The violin dropped to a softer dynamic, notes becoming gentler, more intimate. The section Delia had always played when she thought herself alone, melody meant for private moments rather than public performance. He had listened fromdoorways while she worked through this passage, watching her fingers find notes with certainty that suggested muscle memory from lifetimes she couldn’t consciously access.
The present fractured.
Not gradually. Not with warning that allowed mental preparation. The magnolia scent thickened until it coated his tongue. His vision doubled—the iron gate before him and something older layering over it. Sound compressed to a single ringing tone, then nothing.
Spring, 1906. The courtyard behind Mrs. Thibodeau’s boarding house on Dauphine Street.
Magnolia petals drifted through air that smelled of rain and new growth. Delia stood beneath the tree’s spreading branches, head tilted back to watch blossoms fall around her shoulders in cream-colored silence. Her dress was yellow cotton, the kind that needed laundering twice weekly in the Quarter’s humidity but which she wore anyway because it matched the sunlight that filtered through leaves overhead.
She laughed at something he’d said, the sound so pure he had to look away. Her hair was pinned in the style women favored then, dark curls escaping at her temples and nape where humidity worked against pomade and pins.
“You can’t trap love in a circle of gold.” She spoke while catching petals, hands cupping blossoms before releasing them to continue their fall. “It has to live in the light.”
He had the ring in his pocket. Small velvet box containing a ring he’d commissioned from a jeweler on Royal Street, gold worked with patterns that wouldn’t be recognized as angelic script unless someone knew what to look for. Protection woven into metal, blessing disguised as decoration.
But her words stopped him. Charlotte’s soul speaking truths about his nature even while her conscious mind remained unaware.
The ring stayed in his pocket.
Petals continued falling while she spun in slow circles beneath the magnolia, humming the waltz she claimed came from dreams, the melody that would follow him through decades of loss and searching and the terrible certainty that love this complete couldn’t survive in a world governed by rules he’d failed to respect when it mattered most.
The present returned.
Iron bit into his palm where he’d gripped the gate. The magnolia scent remained, but thinner now, normal botanical presence rather than memory made visceral. Sweat had collected at his collar.
The violin had stopped.
Not faded gradually or transitioned to new melody. Simply ceased mid-measure. The air was too still.
He forced his hand away from the gate and stepped back. Ward sigils would be present in the iron scrollwork, protection that prevented casual entry by beings whose nature registered to properly constructed barriers. But the gate stood open. An invitation.
Glass cracked somewhere to his left. Not music. Not footsteps. Crystal fracturing along fault lines invisible until force made them manifest.
Bastien turned toward the noise, tracking resonance that pulsed from somewhere near the brick wall. The gate’s surface showed his image again, perfectly synchronized.
The sigil was small. Easy to miss unless someone knew to look for it, etched into the gate’s lower support bar where decorative ironwork met functional structure. A mirror mark. Same as the calling card Gideon had provided at the auction house. Same fractured symmetry.
Bastien crouched beside the gate, examining the mark without touching any metal that would register his presence.The sigil pulsed with frequency he recognized from the mirror shard.
A lure. The music, the magnolia scent, the memory of Delia beneath falling petals. All of it orchestrated to bring him here. To this specific location at this specific time.
Gideon wanted him to know exactly how deeply he understood his vulnerabilities.
The violin had been Mirror Lure—sound generated through reflective magic rather than played by a physical instrument, the melody pulled from his own memories and broadcast through surfaces that had witnessed his past.
He stood slowly. Beyond the gate, magnolia trees swayed in the breeze that carried moisture from the river. Normal botanical growth. Ordinary garden space enclosed by brick walls that had stood for over a century.
But deeper where shadows pooled, a door waited.
He could see it through the gate’s opening, set into the far wall beneath a gallery. The door was painted green, color faded by weather and time until it resembled moss more than deliberate pigment choice. Flaking paint revealed cypress beneath.
Ward marks covered the door’s surface. Not decorative patterns humans would interpret as aesthetic choice, but sigils rendered in silver and salt, blood and intention. Charlotte’s techniques. Either direct access to her research or careful reconstruction based on her methodologies as he’d initially suspected.
He recognized the pattern. A vault entrance. The kind Charlotte had theorized but never built—storage for relics that required isolation from normal reflective surfaces.
Gideon had constructed what she’d only imagined.
The door stood sealed beneath its layered wards. Gideon’s next breadcrumb.
