The connection emerged slowly, then all at once.
All three victims descended from families that had attended the Marchande-Levesque tribunal of 1847.
He found the record in a box he had not opened in decades—a water-stained manifest listing the vampires who had gathered at the Presbytère on the night House Marchande-Levesque proposed the Unified Feeding Compact. The document named thirty-seven attendees representing twelve bloodlines. Among them a Beaumont, two Chardons, and representatives of five other houses whose names Bastien recognized from the corners of New Orleans vampire society.
The tribunal had failed. The compact was rejected. Forty-four years later, the Marchande-Levesque family was destroyed in a single night of coordinated violence—murdered, every member, their bodies left intact as warning.
The killer was hunting descendants of those who had witnessed the beginning of the end.
His forearm flared.
The sensation spread outward, sudden and insistent, pulling him from the documents on his floor. Bastien pressed his palm against the darkened skin and felt pressure building beneath — close to pain now, the distinction narrowing.
Connection. Communication.
He returned to the genealogical charts with new focus. If the pattern held—if the killer was working through the bloodlines of those who had attended the 1847 tribunal—then the sequence should be predictable. The first three victims had represented Beaumont, Beaumont again through maternal connection, and Chardon. Nine bloodlines remained.
Which one was next?
He examined the order of the killings. Armand Fontenot had been the first, discovered on a Wednesday morning. Solange Vidal died Thursday night. Thierry Arceneaux found Saturday before dawn.
The locations formed a different pattern. Dumaine Street, Algiers Point, North Claiborne Avenue. Bastien pulled his city map from the drawer and marked each site. The first two locations sat across the river from each other, the third in the Tremé. A triangle, roughly equilateral, with the French Quarter at its center.
If the fourth killing completed a geometric pattern—if the locations themselves carried meaning—then the next murder would happen somewhere in the Bywater or the Marigny, closing the shape around the Quarter’s eastern edge.
Bastien cross-referenced the tribunal manifest with his knowledge of current vampire residences. Of the twelve bloodlines represented in 1847, four had been extinguished completely over the subsequent century and a half. The eight that survived had produced descendants scattered across the city, but most preferred the older neighborhoods, where vampire presence had been established long enough that certain accommodations existed. Feeding territories. Infrastructure. The quiet machinery of undead survival.
Three vampires fit the criteria: members of surviving tribunal bloodlines, living in the Bywater or Marigny, minor enough in status that their deaths would not trigger immediate political response. Two of them had moved to other cities in the past fifty years, their whereabouts confirmed through the networks Bastien maintained for exactly this kind of investigation.
The third was Marguerite Deschamps.
He knew her, distantly. Eighty-four years undead, sired in 1941 by a vampire from House Lavigne—one of the families that had voted against the Unified Feeding Compact and had later participated in the Marchande-Levesque purge. She managed a small gallery on St. Claude Avenue, specializing in art from local Black artists whose work deserved wider recognition thanit received. She had never sought rank, never claimed territory. She existed in the quiet spaces of vampire society, noticed only by those who bothered to notice.
Exactly the kind of victim the killer had been selecting.
And tonight—Bastien checked his calendar—tonight was the anniversary of her sire’s final death. Marguerite visited his tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 every year on this date, a private observance that had continued for six decades. Exactly the kind of predictable ritual that made a vampire easy to find.
The clock on his desk read 3:47 AM. If the killer knew her habits—and the killer had known everything else—Marguerite Deschamps might already be dead among the tombs of the city’s oldest cemetery, surrounded by two centuries of the dead, another body added to ground that had held bodies since 1789.
Bastien reached for his phone to call Baptiste, then stopped.
His forearm burned. Heat spreading, pressure building. The sensation carried information he could not decode—some signal transmitted through his flesh, received without comprehension.
The killer was there—perhaps minutes ahead, perhaps an hour.
The thought arrived with a certainty that had no logical foundation. But his body had reacted at each crime scene, had recognized something in the arrangement of death and symbol and intention. If it was responding now, in his office, miles from any murder site?—
He grabbed his keys and moved.
The drive to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 took four minutes at this hour. Basin Street empty, traffic lights cycling through their patterns for no one. Bastien ran two of them.
The cemetery’s whitewashed walls rose against the dark sky as he approached, that distinctive above-ground architecture that had given New Orleans burial grounds their reputation as cities of the dead. The tombs inside dated back to 1789—olderthan the Louisiana Purchase, older than the American flag flying over the city, older than most of the vampire bloodlines he had been tracing tonight.
He turned onto Basin Street and saw the lights. His shoulders fell. He’d hoped he was wrong even if he knew what he’d find there.
Red and blue, strobing against the cemetery’s pale walls, painting the night in colors that meant he was too late. A police cruiser blocked the entrance. Two officers stood at the gate, their postures carrying the slack confusion Bastien had come to recognize as they had been glamoured by vampires in the vicinity.
He parked across the street and approached on foot.
