“Binding the flesh to the spirit.” Valentin cut in, his patience thinner than his elder’s. “The blood must drain in a specific sequence, following the body’s meridians. The heart must sustain damage but not destruction—pierced at an exact angle that disrupts the dispersal mechanism without triggering it. And the sigils must be carved before death, not after. The victim would feel each one.”
Celeste, standing near the door, made a soft sound. Bastien did not look at her.
“That requires knowledge,” he said. “The kind that doesn’t appear in books. At least not any that I’ve been made aware of over the last three centuries.”
“No.” Marcelline’s ancient eyes fixed on his. “It requires either direct instruction from one who knows, or access to records that should have been destroyed centuries ago.”
“Records kept by whom?”
Another silence. The candle flames did not flicker. Nothing in the room breathed.
“There were trials,” Marcelline said. “In the early years. Before the houses agreed that certain practices should be forbidden. Some vampires believed that preventing dispersal could grant additional power—that the trapped consciousness could be harvested, consumed, bent to the will of the one who held the vessel.” Her expression did not change, but her voice dropped half a register. “They were wrong. The experiments produced only suffering. We burned the records. We executed those who possessed the knowledge. We made it law that anyone who attempted such binding would face destruction themselves.”
“The Marchande-Levesque purge,” Bastien said.
Valentin went still. Séverine’s hand moved toward her throat, an unconscious gesture of protection.
“You know that name.” Marcelline’s words held no question.
“The sigil appeared on Armand’s arm. A circle, bisected by two wavy lines, three marks above and below.”
“That bloodline ended in 1891.” Valentin’s pale eyes had narrowed. “Every member. The knowledge they preserved should have died with them.”
“Someone remembered.” Bastien let the implication settle. “Someone with access to what you burned. Someone who knows your law well enough to break it with precision.”
Before anyone could respond, Celeste’s phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen, and her face went slack, color draining from her cheeks until she matched the corpses they were discussing.
“Marcelline.” Her voice cracked. “Another body. Algiers Point, near the ferry landing.”
It was then that Bastien’s phone buzzed with a message. Likely alerting him to the same news.
The drive across the Crescent City Connection took twelve minutes at this hour, the bridge empty of traffic, the Mississippi spreading black and wide beneath the car. Bastien kept his window cracked despite the heat. The river’s smell rose to meet him—mud and salt and the green rot of things that lived in water too murky to see through.
Algiers Point occupied the west bank, a neighborhood that had been ferry terminal and shipyard and artist colony depending on the decade. The architecture changed as he crossed—fewer Creole townhouses, more shotgun doubles painted in colors that looked cheerful by daylight and washed out to gray under the sulfur glow of streetlamps.
Baptiste met him at the address they had exchanged, a small house two blocks from the ferry landing, its yard overgrown with elephant ears and banana palms. Yellow crime scene tape stretched across the front porch. The human officers on duty nodded as Bastien approached, their eyes glazed with the Veil’s protective confusion.
“Same as this morning?” Bastien asked.
Baptiste’s jaw worked before he answered. “Worse.”
The body lay in the back garden, arranged among flowering ginger plants whose red blooms matched the blood pooled beneath the corpse. A woman this time—middle-aged at turning, undead for perhaps sixty years. Her face held the same frozen recognition Bastien had seen on Armand Fontenot. She had known her killer. She had understood what approached.
The sigils carved into her forearms told a familiar story of binding, containment, anchoring. And beneath them, the Marchande-Levesque mark.
“Her name?” Bastien crouched beside the body, noting the throat wound’s precise depth, the heart’s exact damage.
“Solange Vidal.” Baptiste’s voice held the flatness of someone forcing himself not to feel. “Minor status, aligned with House Béat through her sire’s line. She managed a rare book shop for the past thirty years. Kept to herself, fed clean, never caused trouble.”
“Her bloodline.”
Baptiste hesitated. “Old. Her sire turned in 1843, who’d been sired by someone turned in 1789. The line goes back to the original French colonial families—the ones who established the courts before the Louisiana Purchase.”
“The same line as Armand Fontenot?”
“Distant cousins, if you trace it back far enough. Both descend from vampires turned during the territorial period, when the French courts still controlled the region.” Baptiste paused. “When the Marchande-Levesque family still held power.”
Bastien stood. The ginger flowers released their fragrance into the humid air, sweet and heavy, mixing with the copper smell of blood. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked once and fell silent.
