Prologue
Bastien watched Delphine’s taillights disappear down Chartres Street, her car swallowed by the October darkness and the oak canopy that turned the Garden District into a tunnel of shadow and shifting lamplight. She’d said “tomorrow” before closing the door—easy and certain, as though the word carried no weight at all. Tomorrow meant dinner at Jacques-Imo’s, meant conversation that didn’t require careful editing, meant the cautious optimism of two people who’d just survived something impossible together and were ready to see what came next.
The Veil breach was sealed. The amateur practitioner would wake in a hospital with nothing worse than confusion and a healthy respect for forces beyond their understanding. The Quarter’s wards held steady. For the first time in months, Bastien felt something dangerously close to hope.
His phone buzzed as he reached his car.
Unknown number. Text message. No words, just an image: a photograph of a grimoire under glass, its spine bearing symbols he recognized even in the grainy phone screen resolution. Laveau family marks. Genuine ones, not the tourist-trap reproductions that cluttered every voodoo shop on Bourbon Street.
A second text followed immediately.
Unknown Number:Café Du Monde. 11 PM. Come alone, or I send this to someone who’ll try to use it.
Bastien checked his watch. 10:17 PM. Forty-three minutes to cross the city, find parking, and walk into whatever trap this was.
He got into the car.
Café Du Monde at eleven on a Thursday night was neither empty nor crowded—just the scattered aftermath of a tourist day winding down, a few die-hard beignet addicts, and the staff who’d seen everything and registered nothing. Bastien chose a table near the back where he could watch for someone coming from all angles, ordered coffee he wouldn’t drink, and waited.
She arrived at 11:03.
The woman was perhaps sixty, silver hair pulled back in a style that suggested old Creole families and the kind of confidence that came from never needing to prove anything. Charcoal wool coat despite the October warmth. Leather gloves. Shoes that made no sound on the tile floor. She crossed the courtyard with the fluid precision of someone accustomed to being watched but not approached.
She sat across from him without asking. Set a cream-colored envelope on the metal table between them. The paper was thick, expensive, sealed with dark wax that caught the overhead lights and threw them back wrong.
“They said you’d know why,” she said. Her voice carried traces of French Quarter aristocracy, words reduced to essential syllables.
“And who wouldtheybe?”
“Someone who understands what Charlotte Lacroix left unfinished.” She pushed the envelope toward him. “Someone who knows what Delphine doesn’t know about herself. Yet.”
The locket against his sternum went cold.
Bastien took the envelope. The paper was cold—colder than October air should make it, cold enough that his fingers registered alarm. “What does he want?”
“What Charlotte left incomplete.” The woman stood, already turning away. “You have one week to find it. After that, we force the issue—and Delphine remembers everything at once. All three lifetimes. At the same time.” She glanced back over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Her mind won’t survive it. But you already know that.”
She walked toward the river where the darkness took her.
Bastien broke the seal.
The wax cracked clean. Inside, three items arranged with surgical precision.
First, an invitation to the Rousseau Auction House. Exclusive viewing, seven nights from tonight. Rare occult manuscripts and relics of historical significance. The kind of event that drew collectors who knew better than to ask about provenance.
Second, the photograph from the text message. The grimoire under glass, with the Laveau family marks clear on the spine. But that wasn’t what made his breath catch. In the background of the shot, deliberately included, was another object: a hand mirror, its frame worked in silver that seemed to move in the photograph’s grain.
Third, a note. Four sentences written in ink that shimmered with iridescence.
Charlotte built a network of mirrors to track her soul across death. She died before completing the anchor. You know where she hid the final piece. Bring me the Shadowglass Mirror, or I’ll wake every memory Delphine carries and break her mind doing it.
The ink caught light that didn’t exist in the evening around him, held it, released it in patterns that made his vision blurif he looked too long. Mirror-forged ink. Pigment infused with reflection magic, a technique so rare that fewer than a dozen practitioners worldwide could manage it.
Someone understood Charlotte’s work. Understood what the mirror network was designed to do. And they were using that knowledge to leverage him through the one thing guaranteed to make him comply—the threat of harm to Delphine’s fragile, still-integrating consciousness.
He read the note again. The words didn’t change.
Bring me the Shadowglass Mirror, or I’ll wake every memory Delphine carries and break her mind doing it.
