Then it was gone. The reflection returned to empty street and sodium light, leaving only the uncertain testimony of his celestial awareness to confirm what he’d seen.
Bastien got in his car, started the engine, and pulled away from the curb. The Quarter’s streets unfolded before him—narrow passages between buildings whose history stretched back to when New Orleans was still negotiating its identity between French, Spanish, and American influence.
But his mind remained fixed on the auction house and the trap that had been laid there with his name attached to its trigger.
Gideon Virelli knew who he was. Knewwhathe was. And judging by the sigil work on that calling card, understood mirror magic in ways that indicated either deep research into forbidden techniques or direct contact with someone who’d practiced Charlotte’s methods.
The shard pulsed against his side, warm through the fabric and jacket lining. He’d need to get it home, seal it in a warded container, and run diagnostics that would reveal its purpose and how it connected to the broader pattern of mirror distortion clearly spreading through the Quarter.
But first, he would need to call Delphine when he got home and figure out how to keep his promise about dinner without explaining that someone who understood her ancestral magic was orchestrating events that named her bloodline as leverage.
His reflection moved in the rearview mirror, synchronized perfectly with his actual position.
For now.
Chapter
Two
The black shard sat on Bastien’s desk where he’d left it at 2 a.m.; the surface reflecting nothing.
He’d managed three hours of sleep before giving up. The apartment above his office occupied converted space that had once served as storage for the antiquarian bookshop that previously operated at street level. Exposed brick, tall windows that let in too much light during summer, wards worked into the threshold and window frames. Private enough for the kind of research most people didn’t acknowledge existed.
His phone buzzed. A text from Delphine.
Delphine: You disappeared last night. Rain check on coffee? Are we still on for dinner tonight?
He’d forgotten. They’d made plans for this morning—coffee at Envie, the place on Decatur where she claimed they made the best cortados in the Quarter. He’d walked right past it after the auction house, after Gideon’s calling card, before bringing the shard back home and spending hours trying to understand what he was dealing with.
Frustrated with himself, he typed a reply.
Bastien:I’m so sorry, D. I was dealing with a case. Have lost track of time. Dinner though. Tomorrow night?
The response came within seconds.
Delphine: The mysterious kind or the mundane kind?
Bastien smiled despite himself. She’d been asking variations of that question since they’d worked together during the crisis two months ago. Never pushing for details he couldn’t provide, but always making clear she knew his work involved things most people preferred not to acknowledge.
Putting together a response to her question might take both dinner and dessert.
Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.
Delphine: Jacques-Imo’s. 7 PM. And you’re buying the alligator cheesecake.
He set the phone down with a wide grin. He’d buy her anything her heart desired and had to restrain himself from showering her with his affections every day she didn’t recognize their past lives together. But their mundane exchange over dinner plans soothed him, if only for a moment. Delphine had that effect—grounding him in ordinary concerns when threats tried to consume all of his available attention. Dinner together meant more than just conversation that didn’t require constant editing. For Bastien, who’d loved her lifetimes, it meant the warmth of her laugh when he said something that surprised her and the careful dance they’d been doing for weeks where neither of them quite named what was building between them was growing, albeit at a rather glacial pace.
But first he needed to understand what Gideon Virelli had brought into his city.
The shard measured four inches, blade-shaped, glass so dark it pulled light into itself. Bastien adjusted the desk lamp. Photons bent near the fragment’s edge, curving inward by degrees that shouldn’t happen with ordinary materials. Physics didn’t like this artifact. Neither did his instincts.
The hum started low—vibration through bone rather than sound through air. Frequency matched the boundary between realms, that permeable line his celestial nature could sense without effort. Most practitioners needed instruments to detect this kind of resonance.
Charlotte had theorized about time-displaced reflection. Moments captured and replayed with slight temporal offset. She’d abandoned the experiments because the energy costs looked dangerous. Apparently, someone had solved that problem or didn’t care about the price.
Reflective magic always cost more than practitioners expected. And he wasn’t letting Delphine pay it.
He opened his journal—leather-bound, pages filled with decades of documentation. Fresh page.
