Gideon had already identified her. The network already knew she stabilized it. Probably had known since the moment she’d walked into the Archive vault with him, since she’d touchedthose Lacroix ledgers and every reflection in the building had synchronized.
His protection had become transparent. His hesitation had become liability.
A woman’s laugh drifted from an upper balcony, bright and carefree. Young voice, probably college student or tourist. Someone whose biggest worry was which bar to hit next, whether to text that guy back, normal human concerns.
Delia had laughed like that once. Before he’d taught her to love carefully, to wait patiently, to accept silence as answer.
Bourbon Street’s noise hit him—music bleeding from open doors, tourists laughing, someone arguing in French outside a bar about who was paying for drinks. The living city, messy and present and real. Not frozen in amber, not colorless and trapped, just loudly, vibrantly alive.
He checked his reflection in a bar window as he passed. Normal. No lag. Synchronized properly with his movement.
But somewhere in Gideon’s network, there was probably a mirror showing him in that garden. Delia’s hand in his. The ring in his pocket. The moment he’d confessed what he was and then refused to act on it. Every failure cataloged and available for replay.
Gideon would use it when the time came. Would show Delphine exactly what loving Bastien meant—years of careful distance followed by sudden tragedy, protection that failed when it mattered most, devotion that couldn’t save what it loved.
The past was never past in New Orleans. It lived in gardens that shouldn’t exist. In jasmine that bloomed out of season. In choices that echoed across lifetimes, accumulating weight like sediment at the river bottom, layer upon layer of might-have-beens and should-have-saids.
He’d failed Delia by being too careful. By protecting her from truth until truth became irrelevant. By loving her at safe distanceuntil there was no more distance, just fire and smoke and her confused eyes asking why he’d let this happen.
He wouldn’t fail Delphine the same way.
But he didn’t know yet what different failure looked like. Didn’t know if truth would protect her or destroy her, if proximity would make her safer or mark her more clearly as target. Gideon had shown him the cost of distance in that garden. Would probably show him the cost of closeness next.
Every choice was trap. Every option led to loss.
The only question was which loss he could live with.
Chapter
Sixteen
Bastien had traced the geometry wrong.
The glyph at the garden gate pointed south, and he’d assumed St. Roche Cemetery—five nodes grounded, one remaining, the pattern demanding completion. He’d walked every path between weathered tombs, checked every polished surface, found nothing but memorial candles and tourist offerings.
The sixth node wasn’t in a cemetery at all.
He stood at the levee now, two hours before dawn, watching the Mississippi refuse to move. The river’s surface held perfect stillness, water transformed into mirror that reflected predawn sky without a single ripple to disturb the image. No current. No wake from passing barges. Just glass-smooth surface that shouldn’t exist on moving water.
Mirror Current. Gideon had found a way to infect the river itself.
He’d tested it twice already. Dropped a silver coin from his pocket—his lucky Saint Christopher medal, the one Delia had given him in 1906. It hit the surface and stopped. No splash. No ripples. Just the coin sitting on top of water that had forgottenhow to be liquid, reflecting the falling metal back at him in perfect detail.
The medal rested there now, three feet from shore, impossible and wrong.
Bastien crouched at the water’s edge. The river smelled normal—mud and diesel and the perpetual rot of organic matter breaking down in heat. But the surface temperature was wrong. He held his hand an inch above the water. Cold radiated upward, the kind of cold that belonged to January, not October. Not natural cold either. This was absence, heat pulled out of the world and replaced with nothing.
He traced a simple sigil in the air above the water. Protection mark, basic warding, the kind he’d drawn ten thousand times across three centuries. His finger left a faint trail of light that faded as soon as the pattern completed.
The river’s surface caught the sigil and reversed it.
Not reflected—transformed. Every line he’d drawn appeared backward on the water, the protective symbol inverted into something else entirely. He watched the corrupted mark spread across the glassy surface, bleeding outward in expanding circles, contaminating everything it touched.
Then Gideon’s voice, soft and amused, emanating from the water itself. “Even the river knows obedience.”
Bastien stood. Pulled his hand back before the reflection could grab hold—because for half a second, watching the reversed sigil spread, he’d felt pull. Tug on his shadow, invitation to lean closer, to touch the surface directly and see what happened when mirror met source at the exact wrong moment.
He’d felt this before. The particular flavor of temptation that came from forces offering exactly what you wanted, as long as you didn’t ask the price until after you’d already paid.
