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)
Chartres Street held its ordinary shape. A delivery truck sat dark at the far curb. The courtyard jasmine persisted. The city gave no sign that the ground beneath its surface had shifted.
The curse was no longer a passenger. It had become a conversation, and whatever occupied the other end had just announced its presence.
He climbed the stairs to his apartment. Locked the door. Sat at his desk with the case file open and his hands flat on the surface. The mark vibrated through the wood beneath his palms.
The figure at the end of the street had known where he stood because the curse had told it. It had arrived at the precise moment when Bastien’s attention had fixed on taillights turning onto Ursulines rather than on the city closing around him.
He looked at the photographs on the corkboard. Five faces looked back.
The pull pulsed its new rhythm, and Bastien understood that what he was chasing and what was hunting him now occupied the same ground. The kiss had not caused the convergence, but it had marked the moment when his attention split, and whatever watched from the far end of Chartres had used the opening.
He sat at the center. And the center was contracting.
SEVENTEEN
The safehouse on Esplanade sat above a shuttered print shop whose owner had left New Orleans after the last hurricane and never come back. Baptiste kept the lease current through arrangements Bastien had never asked to understand. The second floor held two rooms, a bathroom with plumbing that protested its own existence, and a kitchen whose only reliable appliance was the coffeemaker.
Bastien had brought Delphine here after the figure on Chartres Street. He would not take her back to his apartment. The apartment sat inside the curse’s radius of reception now, the beacon broadcasting from its walls with an insistence that had changed in quality since the kiss. Whatever had stood at the far end of the block had received that broadcast and answered it, and Bastien would not sleep there again until he understood the architecture of the signal he carried.
The safehouse smelled of old ink and turpentine from the print shop below. A live oak pressed its branches against the windows and filtered the streetlight into shifting patterns across the floor. September heat had thickened overnight, and the single box fan in the window moved air without cooling it.
Delphine sat at the kitchen table with her notebook open and her pen uncapped. She had not written anything in twenty minutes. The page held the same half-sentence she had started when they arrived—pattern deviation in the fourth victim’s sigil placement—and the ink had dried while her attention rested elsewhere.
On him. She studied him with that same patient, relentless focus she turned on documents that resisted surrendering their information.
Bastien stood with his back to the room and his hands braced on the sill of the window. The live oak threw moving shadows across his forearms. Beyond the tree, Esplanade Avenue held its late-night traffic: a couple walking arm in arm beneath the canopy, a delivery truck idling outside the corner market, a bass line vibrating from a house party three blocks toward the river.
What he carried had dropped to a frequency he had not experienced before the kiss. The pulse had become a sustained tone, continuous, humming through his body and pushing outward against his skin. The figure on Chartres had catalyzed the shift, and it had not reversed in the hours since.
He had told Delphine nothing about the figure. He had told her the apartment was compromised, which was true. He had told her the safehouse was secure, which was as close to true as any location could be when the thing hunting him lived inside his body.
“You haven’t moved in eleven minutes,” Delphine said.
He did not turn from the window. “Counting?”
“Observing.” Her pen tapped once against the notebook. “You’ve been standing there with your weight on your left foot and your right hand pressed to your left arm. You shifted your hand twice. Each time, your shoulders locked, and your breathing stopped for three to four seconds before resuming.”
His neck stiffened. She had tracked all of it.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been saying that since Chartres Street. Your definition of fine has expanded to include leaving your apartment at two in the morning and bringing me to a building that smells like a nineteenth-century newspaper office.” She closed the notebook. The sound landed between them. “A curse reaction happened after I drove away tonight. Tell me what it did.”
He went still. She had placed the kiss and the crisis in the same sentence without hesitation. Delphine did not retreat from what had happened. She incorporated it and moved forward.
“The curse reacted,” he said. “Stronger than before.”
“To the kiss?”
“To my attention shifting. The mark is a beacon. When my focus narrows, the signal changes. Tonight it changed enough to draw a response.”