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)
The revenant made a sound then. Not a voice—something that existed below the range of sound, felt in the sternum rather than heard. It recoiled, the borrowed physical coherence fragmenting outward, and the cold snapped back like a door slamming.
Then it was gone. The gap between buildings held only shadow.
Bastien straightened his jacket. The couple had already decided they’d imagined the thunderclap and were walking again. The delivery cyclist had turned the corner. Normal street, normal night, no evidence that anything had occurred beyond a slight scorch mark on the brick where the revenant’s form had impacted and a temperature that was already returning to August’s oppressive norm.
He stood on the sidewalk and looked at his left forearm through his sleeve. The mark pulsed steadily, its warmth already fading back to its baseline. Whatever the discharge had cost it, the cost appeared minimal.
So, he thought.
That’s what you can do.
He filed the information — revenant, drawn from distance by what he carried, stronger than a street-level entity had any right to be, vulnerable to direct celestial discharge — and continued home without breaking stride.
Midnight approached when he reached his office. The watchers had multiplied again—fourteen figures positioned around his building, their attention pressing against his awareness with the constancy of something that had taken up permanent position.
He climbed the stairs and moved directly to his desk without turning on the lights. Quarter light sufficed. He pulled Eulalie’s list from his pocket and set it beside the calendar he had been working through since returning from Preservation Hall.
Maman had said the curse required physical contact. Weeks before the first murder. Someone had moved through his life in that period, close enough to touch, forgettable enough to leave no trace.
He opened the calendar to July and worked backward.
The seventh: a meeting with a vampire representative about territorial disputes. No unusual contact.
The twelfth: dinner with Delphine on Royal Street. His hand stilled on the page at that one. They had been in the careful middle stage of whatever they were becoming—not the beginning, months of slow courtship already behind them, but navigating new territory together. He remembered the particular quality of that evening—her attention across the table, the way she had leaned toward him when she was making a point she considered important, the long walk home afterward neither of them had wanted to end. He had been entirely present with her. Entirely distracted from everything else.
Which meant entirely vulnerable to anyone watching.
The thought arrived with the cold clarity of something he had been avoiding. Whoever had placed this curse had observed him. Had watched him move through the city, had documented his patterns, had chosen their moment carefully. They had watched him with Delphine, had noted the particular quality of his attention around her—how it narrowed his focus, how it left his perimeter less monitored than it should have been.
Had perhaps identified her as leverage for when other methods failed.
His hands flattened against the desk.
The eighteenth: Maman’s shop, restocking components. Crowded afternoon, tourists in the public areas. Anyone could have brushed against him in the narrow aisles.
The twenty-third: a jazz funeral for a practitioner who had died of old age and satisfaction. Half the magical community had attended. Bodies pressed close in the second line, strangers and acquaintances alike moving to the brass band’s direction.
He worked through the remaining days. Each one offered possibilities. None offered certainty.
Someone had moved through his life in those weeks, close enough to touch, invisible enough to forget. They had watched him work and dine and pay respects to the dead. Had learned the particular architecture of his routine. Had noted, the woman who occupied a space in his attention that nothing had occupied in over a century.
The violation of it locked his jaw, tightened his shoulders into something just short of a physical response.
He reached for his phone before he understood he was doing it. The impulse to call her—to hear her voice and confirm she was fine and ordinary and safe in her apartment on Ursulines Street—was strong enough to be embarrassing. He set the phone back down.
She was fine. She was asleep, probably, or still at her desk with the archive materials she’d mentioned. The beacon didn’t make her a target tonight. He would deal with the question of her safety in the morning, with a clear head, with a plan rather than an instinct.
But he left the phone face-up on the desk where he could see it, which was its own kind of admission.
The beacon warmed beneath his sleeve. The murders had a killer. The curse had a caster. And somewhere in the city, things had begun arriving that had no reason to be here—drawn by the signal his forearm broadcast to anything old enough to understand what it meant.
Bastien picked up Eulalie’s list and began at the top.