They walked through streets that had not yet given up August’s heat, the evening air pressing close, the Quarter moving into its night rhythm around them. Bastien kept her on his left, positioning himself between her body and the street, his expanded perception scanning every shadow and doorway.
“The person watching me,” she said as they turned onto Dauphine Street. “What did they want?”
“Information. Understanding.” He chose words that were true without being complete. “They wanted to know why I spend time with you. What you mean to my investigation.”
“And what did you tell them?”
That you are everything. That I would burn this city to ash before letting harm touch you.
“That you’re a research consultant. That our relationship is professional.”
“Did they believe you?”
“No.”
She laughed—a small sound, half-amusement and half-recognition. “I wouldn’t have believed you either. The way you look at me isn’t professional.”
They were three blocks from her building when the temperature dropped.
Bastien felt it before he could name it—the specific cold of a revenant’s approach, sharper than the previous two encounters, and not alone. He caught the signature of two distinct presences converging from opposite directions. Someone had sent these. Someone had identified his route, anticipated the walk home, positioned them deliberately.
“Stay close to me,” he said quietly.
Delphine heard the change in his voice and responded without question, stepping nearer. “What is it?”
“Keep walking. Don’t stop regardless of what you see.”
The first one came from a doorway to their right—smoke-and-density form, luminescent eye-spaces, cold flooding outward as it moved with the unnatural speed of something not bound by physical mass. Bastien stepped in front of it before it could reach Delphine, taking the impact on his left forearm, using the mark’s heat in a concentrated pulse.
The revenant fragmented, but the second was already moving from the left.
“Bastien—” Delphine’s voice, sharp and controlled. Not panic. Awareness.
“I see it.” He pivoted, putting himself between her and the second revenant, its cold reaching him a fraction of a second before its physical coherence did. Close work—closer than the previous encounters, closer than he would have chosen. His left arm burned with the effort of sustained discharge, celestial energy flooding outward against borrowed physical form.
The second revenant recoiled but didn’t fully fragment. Stronger than the others. It reformed at the edge of the alley, its luminescent eye-spaces fixed on Bastien with something that read as intelligence rather than hunger.
Directed,he thought again.Someone sent these.
He discharged a third time, deeper and more costly, feeling the drain of it in his bones. The revenant came apart with a sound like tearing silk, its cold dispersing in threads that vanished against the warm August air.
Silence.
Delphine stood two feet behind him, perfectly still. When he turned she was watching him with an expression he couldn’t fully read in the lamplight—not fear, but something more complicated than composure.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No.” She looked at his left arm. “Are you?”
“No.” His forearm ached with the deep bone-warmth of overexertion, but nothing was damaged. “We should keep moving.”
They walked the remaining three blocks without speaking. Not uncomfortable silence—the silence of two people who had just experienced the same thing and needed a moment before they could talk about it.
When they reached her building, Delphine turned to face him at the base of the stairs.
“Those were revenants,” she said.
He looked at her. “Yes.”
