Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
More dangerous than falling in love with an angel and tethering their souls together. Bastien’s love for Charlotte, for Delia, and even for Delphine had not faded a day, but protecting her in each life continued to become more complicated by the day.
Part of him wished Delphine did remember him. Their love. His willingness to do anything for them to find each other, to be together. He missed being able to talk openly with Charlotte about such things. He missed loving Delia freely and openly.
The past had now been weaponized against him. His memories turned into ammunition.
Bastien reached the corner where Chartres met Dauphine, pausing beneath a streetlight. He looked back one final time at the street he’d just walked.
The figure was gone.
Not faded gradually or moved to new position. Simply absent from every mirror and window.
He stood there for several seconds. October air tasted of river and humidity and magnolia blossoms. The Quarter moved around him with its usual evening energy, humans and other beings conducting business. Music drifted from open doorways and windows. Voices rose in conversation or argument or laughter.
Normal sounds. Ordinary activity. Reality continuing while underneath, mirror networks pulsed with surveillance that rendered every surface suspect.
Bastien turned away from Rue Chartres and walked toward his apartment, steps measured and controlled. Gideon wasn’t just watching. He was curating experience, constructing encounters, and manipulating memory with precision demonstrating his intimate knowledge of exactly which wounds remained unhealed despite a century of careful maintenance.
The violin’s melody followed him through the dark streets, notes arranging themselves in his thoughts with clarity that memory alone couldn’t sustain. Delia’s waltz, broadcast through mirrors that remembered everything they’d ever witnessed.
The locket had become warm through his shirt. Charlotte’s magic responding to threats that targeted her soul across the boundaries death should have made absolute. Protection and prison both.
He wouldn’t fail again. Not Delia. Not Charlotte. And certainly not Delphine. They’d already been through too much. He’d do whatever necessary to protect her in this life.
Even if her survival required walking directly into traps that Gideon constructed with his own grief as their foundation.
The streetlight cast his shadow long across the sidewalk. But the shadow moved wrong, angle shifted just enough to suggest the sun stood somewhere other than its actual position overhead.
Bastien didn’t look back at the distortion. Didn’t acknowledge the way his image in a passing car window remained frozen for half a second while his physical form continued forward.
He kept walking, steps steady and controlled as he neared his apartment on Dauphine.
Gideon had mapped these routes before the first breadcrumb appeared at Café Du Monde.
Chapter
Six
Late into the evening after he’d documented everything he could about the iron gate, the memory forced upon him, and the reflection magic he’d experienced, Bastien returned to Rue Chartres with chalk, salt, and the silk-wrapped shard pressed against his ribs. The Quarter had emptied to its post-midnight rhythm—stragglers heading home, someone playing trumpet three streets over, the usual texture of a city that never quite went silent.
The courtyard looked exactly as he’d left it six hours ago. Wrought iron gate, magnolia trees in the shadows beyond, and the door beneath the gallery where ward marks pulsed with energy that reached him from ten feet away.
Charlotte’s work. He’d recognize her technique anywhere—the particular combination of silver and salt, the way she layered protection and concealment so thoroughly that most practitioners would walk past without noticing anything unusual. Whoever had placed this door here either had access to her research or had studied her methods long enough to recreate them with precision.
He set his bag down and withdrew the chalk. The shard’s hum increased as he approached the threshold, frequency rising to match whatever resonance the wards carried. Not painful. Just present, the way tuning forks vibrated in sympathy when struck at the right pitch.
The first circle went down clean. White powder adhering to damp brick, connecting beginning to end without gaps. Salt followed, poured along the outer edge to create containment within protection. Standard procedure for approaching an unknown threshold. Keep whatever emerged on the other side filtered through layers of deliberate intention.
Bastien drew the unsealing sigil in the air. Silver dust fell from his fingertips—Charlotte’s method again, particles that should have dispersed but instead held their pattern until the working was complete. He spoke three words in a language that rumbled in his throat, sounds that belonged to realms where different rules applied.
The wards responded immediately.
Silver flared white-hot, then dimmed. Salt crystals rearranged themselves into configurations that signaled opening rather than sealing.
He turned the old, brass handle worn smooth by use and the door swung inward without sound. Stone stairs descended into darkness, and cold air drifted up—moisture, minerals, the particular scent of river water filtered through limestone. New Orleans had deep construction, foundations that went down farther than modern basements ever reached and he was going to follow the breadcrumbs wherever they took him.