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)
They were three blocks from her building when the temperature dropped.
Bastien felt it before he could name it—the specific cold of a revenant’s approach, sharper than the previous two encounters, and not alone. He caught the signature of two distinct presences converging from opposite directions. Someone had sent these. Someone had identified his route, anticipated the walk home, positioned them deliberately.
“Stay close to me,” he said quietly.
Delphine heard the change in his voice and responded without question, stepping nearer. “What is it?”
“Keep walking. Don’t stop regardless of what you see.”
The first one came from a doorway to their right—smoke-and-density form, luminescent eye-spaces, cold flooding outward as it moved with the unnatural speed of something not bound by physical mass. Bastien stepped in front of it before it could reach Delphine, taking the impact on his left forearm, using the mark’s heat in a concentrated pulse.
The revenant fragmented, but the second was already moving from the left.
“Bastien—” Delphine’s voice, sharp and controlled. Not panic. Awareness.
“I see it.” He pivoted, putting himself between her and the second revenant, its cold reaching him a fraction of a second before its physical coherence did. Close work—closer than the previous encounters, closer than he would have chosen. His left arm burned with the effort of sustained discharge, celestial energy flooding outward against borrowed physical form.
The second revenant recoiled but didn’t fully fragment. Stronger than the others. It reformed at the edge of the alley, its luminescent eye-spaces fixed on Bastien with something that read as intelligence rather than hunger.
Directed, he thought again. Someone sent these.
He discharged a third time, deeper and more costly, feeling the drain of it in his bones. The revenant came apart with a sound like tearing silk, its cold dispersing in threads that vanished against the warm August air.
Silence.
Delphine stood two feet behind him, perfectly still. When he turned she was watching him with an expression he couldn’t fully read in the lamplight—not fear, but something more complicated than composure.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No.” She looked at his left arm. “Are you?”
“No.” His forearm ached with the deep bone-warmth of overexertion, but nothing was damaged. “We should keep moving.”
They walked the remaining three blocks without speaking. Not uncomfortable silence—the silence of two people who had just experienced the same thing and needed a moment before they could talk about it.
When they reached her building, Delphine turned to face him at the base of the stairs.
“Those were revenants,” she said.
He looked at her. “Yes.”
“They came from two directions. That wasn’t random.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
She absorbed this. The jasmine in the window box above them scented the warm night air, incongruously domestic against the shape of what had just happened. “Someone sent them.”
“Someone who knew our route.”
“Which means they’ve been watching long enough to know our patterns.” Her voice remained steady, the archivist’s precision finding its footing even here. She looked at his forearm. “That’s what the mark does. It broadcasts. And apparently it broadcasts enough for someone to track us well enough to set an ambush.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been dealing with this.”
“Yes.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.” He met her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
She was quiet for a moment. The street around them was ordinary August New Orleans—distant music, the smell of a restaurant two blocks over, a couple passing on the far sidewalk without glancing in their direction. Normal life, its surface unbroken.
“I need to tell you something,” he said. The words emerged before he could reconsider them.
She waited, her expression patient in the lamplight.
“Being connected to me—working with me, spending time with me—carries risks I can’t fully explain. The people watching us tonight are not the only dangers. There are forces at work in this city that see attachments as weaknesses to exploit.” He met her eyes, willing her to understand what he could not say directly. “If you wanted to step back from our arrangement, I would understand. I would not ask questions or demand explanations. I would simply accept your choice.”
“Is that what you want? For me to step back?”
The question cut through his distance.
“What I want has never been the relevant factor.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.” He exhaled, and something in his chest released with the truth. “It’s not. What I want is to keep seeing you. But what I want does not outweigh your safety. And I cannot guarantee your safety while this investigation continues.”
Delphine stepped closer, close enough that he could count the individual strands of hair the breeze had loosened from her ponytail.
“I’m a grown woman, Bastien. I have a career, an education, a life I built through my own choices. I don’t need you to guarantee my safety. I need you to be honest with me about what we’re facing and then trust me to make my own decisions.”
“Even if those decisions might get you hurt?”
“Even then.” She reached up and touched his face, her palm warm against his jaw. “I’d rather face real danger with full knowledge than live in comfortable ignorance while you carry everything alone.”