“And instead?”
“Instead, I disappear.”
“The curse makes you visible,” Maman said. “You cannot simply vanish.”
“The curse broadcasts my location. It does not broadcast my purpose.” He turned from the window. “Let the factions watch me. Let them track my movements and file their reports and analyze my patterns. I will give them what they expect to see—an investigator pursuing leads, visiting crime scenes, consulting sources. Visible. Predictable. Harmless.”
“While doing what, precisely?”
“Hunting.” Something shifted in his chest—not the curse, but something older. Something predating his fall, remembering how to pursue rather than follow. “The architect has resources. Connections. Access to information about vampire society, about me, about historical conflicts being torn open by these murders. Those resources leave traces. Those connections can be identified. That access came from somewhere.”
“You will hunt a shadow.”
“I will hunt what casts the shadow. The witch who placed my curse required components, knowledge, proximity. The killer executing murders requires intelligence, timing, freedom to move without detection. Both connect to the architect. Both received instructions, resources, direction. If I find those connections, I find the mind behind the design.”
Silence on the line.
When Maman spoke again, her voice had shifted register in a way he recognized as the end of a consultation—when she had heard enough to form a view she wasn’t ready to state fully yet.
“The hunter and the hunted often resemble each other, cher. Be aware that in pursuing this shadow, you do not become it.”
“I stopped being careful when the fifth victim died. Caution has accomplished nothing except extending the timeline of this slaughter.” He looked at the photographs on his corkboard—six faces now, six words in a sentence he refused to let the architect complete. “I will not be bait anymore. I will not be distraction. I will not be the component that makes their machine function.”
“What will you be?”
“The one who ends it.”
He disconnected and stood alone in his apartment, the mark burning steady against his forearm, the city spread beyond his windows in a tapestry of lights beginning to glow against gathering dark.
Six dead. Seven remaining.
But the pattern was not his concern anymore.
Bastien gathered the genealogical charts from his floor and began organizing them into categories. Not by victim—by resource. Where had information about bloodlines originated? Who had access to records most of the city had forgotten? What connections existed between archives he had consulted and deaths following his consultation?
Delphine had said she found something in the Chardon papers. Tomorrow morning she would bring it, and he would listen, and they would work it the way they had worked the Beaumont documents—side by side, her precision and his memory building something neither could construct alone.
The thought of her steadied something that the Fontenot kitchen had destabilized. Not because she was a solution to any of this. Because she was a fact—warm, specific, and outsidethe architecture of the trap. Something the architect had not counted on and could not fully account for, because whatever the mark broadcast about his vulnerabilities, it could not broadcast what she actually meant. That was his, and it stayed his.
The investigation had made him visible. He would continue investigating—visibly, predictably, exactly as expected.
But behind that performance, he would hunt.
The architect wanted him distracted. The factions wanted him managed.
He would give them what they expected.
And while they watched, he would find the hand that had set this trap—and remove it from the board.
ELEVEN
Baptiste called before dawn.
Bastien stood at his window on Dauphine Street, watching the last figures of the Quarter’s night population dissolve into doorways and side streets. He had not slept. The decision from the previous night sat in his chest alongside the curse—he would stop following the trail the killer laid and start cutting across it. He would stop being bait. He would hunt.
His phone lit against the sill, and Baptiste’s name filled the screen.
“Where.”
