His hand was steady on the phone. His breathing stayed even. These were just facts requiring documentation, not emotional crisis requiring reaction. This was what he did—observed, recorded, prepared response. Panic was for people who hadn’t spent three hundred years learning how to function while everything burned.
But standing there, watching his own reflection repeat itself through contaminated glass, Bastien understood exactly what choice he’d made.
He’d picked protection. Again. The same choice he’d made with Charlotte when he’d tried to keep her safe from her own research. The same choice he’d made with Delia when he’dhidden the truth about angels and fallen grace and love that transcended lifetimes.
Both times, the women had died not knowing all the facts about their situation.
And here he was, making the same choice with Delphine, expecting different results.
The definition of certain kinds of foolishness.
Bastien unlocked the door and climbed stairs to his apartment. The building was quiet—too early for neighbors to be awake, too late for night-shift workers to still be moving around. His footsteps echoed in the stairwell, regular rhythm that felt almost meditative.
Inside his apartment, he started coffee brewing and pulled out his laptop. The documentation wouldn’t write itself, and sitting here dwelling on impossible choices wouldn’t change the fact that he’d already made them.
But tomorrow—or later today, technically—when Delphine showed up at the Archive and gave him that look that meant she knew he was holding back, maybe he’d try something different.
Maybe he’d tell her the truth and let her decide what to do with it.
Maybe.
The coffee finished brewing. Bastien poured a cup and sat down to work, watching dawn light creep across his desk while the city woke around him. The mirrors in his apartment showed him exactly as he was—tired, conflicted, trying to protect someone who didn’t need protection so much as partnership.
Gideon was right about one thing—Bastien was learning.
Just not the lessons Gideon intended to teach.
Chapter
Seventeen
Roxy’s text came through at 2:47 a.m.
Roxy:Levee. Now. Bring whatever stops things from seeing double.
Bastien grabbed his keys and the leather pouch of silvered salt. No explanation, no context—that was Roxy. She didn’t waste words on problems she couldn’t solve herself.
The drive to Algiers Point took twenty minutes through empty streets. The river smell hit him before he parked—mud and rust and something else underneath, sweet like funeral flowers left too long in heat. He killed the engine and sat for a moment, letting his senses adjust. The Mississippi stretched black and still to his left, surface too calm for water that should have been moving.
Roxy waited under a broken streetlight, arms crossed. She looked tired. Hair pulled back tight, almost severe; that meant she’d been awake too long dealing with pack business that wouldn’t wait for dawn. Mid-thirties, built solid from years of hauling equipment and breaking up fights. Beta of the Crescent Moon Pack, which meant she handled the problems Tib didn’t want to touch.
“Three of ours are seeing things that aren’t there,” she said. No greeting. “Started two nights ago. Now it’s spread to seven.”
Bastien walked to the levee’s edge. “What kind of things?”
“Echoes. Their own movements three seconds before they happen. Reflections that move on their own.” She moved beside him, boots scraping concrete. “One shifted last night. His wolf had two shadows.”
He crouched and pressed his palm to the water. Cold bit through his glove—winter cold, wrong for October. The surface felt solid. Not ice, but something that had forgotten how to be liquid.
“Mirror Fever,” he said.
“That’s what I thought.” She pulled a flask from her jacket and took a pull. “Except it’s not hitting humans. Just us. Seven wolves in two days, all of them showing the same symptoms. Eyes holding images that aren’t there. Voices echoing before they speak.”
Bastien stood. His reflection in the water moved half a second after he did, lag visible enough to make his teeth ache. The temporal delay that had infected every mirror in the Quarter was spreading. Natural water amplifying reflection magic, treating the river itself as one more surface for Gideon’s network to corrupt.
“Where are they now?”
“Quarantined. Pack Alpha’s orders.” She capped the flask. “I’m here because you’re the only one in this city who might know what we’re dealing with, and because—” She stopped and stared at him. “Because Gabriel Jr.’s one of them. Tib’s nephew. Twenty-three years old, good kid, never caused trouble in his life. And now he’s seeing himself die in seventeen different ways every time he closes his eyes.”
