Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
“What comes next?” he asked.
“Next,” Maman said, “we find out which one it is. Punishment builds toward an ending. Preparation builds toward a beginning. The cage will tell us which, but only if we reach it before it reaches you.”
She rose from her chair and collected the ceramic jar from the shelf behind her—dark glass, the contents inside swallowing light instead of returning it. She placed it at the center of the candle triangle, and the flames pulled toward it, bending low.
“We have work to do,” she said.
Bastien gathered the photographs and returned them to the portfolio. His fingers passed over each face. Fontenot. Vidal. Arceneaux. Deschamps. Renier. Peletier. Cantrelle. Garnier. People who had helped him. People who had died for it.
He closed the portfolio and placed it inside his jacket, against the mark.
The beacon pushed its signal outward. The nodes received it and returned it. The cage held.
Delphine zipped her bag and stood. She looked at him across the table. The candles had begun to fade, their amber dimming as Maman’s attention moved to the work ahead. In the diminishing glow, Delphine’s chin held its forward angle, her eyes already calculating the distance between what they knew and what they needed.
“What do you need from me?” she asked.
“Stay close,” he said.
She lifted her bag to her shoulder and followed Maman into the front room.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The first seizure hit on the stairs.
Bastien had one hand on the railing and one foot on the third step when his forearm detonated. The darkened skin tore open along seams he had not known it possessed, and the pain arrived without gradation, without the incremental build that two months of escalation had trained him to anticipate and absorb. The hum he had carried for weeks, the directional pull, the slow climb toward a threshold he had learned to breathe through — none of that applied. His arm split wide, and every nerve between his hip and his collarbone ignited at once.
His hand locked on the banister. His knees folded. He caught himself on the stair’s edge, hip striking the wood, the impact registering as a distant fact beneath the heat consuming his left side. The pain spread outward, climbed his sternum, reached his throat, and lodged behind his eyes in a pressure that bent the stairwell into overlapping planes.
The banister occupied three positions. The wall beside him warped, its plaster surface bowing outward as the curse pushed through his flesh and into the surrounding air.
He could not stand.
Two centuries of holding himself upright through injuries that would have killed a mortal body, through the slow erosion of what he had been before the fall, through every escalation the mark had delivered since it first appeared beneath his skin—and his legs refused the command his mind issued. The signal transmitted outward with an intensity that buzzed in his teeth. The nodes at the murder sites would be receiving. The cage Isaak Vael had described—the closed loop connecting each death to the beacon in his flesh—would be vibrating at the frequency the architect had designed it to reach. Every component of the trap was alive and singing, and Bastien knelt on the stairs and could not make his body answer.
His hand pressed against his forearm. The flesh beneath his shirt burned so hot the temperature traveled through the fabric and into his palm, and the contact amplified the output instead of dampening it.
A second wave followed the first. His spine seized. His head dropped forward, his forehead found the stair riser, and the wood pressed against his skull while the rest of the world lost its solidity.
Outside, September held its late-afternoon humidity over the city. The live oak’s branches scraped the second-floor windows in a wind too sluggish to move the air through the building’s open casements. A city bus braked at the Esplanade corner stop, its hydraulics wheezing, and the sound reached him muffled, stripped of its edges, as if the curse had interposed itself between his ears and the avenue.
Bastien counted his heartbeats because counting was the last discipline that held.
Twelve. Thirteen. Each one arrived with a concussive pressure that expanded from the mark and met resistance in his extremities—a compression closing inward from the edges of his body, squeezing what the curse had spread. His fingers tingled. His feet had gone cold inside his shoes. Blood redirected inward, drawn by the beacon’s demand, feeding the signal instead of the man who carried it.
He had experienced seizures before. Once in 1934, when a blood ward on Toulouse Street detonated during an investigation and the residual energy hit his system with enough force to drop him in a courtyard while three factions watched. Once in 1871, when the mark that preceded this one—the first attempt at a beacon, cruder, abandoned by its caster—flared during a confrontation and put him on the floor of a warehouse on Tchoupitoulas.