The locket had become warm through his shirt. Charlotte’s magic responding to threats that targeted her soul across the boundaries death should have made absolute. Protection and prison both.
He wouldn’t fail again. Not Delia. Not Charlotte. And certainly not Delphine. They’d already been through too much. He’d do whatever necessary to protect her in this life.
Even if her survival required walking directly into traps that Gideon constructed with his own grief as their foundation.
The streetlight cast his shadow long across the sidewalk. But the shadow moved wrong, angle shifted just enough to suggest the sun stood somewhere other than its actual position overhead.
Bastien didn’t look back at the distortion. Didn’t acknowledge the way his image in a passing car window remained frozen for half a second while his physical form continued forward.
He kept walking, steps steady and controlled as he neared his apartment on Dauphine.
Gideon had mapped these routes before the first breadcrumb appeared at Café Du Monde.
Chapter
Six
Late into the evening after he’d documented everything he could about the iron gate, the memory forced upon him, and the reflection magic he’d experienced, Bastien returned to Rue Chartres with chalk, salt, and the silk-wrapped shard pressed against his ribs. The Quarter had emptied to its post-midnight rhythm—stragglers heading home, someone playing trumpet three streets over, the usual texture of a city that never quite went silent.
The courtyard looked exactly as he’d left it six hours ago. Wrought iron gate, magnolia trees in the shadows beyond, and the door beneath the gallery where ward marks pulsed with energy that reached him from ten feet away.
Charlotte’s work. He’d recognize her technique anywhere—the particular combination of silver and salt, the way she layered protection and concealment so thoroughly that most practitioners would walk past without noticing anything unusual. Whoever had placed this door here either had access to her research or had studied her methods long enough to recreate them with precision.
He set his bag down and withdrew the chalk. The shard’s hum increased as he approached the threshold, frequency risingto match whatever resonance the wards carried. Not painful. Just present, the way tuning forks vibrated in sympathy when struck at the right pitch.
The first circle went down clean. White powder adhering to damp brick, connecting beginning to end without gaps. Salt followed, poured along the outer edge to create containment within protection. Standard procedure for approaching an unknown threshold. Keep whatever emerged on the other side filtered through layers of deliberate intention.
Bastien drew the unsealing sigil in the air. Silver dust fell from his fingertips—Charlotte’s method again, particles that should have dispersed but instead held their pattern until the working was complete. He spoke three words in a language that rumbled in his throat, sounds that belonged to realms where different rules applied.
The wards responded immediately.
Silver flared white-hot, then dimmed. Salt crystals rearranged themselves into configurations that signaled opening rather than sealing.
He turned the old, brass handle worn smooth by use and the door swung inward without sound. Stone stairs descended into darkness, and cold air drifted up—moisture, minerals, the particular scent of river water filtered through limestone. New Orleans had deep construction, foundations that went down farther than modern basements ever reached and he was going to follow the breadcrumbs wherever they took him.
Bastien pulled an LED lantern from his bag and started down.
The passage was narrow. Stone walls on both sides, worn smooth by water seepage more than tool marks. He kept one hand on the wall as he descended, counting steps. The texture under his palm told him what his eyes couldn’t yet confirm—pre-colonial construction at minimum, possibly older. Limestoneporous enough to absorb Mississippi groundwater but dense enough to hold structural weight.
Sound behaved strangely here. His footsteps should have echoed. Instead they came back muffled, dead. The stairwell drank noise rather than reflecting it.
Twenty steps down, the stone under his hand pulsed once.
Not vibration from traffic above. Not settling. Recognition. Charlotte’s workings had always responded to his presence this way—awareness built into the architecture, wards that knew the difference between authorized entry and intrusion, although over the years since her death, Bastien had learned it wasn’t necessary. There had yet to be a ward his celestial resonance hadn’t allowed him entrance regardless.
But he’d walked through her constructions before. This felt familiar.
Fifty steps, and his boot struck level ground.
The chamber opened ahead. Bastien stopped in the doorway, lantern held forward and let his eyes adjust. First impression—volume. Space larger than the stairwell suggested, carved from bedrock that predated everything above it. Then details resolved—curved walls, surfaces that reflected light at wrong angles, alcoves set at regular intervals around the perimeter.
The air smelled of standing water and silver.
He stepped across the threshold. The pressure changed—membrane between passage and chamber, the particular resistance of walking through water without getting wet. His ears popped with the adjustment.
His boots struck water. Black, still, ankle-deep. The surface absorbed light rather than reflecting it and held an unnatural and unending darkness.
The chamber was circular, maybe thirty feet across and made of limestone blocks fitted without mortar, eighteenth-century technique. The ceiling arched into a dome with symbols carvedat the apex that pulsed faint blue in his lantern beam. And lining the walls in alcoves carved at precise intervals?—
