand remained pressed to his other arm. The heat traveling through him had intensified since she arrived, the beacon surging against her proximity. “It’s drawing. Not broadcasting. Drawing.”
Her left hand found his right wrist and circled it. She pulled his hand from the mark and held it between both of hers. The loss of pressure sent a spike through his center that whited his vision at the edges.
“Don’t.” He tried to return his hand to his forearm. She did not release him.
“Your palm is burned.” She turned his hand over. The skin had reddened, the mark’s heat having crossed from warmth to damage in the minutes he had held it there. “You’re hurting yourself.”
“The contact—”
“Is not helping.” She held his hand steady. “Your hand was feeding it. The thing in your arm was pulling through the contact.”
He blinked. The fractured vision wavered. Her three faces consolidated to two, held their overlap for a beat, and resolved to one. Delphine’s face, close enough that he could see the faint scar above her left eyebrow and the movement of her throat as she swallowed.
“Can you stand?”
“I tried.”
“Then we stay here.”
She positioned herself on the stair above him, settled his hand in her lap, and placed her other palm flat against the mark on his forearm.
The beacon reacted. Her palm against the mark’s output produced a frequency interference he had experienced before—her warmth disrupting the signal the way Maman’s wards disrupted it, but the wards blocked while Delphine absorbed. The distinction mattered.
He leaned into her hand. His body moved toward the source of relief without consulting the part of his mind that had spent months managing distance. Her palm became the fixed point around which the stairs reorganized. The steps found their single positions. The wall settled. The banister became a railing again.
The trumpet on the avenue had stopped. His breathing came ragged. Hers came controlled. Her exhales landed at his temple, and the scent of shea butter and black tea reached him through his own salt sweat and the burned mineral smell the mark produced.