“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
He ended the call. Delphine was already standing, had retrieved his jacket from the back of the couch, and was holding it out with an expression that held, he noted, no resentment—only attention.
“How bad?” she said.
“I don’t know yet.”
“No one calls four times in a row for nothing, that’s for sure.”
“You’re right.”
She handed him the jacket. He shrugged it on, and she turned to find his keys on the side table where he’d set them, and passed those to him as well, the small automatic competence of her that had been winding around his chest for months. He looked at her—the fallen hair, the slipped strap, her swollen lips and slight lingering flush, all the small evidence of a night that had been interrupted at its best possible moment—and felt the familiar, frustrating, irreducible weight of everything he still hadn’t told her.
Tomorrow, he thought. The same word he’d said to Delia on a November street in 1906, with a ring in his pocket and a clock chiming the hour.Tomorrow.
This time he intended to mean it.
“Let me know how it goes,” Delphine said.
“Of course.” He paused, the need to say something regarding their ill-timed interruption stalling his movement. “Delphine, I’m so so?—”
“Go. The city needs you. I will be here. I’m not going anywhere, Bastien.” A soft smile formed.
To his own surprise, Bastien gripped her with authority by the back of her neck, pulling her into him for another searing kiss. She returned his kiss with equal fervor, heating him again, but he stopped before he wouldn’t be able to.
One more chaste kiss to her soft lips.
“Thank you,” he whispered as he slipped out the door and headed to meet Baptiste.
August in New Orleans wrapped around everything with purpose. The humidity hadn’t broken overnight; it hung in the air, thick enough to taste, coating every surface with a thin sheen of moisture. Bastien moved through the French Quarter’s pre-dawn streets, past galleries dripping with iron lacework, past carriage gates concealing courtyards older than the American nation. The buildings leaned toward each other overhead, narrowing the sky to a ribbon of purple-gray.
Bourbon Street clung to its last dregs of consciousness. Three blocks away, a saxophone wailed from Lafitte’s—the bartender there played until sunrise, had for forty years, would until he died. Closer, a pair of tourists stumbled toward their hotel, their laughter too loud for the hour. The sour-sweet smell of spilled daiquiris rose from the gutters, mixing with the ever-present funk of the Quarter: old stone, river water, night-blooming jasmine from hidden gardens.
He turned onto Dumaine and the scent changed.
Blood. Hours old, but unmistakably vampire. Beneath it, something else—burned herbs, he was quite certain. Ritual smoke.
He found the scene three doors down, where a narrow passage cut between two Creole townhouses. Baptiste stood at the entrance, his dark face gone gray beneath its deep brown. Two human police officers lingered near the street, their expressions slack with confusion. The vampire glamour worked on their minds, softening the edges of what they’d witnessed, making the details impossible to hold.
The senior officer, a woman with sergeant’s stripes and tired eyes, straightened when she saw him approach. “You the specialist they called?”
Bastien produced credentials—forged by hands that understood what mortal officials expected to see. “I’ll take it from here.”
She examined the identification with glazed attention as if her mind kept sliding away from details it couldn’t process. “We secured the scene. It’s... We’re not sure what we’re looking at.”
Her shoulders dropped as she stepped back. Whatever waited in that passage, she wanted no part of it. “We’ll be on the street if you need us.”
Bastien waited until both officers had retreated before stepping into the passage.
The courtyard beyond measured twenty feet square, enclosed on three sides by the backs of buildings, accessible only through this corridor or over walls too high for casual climbing. A crumbling brick planter thick with resurrection ferns partially concealed what lay behind it. A single banana tree grew in the corner, its broad leaves motionless in the still air.
Bastien stopped at the courtyard’s edge and made himself look.
Vampires did not leave corpses. When they died—truly died, the final death that no blood could reverse—they dispersed. Ash, dissolution, a rapid decay that left nothing for forensics to findand nothing for families to bury. The absence of a body served as both mercy and practicality.
The vampire before him had not dispersed.
He lay on his back, arms positioned at his sides with a care that spoke of arrangement rather than collapse. His eyes fixed on the lightening sky. His expression had locked mid-recognition—he had known his killer. He had seen death coming.
