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)
The pulse grew stronger as he held it, matching the rhythm of his heartbeat. Outside, thunder rolled across the Quarter, and somewhere in the distance, a church bell began to toll the hour.
Four o’clock in the morning. The hour when the Veil was thinnest, when the boundary between past and present became permeable.
Bastien opened his case files again, studying the pattern of incidents with new understanding. The reports weren’t random supernatural events—they were echoes. Fragments of memory bleeding through from 1906, carried on the same magical currents that were awakening the locket.
A grandmother rocking on a porch might be someone’s great-great-grandmother, killed in the original fire but somehow preserved in the city’s mystical memory. A self-mixing cocktail shaker could be the ghost of a long-dead bartender, still serving drinks to customers who existed only in recollection. Dreams of strangers calling through smoke might be the voices of the original ritual’s victims, still trying to complete connections that had been severed by flame and chaos.
The locket pulsed again, brighter this time, and Bastien felt something shift deep in his chest. A loosening of bonds he’d thought permanently sealed, a stirring of hope he’d buried beneath decades of grief.
Whatever was coming, whatever the arcane recursion was building toward, it had found him. The question now was whether he would have the courage to face it—and whether this time, he might be strong enough to change how the story ended.
He set the locket carefully on his desk and reached for his phone. If the past was truly returning, if the old magic was awakening, then he needed allies. People who understood the dangers they were all about to face.
The first call went to Vincent Tremé, a psychic who specialized in temporal disturbances. The second to Tib Thibodeaux, whose werewolf pack had territorial claims throughout the bayou parishes. The third to Tomas Navarro, one of the old vampires who remembered what the Quarter had been like before the treaties.
Each conversation was brief, professional, carefully neutral. But beneath the surface, Bastien heard what he was listening for—the same unease he’d been feeling, the same sense that something fundamental was shifting in the city’s supernatural landscape.
By dawn, he had confirmation. The recursion wasn’t limited to his immediate area. Reports were coming in from across the Quarter, from Uptown, from the Marigny. Everywhere that had been touched by the original 1906 incident was showing signs of magical instability.
And at the center of it all, growing stronger with each passing hour, was the signature of soul-tethering magic. The same forbidden working that had torn his world apart over a century ago.
The locket pulsed once more, then went dark again. But the warmth lingered in his palm, and with it, something he’d thought lost forever.
Hope.
Whatever was coming, he would be ready for it. This time, he wouldn’t arrive too late. This time, he wouldn’t watch helplessly as the woman he loved died in flames, her eyes filled with confusion instead of recognition.
This time, perhaps, the story might have a different ending.
Outside his window, the first hints of sunrise began to paint the eastern sky in shades of gold and rose. The rain had stopped, and the Quarter was stirring to life as it had for centuries—a city built on the boundary between worlds, where the impossible was merely improbable and the past never stayed buried for long.
Bastien closed his case files and prepared for the day ahead. Whatever the arcane recursion was building toward, whatever the awakening magic intended to accomplish, he would meet it head-on.
After all, he’d already lost everything once. What more could the universe possibly take from him?
The locket on his desk caught the morning light and seemed, just for a moment, to pulse again.
Everything, he realized. If he was wrong about what was coming, if this was another cruel trick of memory and hope, the universe could take everything all over again.
But if he was right . . .
If he was right, then perhaps some bonds really were strong enough to survive death itself.
Two
The Obscura Archive occupied a converted Creole townhouse on Ursulines Street, its narrow facade squeezed between a palm reader’s shop and a store that sold nothing but vintage postcards. Bastien had walked past the building thousands of times over the past twenty-five years, always on the opposite side of the street, always with his eyes averted from the second-floor windows where he knew she worked.
Today, for the first time since Delphine Leclair had grown old enough to hold a job, he was going inside.
The keepsake locket burned against his ribs as he climbed the front steps. Hours had passed since he’d felt it pulse to life in his office, and the metal hadn’t cooled. Each step toward the Archive’s entrance made it hotter, as if responding to proximity with something it recognized.
A brass plaque beside the door read “Obscura Archive: Historical Research and Document Preservation.” Beneath it, smaller text promised “Specializing in Louisiana Genealogy, Colonial Records, and Unusual Historical Phenomena.”