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)
Six
The call came at six in the morning—Henri Novak’s voice carrying the particular strain that marked a detective who’d cataloged too many impossible events.
“We got another one, Mr. Durand. Same markings, same symptoms. But this time it’s someone who had contact with your first victim.”
Bastien reached for his clothes, exhaustion making his movements clumsy. A week since he’d revealed the truth to Delphine at the Archive. Seven days of watching her process revelations about reincarnation and soul-binding magic while he maintained distance that felt like slow starvation.
“Where?”
“Charity Hospital. Marcus Lafitte—bartender at Blue Note Café where your Emmett Carrow has been drinking. Came in around midnight screaming about fire and women made of ash.”
Bastien was already moving before Novak finished speaking. The drive through empty predawn streets took less than ten minutes but felt like hours as implications crystallized in his mind. Direct transmission between victims meant the contamination was evolving, adapting, growing stronger.
Charity Hospital rose from the medical district like a monument to human suffering, its emergency entrance bathed in fluorescents that leached color from everything they touched. Bastien found the private room by following the scent—jasmine twisted through something metallic and wrong, like perfume poured over heated copper.
But concentrated now. Aggressive.
“Started two hours after his shift,” Detective Novak said, not bothering with his notebook. Some cases resisted documentation. “Witnesses say he was fine, then collapsed in the parking lot like someone had set him on fire from the inside.”
Marcus Lafitte writhed against restraints that kept him from clawing at his own skin. Late twenties, lean from years behind the bar, but the markings across his torso told a different story entirely.
Soul burn glyphs carved themselves into his flesh in real-time, following vascular pathways that illuminated with each heartbeat. Not tattoos or scars—living symbols that pulsed with silver light, etching themselves deeper with every breath.
“Christ,” Bastien whispered, watching new patterns branch across the man’s ribs.
“Gets worse when he’s conscious,” a nurse said from the doorway. “Keeps asking for someone named Charlotte. Says she’s calling him home through fire that doesn’t burn.”
Marcus Lafitte’s eyes snapped open at the sound of voices. Pupils blown wide, he still focused with terrifying intensity on Bastien’s face.
“You know her,” he gasped, fighting the restraints. “The woman in white. She showed me your face in the flames. Said you’d understand what’s happening to me.”
Ice shot through Bastien’s chest. The victims weren’t just being marked—they were making direct contact with Charlotte’s spiritual essence.
“Tell me about the customer who paid with old coins.”
“Felt like winter given form. Spoke in a voice that carried accents from dead languages.” Marcus’s back arched as new sigils burned themselves across his collarbone. “Asked if I knew people who ‘carried old songs in their blood.’ When I said no, he smiled like I’d given the wrong answer.”
“What happened when you touched the coins?”
“Turned to ash in my palm. But when I breathed it in . . .” His voice broke into a keen of pure anguish. “That’s when she appeared. Beautiful and terrible and so alone. Standing in fire that should have consumed her but only made her glow brighter.”
The same vision Emmett had described. Charlotte’s essence, preserved in her family’s soul-binding experiments, reaching across centuries to mark random strangers for inclusion in a cosmic working none of them understood.
“Has anyone else been affected? Other employees?”
“Emmett said something about meeting a woman at the Archive. Researcher who helped him understand what was happening.” Marcus convulsed as symbols spread across his chest like infection. “Said she had kind eyes and knew things about old families that she shouldn’t know.”
Delphine.
Emmett had sought her out, drawn by the same mystical compulsions that marked him. And she, unaware of her role in the spreading contamination, had given him exactly the assistance his damaged soul craved.
Direct contact between victim and anchor point. The soul stream drift was accelerating.
Bastien left the hospital with Marcus Lafitte’s screams echoing in his ears and the certainty that time was running out. Every hour that passed meant more potential vectors, more innocent people marked for inclusion in Charlotte’s incomplete transformation.
His phone rang as he reached the French Quarter—Maman Brigitte’s voice tight with urgency.
“Don’t come to the shop. Meet me at Marie Laveau’s tomb. There are things we can’t discuss where walls have ears, and wind carries whispers to the wrong listeners.”
Twenty minutes later, Bastien pushed through the wrought iron gates of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Even at seven in the morning, the place felt like a city abandoned by the living. He walked the familiar gravel paths past early tourists seeking spectacle and locals who still believed in the power of the dead to influence the living.
Above-ground tombs cast long shadows that seemed to move independently of the sun, and Spanish moss draped the ancient oaks like blankets that rustled without breeze. The kind of place where death was architecture rather than absence.