Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 105939 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105939 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
“Will you come up for coffee?” she asked as they reached the front steps. “Mrs. Thibodeau is visiting her sister in Metairie. We’d have the parlor to ourselves.”
The invitation was carefully casual, but Bastien heard the deeper question beneath it. They had been building toward this moment for months—the space between courtship and complete surrender, between the love they’d acknowledged and the future they’d only dared to dream of.
“Delia.” He stopped her with a gentle hand on her wrist. “Before we . . . there’s something you should know about me. Something important.”
She turned to face him fully, her expression serious now. “Tell me.”
“I’m not what I appear to be. My nature, my past—”
“Your nature is to protect people who need protecting,” she interrupted. “Your past brought you to me. Everything else is just details.”
“What if the details matter? What if they change how you see everything between us?”
She considered this, her head tilted slightly to one side. In the distance, a clock tower chimed the hour—ten o’clock. Late enough that the streets were nearly empty, early enough that the night still held promise.
“Then we’ll face that when it comes,” she said finally. “But Bastien, I need you to understand something. Whatever you think you need to confess, whatever darkness you imagine you carry—it doesn’t change what I feel. It doesn’t change what we are to each other.”
The certainty in her voice nearly undid him. She was offering him exactly what he’d wanted without even knowing the true weight of what she was accepting. A fallen angel’s love came with complications that could span lifetimes, with dangers she couldn’t begin to imagine.
But looking at her face in the lamplight—seeing the trust and affection and quiet determination there—he found himself believing that perhaps this time could be different. Perhaps this time, love might be enough.
“Tomorrow,” he said, his voice steadier now. “Come to the cathedral after your work. I’ll tell you everything then. And I’ll ask you something I should have asked months ago.”
“Ask me now.”
“Tomorrow.”
She smiled, accepting the delay with grace. “Very well. Tomorrow, then.” She stepped closer, her hands finding his face as she drew him down to her. Their lips met in a kiss that held all the promise of tomorrow—deep, lingering, filled with the certainty of love freely given and completely returned. When they finally parted, her eyes were bright with unshed tears of happiness. “Good night, my mysterious guardian.”
“Good night, my love.”
She climbed the stairs to the boarding house door, her skirts swaying gently. At the threshold, she turned back to him with that same bright smile.
“Tomorrow,” she said, and began to hum again—that same lovely, unconscious melody.
He stood there long after she’d gone inside, long after the light appeared in her second-floor window and then went dark again. The ring box remained in his pocket, the proposal unspoken, but for the first time in as long as he could remember, Bastien felt something approaching peace.
Tomorrow, he would tell her everything.
Tomorrow, he would ask her to be his wife, to bind her life to his in ways that would transcend human understanding. Both human and ethereal promise in one.
Tomorrow, they would begin planning a future that seemed, in this moment, as bright as the gas lamps lining the Quarter streets.
He was still standing there, lost in dreams of tomorrow, when the first wave of mystical disturbance hit him.
It began as a whisper along his senses—the faint taste of copper and ozone, the subtle wrongness that meant someone, somewhere, was meddling with forces beyond their understanding. For a moment, he dismissed it as background noise. New Orleans was always alive with small magics, tiny rituals performed by practitioners who thought they understood the powers they invoked.
But this was different.
Older.
Stronger.
And growing.
The second wave hit him harder, physically and strong enough that he staggered against the lamppost. This wasn’t the tentative magic of local practitioners. This was ancient power, forbidden knowledge, the kind of ritual that should have been lost centuries ago.
Anima Binding or Soul-tethering as some called it. Someone was attempting to bind spirits across lifetimes, to forge connections that transcended death itself.
Horror bloomed in his chest as understanding dawned. The ritual was massive in scope, designed to affect multiple subjects across a wide area. And at the heart of the working, he could sense the location of the primary focus.
The Saenger Theatre district. Four blocks from where he stood.
Two blocks from Delia’s boarding house.
“No.” The word came out as barely a whisper.
He was already running, his long coat streaming behind him as he raced through the narrow streets. Gas lamps flashed past in blurs of yellow light. His feet pounded against cobblestones while his mind cataloged the growing magical signatures around him.
Someone had been preparing this ritual for months, maybe years. They had layered protections around themselves, woven safeguards into the very architecture of the district. But they had also made a crucial error—they had assumed their targets would be willing participants.