Delphine:You’re avoiding me. I don’t need protection.
His thumb hovered over the keyboard. She wasn’t wrong. He’d been avoiding her—keeping distance, scheduling work around her Archive hours, making excuses when she suggested coffee or lunch or any of the dozen small interactions they’d fallen into over the past months. Not because he wanted to.Because every hour spent near her while this was going on unresolved felt like gambling with her safety.
Delphine:Whatever you’re protecting me from, I can help. I know you know that.
He stared at the words. She was right about that too. Delphine was capable, intelligent, resourceful. She’d proven that multiple times. But capability didn’t insulate her against mirror contamination. Neither did intelligence.
He didn’t answer. Just pocketed the phone and turned back toward his car. She’d forgive him later. Or she wouldn’t. Either way, she’d be alive to make that choice and her safety was the most important thing to him of all.
At the base of the Crescent City Connection, he stopped.
His reflection stared up at him from the water—coat, dark hair, pale face. Nothing unusual.
Then it blinked.
Bastien didn’t move. His reflection smiled.
The image split down the middle like a curtain parting. For a second, he saw something behind it—another version of himself standing in a room full of broken mirrors. The other Bastien raised one hand, palm out, pressing against glass that wasn’t there.
The reflection reformed. Normal. Whole.
Bastien stepped back from the edge. The fog thickened behind him as he turned toward the city.
Behind him, in the water, his reflection stayed at the river’s edge. He knew without looking back—could feel it the way he felt eyes on him in a crowd. The image held its position, staring after him while he walked twenty paces, then thirty.
It didn’t follow.
Chapter
Five
Bastien had been tracking resonance signatures through the Quarter for three hours when he heard the violin.
Not street music. Not amplified sound bleeding from open doorways. This came from somewhere above street level, melody drifting through upper windows on Rue Chartres. A waltz in three-quarter time, played with precision that suggested formal training and familiarity born from repetition.
His feet stopped moving before his conscious mind registered recognition.
He knew that tune. Had heard it played on a parlor piano over a century ago, notes rendered through touch rather than bow against string. The melody Delia had hummed while working, while walking, while existing in the world with unconscious grace. Her waltz. The one she’d claimed came to her in dreams, rising from some well deeper than memory.
The violin continued through the opening phrases. No mistakes. No hesitation. Every note precisely where it belonged.
He started walking again, following the sound through streets that narrowed between buildings whose upper stories leaned close enough to block starlight. The violin grew louder as he approached its source. Not natural acoustic amplification butresonance that bypassed his ears entirely, melody registering as frequencies his celestial nature recognized. These notes carried intent, chosen for their ability to trigger specific responses in beings whose perception extended beyond mortal range.
Gideon was getting theatrical.
Light from upper windows drifted across glass surfaces with rhythm that matched the violin’s tempo. The reflections swayed independently of whatever objects they were meant to portray.
He passed beneath a gallery whose ironwork cast twisted shadows on the sidewalk. The violin pulled him forward with deliberate gravity. Not compulsion strong enough to override will, but suggestion calibrated to exploit curiosity that already existed.
This was the next breadcrumb in a trail laid specifically for him to follow.
The street opened onto an iron gate standing ajar. Magnolia trees grew beyond the threshold, branches heavy with white blossoms. The scent was thick enough to taste—sweet and cloying, a scent that announced itself before the flowers came into view.
The violin reached its crescendo, melody swelling through the final measures before the repeat. Bastien stopped at the gate. Ward sigils would be present somewhere in the metalwork, protection layered into decorative patterns that humans would interpret as aesthetic choice rather than magical function.
The image showed in the iron’s surface—him standing at the threshold. The reflection moved when he moved, synchronized perfectly.
Then the melody shifted.
