Bastien drank and watched her drink and let the quiet hold. The case files waited in the other room. The corkboard of photographs and sigil tracings and bloodline maps waited where they had left it the evening before.
But the woman sitting across from him in his shirt, with coffee dust on her fingers, had earned this pause. He had earned it. Whatever the day would bring, whatever the case would demand, these minutes belonged to them.
Delphine’s phone sat on the table between them. His phone sat in the bedroom, on the floor beside the bed where it had landed when she pulled his shirt over his head the night before.
His phone rang.
The sound cut through the kitchen. Bastien set his mug down and crossed the safehouse in four strides. The screen showed Baptiste’s name.
He answered.
“Where.” The word carried its own history between them. He had answered Baptiste’s calls with that single syllable across years of fieldwork, and the syllable contained everything that followed: location, urgency, what he would find when he arrived.
“Seventh Ward. Abandoned double-shotgun on North Prieur, past St. Bernard.” Baptiste’s voice held the tightness Bastien had learned to read as contained alarm. The vowels compressed. The consonants landed harder than casual speech produced. “This one is different.”
“Different how.”
“The carving is deeper. The symbol over the heart repeats. Three times, concentric. And the body...” A pause that lasted two seconds longer than Baptiste’s pauses ever lasted. “It faces the door. The killer left the door open. Whoever did this wanted it found fast.”
Bastien pressed his hand against the curse mark. The signal, still operating at its reduced level, spiked once and settled.
“Thirty minutes.”
“I’ll hold the scene.”
The call ended. Bastien lowered the phone and stood in the bedroom with the sheets still carrying the shape of two bodies and the air still holding the scent of Delphine’s skin.
She stood in the kitchen doorway. She had heard his side of the conversation, and her face had already shifted from the unguarded warmth of the morning to the composed focus shebrought to the investigation. The change showed in the set of her jaw and the angle of her shoulders and the way her eyes found his and held them without blinking.
“Another body,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’m coming with you.”
He did not argue. The months of attempting to keep her at a distance from the crime scenes had collapsed alongside every other form of restraint he had maintained around Delphine LeClair. She had contributed pattern recognition and archival connections that his centuries of experience had not produced. And the woman who had silenced his curse with her mouth would not be told to stay behind.
They dressed in silence. She wore yesterday’s clothes, the blouse wrinkled from the floor, the trousers creased at the knees. He wore what he always wore for fieldwork.
The drive to the Seventh Ward took twelve minutes through morning traffic. Delphine drove. Bastien sat in the passenger seat and tracked the curse mark’s behavior as they moved northeast through the city. The signal had resumed its full volume the moment they left the safehouse. Delphine’s proximity had reduced it; distance restored it.
North Prieur Street held the architecture of a neighborhood that had survived flooding and neglect and partial recovery in uneven measures. Shotgun doubles lined the block, some renovated with fresh paint and iron railings, others carrying the marks of decades without investment. The abandoned double sat mid-block, its weatherboard siding gray with age, its porch sagging at the left corner where a support had rotted through. A ligustrum hedge had consumed the side yard.
Baptiste stood on the porch. His posture told Bastien everything the phone call had not. His hands hung at his sides, and they did not move. Baptiste’s hands moved whenthe work was manageable. When they went still, the work had exceeded the parameters he had set for himself across years of investigating deaths that did not follow mortal rules.
“In the front room,” Baptiste said as they climbed the porch steps. He looked at Delphine. His expression did not change, but his attention registered her arrival alongside Bastien at this hour. He said nothing about it. “The door was open when I arrived. The contact who called it in said it was open when she passed at six-fifteen this morning.”
Blood hit Bastien at the threshold. Sharper than the previous scenes, carrying an iron concentration that told him the body had not been dead long. The burned-herb residue of ritual smoke hung thicker here than at any prior site. And the air itself pressed against his skin with a wrongness that had nothing to do with temperature—a frequency that told his body the space ahead contained a violation of the physical world.
The front room of the shotgun held a body.
The vampire lay on the bare wooden floor, facing the open front door. The killer had arranged the body with the same geometry Bastien had documented at every prior scene. Arms at the sides, eyes open, skin intact and uncollapsed, holding the appearance of life in the way that only prevented dispersal could achieve.
But this body carried marks the others had not.
The sigils cut deeper into the flesh than any previous victim’s had. The binding marks on the forearms reached through the dermis and into the muscle beneath, the grooves wide enough to expose tissue that should have stayed invisible. The containment glyphs at the wrists showed the same increased depth. The anchoring signs along the biceps had cracked the underlying bone in two places.
Over the heart, the Marchande-Levesque symbol repeated three times. Concentric rings of the same design, each carvedat a different depth, the outermost shallow and the innermost reaching tissue that Bastien had never seen exposed at a murder scene.
