Maman had said the curse required physical contact. Weeks before the first murder. Someone had moved through his life in that period, close enough to touch, forgettable enough to leave no trace.
He opened the calendar to July and worked backward.
The seventh: a meeting with a vampire representative about territorial disputes. No unusual contact.
The twelfth: dinner with Delphine on Royal Street. His hand stilled on the page at that one. They had been in the careful middle stage of whatever they were becoming—not the beginning, months of slow courtship already behind them, but navigating new territory together. He remembered the particular quality of that evening—her attention across the table, the way she had leaned toward him when she was making a point she considered important, the long walk home afterward neither of them had wanted to end. He had been entirely present with her. Entirely distracted from everything else.
Which meant entirely vulnerable to anyone watching.
The thought arrived with the cold clarity of something he had been avoiding. Whoever had placed this curse had observed him. Had watched him move through the city, had documented his patterns, had chosen their moment carefully. They had watched him with Delphine, had noted the particular quality of his attention around her—how it narrowed his focus, how it left his perimeter less monitored than it should have been.
Had perhaps identified her as leverage for when other methods failed.
His hands flattened against the desk.
The eighteenth: Maman’s shop, restocking components. Crowded afternoon, tourists in the public areas. Anyone could have brushed against him in the narrow aisles.
The twenty-third: a jazz funeral for a practitioner who had died of old age and satisfaction. Half the magical community had attended. Bodies pressed close in the second line, strangers and acquaintances alike moving to the brass band’s direction.
He worked through the remaining days. Each one offered possibilities. None offered certainty.
Someone had moved through his life in those weeks, close enough to touch, invisible enough to forget. They had watched him work and dine and pay respects to the dead. Had learned the particular architecture of his routine. Had noted, the woman who occupied a space in his attention that nothing had occupied in over a century.
The violation of it locked his jaw, tightened his shoulders into something just short of a physical response.
He reached for his phone before he understood he was doing it. The impulse to call her—to hear her voice and confirm she was fine and ordinary and safe in her apartment on Ursulines Street—was strong enough to be embarrassing. He set the phone back down.
She was fine. She was asleep, probably, or still at her desk with the archive materials she’d mentioned. The beacon didn’t make her a target tonight. He would deal with the question of her safety in the morning, with a clear head, with a plan rather than an instinct.
But he left the phone face-up on the desk where he could see it, which was its own kind of admission.
The beacon warmed beneath his sleeve. The murders had a killer. The curse had a caster. And somewhere in the city, things had begun arriving that had no reason to be here—drawnby the signal his forearm broadcast to anything old enough to understand what it meant.
Bastien picked up Eulalie’s list and began at the top.
EIGHT
Genealogical charts covered Bastien’s floor.
He had pulled every document from the three boxes against his wall—parish records, marriage contracts, sire registries, handwritten notes in French and Spanish and occasionally Latin. The papers formed overlapping layers across the hardwood, centuries of vampire lineage rendered in ink that had faded from black to brown to something close to rust. His apartment smelled of old paper and dust and the faint copper undertone that never quite left his skin anymore.
Past two in the morning, and the humidity had not relented. His shirt clung to his shoulders. Beneath his sleeve, the forearm kept its own broadcast — a frequency that had nothing to do with August and everything to do with whoever had ears trained to receive it.
Let them listen. He had work to do.
The five victims’ names anchored separate columns on his corkboard: Armand Fontenot. Solange Vidal. Thierry Arceneaux. Marguerite Deschamps. Adelaide Renier. Beneath each name, photographs, bloodline data, the sigils carved into their flesh. Five words in a sentence he was beginning to read.
He returned to the 1847 tribunal manifest—the water-stained document listing thirty-seven vampires representing twelve bloodlines. The Presbytère gathering. The Unified Feeding Compact that House Marchande-Levesque had proposed and that the assembled families had rejected.
He had been reading the manifest as a target list. The killer worked through descendants of those who had attended, picking off minor members of houses that had witnessed the beginning of the Marchande-Levesque destruction. A revenge pattern spanning generations.
But revenge for what, precisely?
The compact’s rejection had been political, not personal. House Marchande-Levesque had proposed restrictions on feeding territories—shared hunting grounds, regulated access, an end to the territorial disputes that had plagued the city since the Spanish ceded Louisiana to France and France sold it to America. The other houses had refused. They preferred their independence, their private territories, their ability to feed without negotiation.
Forty-four years later, coordinated violence destroyed the Marchande-Levesque family. Every member. Bodies left intact as warning.
He remembered the aftermath. The silence that fell over vampire society, the distance everyone maintained from the Garden District for months afterward, the way certain names stopped being spoken aloud.
