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)
The tremor in his left hand worsened. His fingers curled against his thigh, and he could not straighten them.
The kitchen faucet ran above him. Delphine moved through the rooms beyond the landing, and the cabinet door opened and closed, and the tap shut off, and then her footsteps returned toward the stairs.
He would not be able to hide this from her. The seizure and its aftermath had stripped the capacity for concealment alongside everything else the curse had taken. She would return, and she would look at him, and she would see a man whose hands would not stop shaking, whose spine required a wall, whose body had crossed a threshold it could not recross.
She would see that the investigation they had built together now moved on a timeline his body might not survive.
The mockingbird called again.
Delphine descended with a glass of water in one hand and a damp cloth in the other.
Her eyes found him before her feet reached the first stair—his position against the wall, the hands in his lap, the tremor that had not subsided in her absence. She registered the full inventory in the seconds it took her to cross the landing. Her jaw tightened. The tendon in her neck rose against the skin.
She sat on the stair above him, placed the glass between her knees, took his right hand, and pressed the damp cloth against the burned palm. The coolness cut through the throb. She held the compress in place and did not rush.
“The shaking is worse,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The mark?”
“Climbed back the moment you left.”
She placed his wrapped hand in his lap and moved the glass to the stair beside his hip. Then she settled her palm against his forearm.
The beacon dropped—lower than it had the first time, lower than the register it had held before the seizure began. Her palm met less resistance now. The pressure behind his eyes receded. The tremor in his left hand slowed, stuttered, and steadied to a vibration he could tolerate.
His right hand, wrapped in the damp cloth, rested against his thigh. Delphine placed her free hand over his left and pressed his fingers flat.
They sat while the stairs dimmed around them and the live oak threw its moving patterns across the wall. The mockingbird had gone quiet. Traffic on Esplanade had thinned to the interval between rush and evening, and the block held a stillness that the city rarely permitted.
“In the basement on Tchoupitoulas,” he said. “Your hand on my chest. The crime scene on North Prieur. Your hand on my arm. Tonight.” He looked at her palm. “Every time the curse escalates, your contact brings it down.”
“I know.”
“That should not be possible. The curse was designed by someone who understood my body—what it carries, how it functions. Maman’s wards affect the signal. Her preparations can dampen it. But your touch does what the wards cannot. It does not block the output. It changes the output’s character.”
Delphine’s fingers flexed against the mark.
“I am not going to theorize about why my hand on you affects the curse,” she said. “I am going to observe that it does. And I am going to use that observation the way I use every piece of evidence—practically.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. The expression hurt. Every muscle in his face had locked during the seizure, and they had not fully released.
“You are the most practical person I have ever known.”
“You have known people for two hundred years. The bar should be higher.”
He reached for her hand. His fingers closed around hers, and her hand tightened in his.
“I cannot do this without you.” The words arrived without preamble, without qualification, without the measured framing he applied to statements that carried risk. “The curse is accelerating. The cage is completing. And the only counter I have found to what it does to me is you. Sitting on a staircase. Holding my hand.”
Delphine did not blink.
“Then you will not do it without me,” she said.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead. The kiss lasted three seconds. Her mouth carried none of the hunger their kisses usually held—only steadiness, only the weight of a decision she would not revisit.
She pulled back.
“We need to eat,” she said. “And you need to drink that water. And then we need to call Maman and tell her the cage is moving faster than we thought.”
“In that order?”
“In that order.”
She rose and extended her hand. He took it. She braced herself against the banister and pulled, and he stood, and his legs held.
They climbed the remaining stairs together. Her shoulder pressed against his arm. The four-inch gap they had maintained through weeks of walking side by side had closed, and neither of them restored it.
The kitchen held the last of the light. The live oak filtered it across the table and the coffeepot and the corkboard on the far wall where eight faces watched from their positions around his name. Delphine filled a second glass from the tap and brought it to him. Their fingers overlapped on the ceramic, and the overlap lasted.