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)
Blood had drained into the channels carved into the flagstones beneath her. The grooves cut through stone that had been laid when the cemetery was founded, through ground that had held the dead since before the vampires of New Orleans organized themselves into courts. The killer had prepared this space, had knelt here before tonight—perhaps weeks ago, perhaps months—and had carved these patterns into sacred ground while the dead watched from their marble homes.
Pain tore through his forearm.
Heat spread outward in a wave that reached his fingertips and the base of his skull. His knees buckled before he could brace himself. He caught himself against the nearest tomb, one hand pressed against cold marble, his marked arm burning bright beneath his sleeve.
Not reaction. Recognition. His body was responding to the fresh residue of ritual, to magic that still hung in the air between these old stones, to something the killer had left behind specifically for him to find.
The killer anticipated him.
The thought arrived through the pain. The fourth murder, at the location the pattern predicted, at a time when Bastien might arrive to witness the aftermath but not in time to prevent it. This was not failure of speed. This was coordination. The killer knew he was investigating, knew he would figure out the pattern, had planned for him to be standing among these tombs feeling his own flesh burn with magic placed there without his consent.
What lived in his forearm was not incidental. It was part of the design.
He forced himself to breathe through it. One breath, then another. The heat began to fade, dropping back to its baseline warmth. His vision cleared. His hands steadied.
Marguerite Deschamps lay before him, the fourth word in a sentence he could not yet read. House Lavigne. The bloodline that had helped destroy the Marchande-Levesque family. Now touched in turn by violence echoing what had come before.
Bastien began the documentation he knew would reveal nothing new. Same wounds. Same sigils. Same execution. But something additional caught his eye: a slight variation in the Marchande-Levesque symbol carved over her heart. An extra mark, small enough to miss, added to the lower right quadrant of the familiar design.
He photographed it, compared it to the images from the previous scenes. This mark had not appeared on Armand or Solange or Thierry. It was new.
Escalation.
Bastien called Baptiste to secure the scene, gave instructions for documentation, promised to return in daylight to examine what darkness concealed. But his mind had already moved past the immediate evidence. He was thinking about what lived in his flesh. About what it meant that the killer had anticipated his arrival. About the pattern connecting four deaths to a massacre that had happened before most of the victims were born.
The killer was writing a message in blood and wanted that message to be read.
And the thing burning in his forearm—the thing that responded to each scene, that recognized something in the arrangement of death and symbol and intention—suggested that he was meant to be the reader.
The drive back to the Quarter passed in silence. He parked on Chartres and sat with the engine running for a long moment. The Quarter had begun its slow transition toward dawn, that gray hour when the last bars closed and the first delivery trucks began their rounds. A man in a tuxedo walked past, his bow tie undone, his shoes clicking against the sidewalk. Nearby, a saxophone played its final notes of the night.
His phone buzzed.
Delphine. The name on the screen loosened something in his chest, some tension he hadn’t realized he was holding. He answered.
“Bastien?” Her voice came through rough with sleep. “It’s almost five. Are you all right?”
“No,” he said. The honesty emerged before he could consider its wisdom. “I’m not.”
Silence on the line. Then she asked, “Where are you?”
“In my car. On Chartres.”
“Come.” A pause. “Not for anything. Just come. I’ll make coffee.”
He closed his eyes. The mark on his forearm throbbed once, low and steady, then went still. “It’s almost dawn.”
“I know what time it is.” Her voice carried no accusation, no demand for explanation. Only presence, offered without condition. “Come here, Bastien. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
He went.
Delphine’s apartment occupied the second floor of a building near the Archive where she worked. She answered the door in a cotton robe the color of fresh cream, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders, her feet bare on the worn wooden floors. The light in her kitchen cast her in amber tones.
“Coffee’s brewing.” She stepped aside to let him enter. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.” But she smiled when she said it, that slight curve of her mouth that had been doing damage to his composure since the first time he’d seen it.
“Sit. Don’t talk. I’ll bring you something.” She pulled him into her apartment.