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)
Baptiste stood at the alley’s entrance, far enough away that he could not have seen the moment of weakness. “Same pattern? Looked like it to me, but you’re the expert.”
“Same pattern.” Bastien’s voice emerged level, which was a minor triumph. “Same blade, same drainage, same sigils. He knew the killer. They all knew the killer.”
“Thierry kept to himself. Didn’t have enemies.”
“None that we knew of.” A closer examination of the sigils, comparing them to memory of the previous scenes. Similar but not identical. The same foundational shapes, the same underlying grammar, but with variations suggesting progression rather than repetition. The killer was saying something new with each body. Building a sentence word by word. “What bloodline did he descend from?”
Baptiste’s hesitation told Bastien the answer before he spoke it. “Chardon. Minor branch, distant connection, but the lineage was there.”
Three victims. Three bloodlines: Beaumont, Beaumont again through Solange’s maternal line, and now Chardon. The houses that had shaped vampire politics in New Orleans for two centuries, reduced to a taxonomy of the dead.
“Someone is working through the old families,” Bastien said. “Not the powerful ones. The forgotten ones. The vampires who carry bloodline significance without bloodline protection. But they’re targeting nonpolitical members of the family.”
“Why?”
A single throb from the mark, low and heavy. Bastien pulled his sleeve down and ignored it. “I don’t know yet. But the killer does. Every victim has been chosen with care. Every scene arranged with purpose. This isn’t chaos, Baptiste.”
Standing, his forearm still warm with the strange internal pressure, Bastien began the work of examining what the dead man could tell him.
The examination took two hours.
Photographs of the sigils from multiple angles. Measurements of the spacing between them. Notes on the slight variations in depth that suggested hesitation or emphasis. Someone had carved the blood channels within the past week—the weathering of the concrete confirmed it—which meant the killer had prepared this site in advance. Thierry Arceneaux’s death had been chosen before Thierry Arceneaux knew it himself.
The body offered fewer answers. The throat wound matched the others exactly: a single blade, drawn from left to right, severing everything that mattered with surgical certainty. The heart bore the same thin puncture, metal rather than wood, delivered at precise timing. Blood drained completely, collected in the channels, allowed to pool in the sigil patterns until the work was done.
The question of why kept returning. Why intact bodies? Why the careful arrangement? Why bloodline significance rather than political power?
The vampires who had died were not decision-makers. No seats in the court, no controlled territory, no commanded loyalty beyond the personal. Armand Fontenot had run a jazz club. Solange Vidal had managed a rare book shop. Thierry Arceneaux had restored furniture. These were the quiet dead, vampires who had found ways to exist without dominating, who had chosen craft over conquest.
And someone was killing them with the patience of a surgeon and the focus of a priest.
His forearm throbbed as the documentation finished.
No second flare since the initial response, but the presence remained—a low hum of awareness that intruded on every thought. Twice now, a reaction at murder sites. Coincidence remained possible. Residual magic from the scenes interacting with residual magic already in his system. A reasonable hypothesis. One he would test by monitoring whether the mark responded to other stimuli, or only to these killings.
Afternoon shadows lengthened across the city as he returned to the Quarter. The humidity had not broken. It never broke in August, not really; it only shifted, moving from unbearable to merely oppressive and back again. His shirt clung to his shoulders. Beneath his sleeve, the darkened skin kept its own temperature — nothing to do with the weather, everything to do with whatever had taken residence in his arm.
He sat in his car on Chartres for a long moment, watching foot traffic pass. Tourists moved in clusters, cameras raised against the late light. Between them, locals navigated the crowded streets, their faces set against the heat, their destinations fixed in minds that knew every stop they wanted to make.
Delphine was somewhere in the city right now. At the Archive, most likely, surrounded by documents that held the past in their pages. Their moment two nights ago felt simultaneously recent and remote—the restaurant, the jazz club, her hand finding his jacket lapels and pulling him flush to her body. The interrupted warmth of something they had been building toward for the better part of centuries…at least for him. For her, almost a year.
He owed her a conversation. Had owed her one since their last investigation together, since the flooded chamber and the promise of I’ll tell you everything. He had told her some things. Not the specifics of what he still carried—that she had been Charlotte, that she had been Delia, that he had loved her across each of those lifetimes in three entirely different bodies and still somehow kept losing her.