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 third was Marguerite Deschamps.
He knew her, distantly. Eighty-four years undead, sired in 1941 by a vampire from House Lavigne—one of the families that had voted against the Unified Feeding Compact and had later participated in the Marchande-Levesque purge. She managed a small gallery on St. Claude Avenue, specializing in art from local Black artists whose work deserved wider recognition than it received. She had never sought rank, never claimed territory. She existed in the quiet spaces of vampire society, noticed only by those who bothered to notice.
Exactly the kind of victim the killer had been selecting.
And tonight—Bastien checked his calendar—tonight was the anniversary of her sire’s final death. Marguerite visited his tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 every year on this date, a private observance that had continued for six decades. Exactly the kind of predictable ritual that made a vampire easy to find.
The clock on his desk read 3:47 AM. If the killer knew her habits—and the killer had known everything else—Marguerite Deschamps might already be dead among the tombs of the city’s oldest cemetery, surrounded by two centuries of the dead, another body added to ground that had held bodies since 1789.
Bastien reached for his phone to call Baptiste, then stopped.
His forearm burned. Heat spreading, pressure building. The sensation carried information he could not decode—some signal transmitted through his flesh, received without comprehension.
The killer was there—perhaps minutes ahead, perhaps an hour.
The thought arrived with a certainty that had no logical foundation. But his body had reacted at each crime scene, had recognized something in the arrangement of death and symbol and intention. If it was responding now, in his office, miles from any murder site—
He grabbed his keys and moved.
The drive to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 took four minutes at this hour. Basin Street empty, traffic lights cycling through their patterns for no one. Bastien ran two of them.
The cemetery’s whitewashed walls rose against the dark sky as he approached, that distinctive above-ground architecture that had given New Orleans burial grounds their reputation as cities of the dead. The tombs inside dated back to 1789—older than the Louisiana Purchase, older than the American flag flying over the city, older than most of the vampire bloodlines he had been tracing tonight.
He turned onto Basin Street and saw the lights. His shoulders fell. He’d hoped he was wrong even if he knew what he’d find there.
Red and blue, strobing against the cemetery’s pale walls, painting the night in colors that meant he was too late. A police cruiser blocked the entrance. Two officers stood at the gate, their postures carrying the slack confusion Bastien had come to recognize as they had been glamoured by vampires in the vicinity.
He parked across the street and approached on foot.
“Durand.” The officer who recognized him was young, her face pale beneath the streetlights. “They said you might be coming.”
“Who found her?”
“Security guard. Does rounds every few hours, noticed the gate had been forced around two-thirty. Found her near the back, by the old family vaults.” The officer swallowed. “It’s bad.”
It would be. Especially to an unsuspecting human.
Bastien ducked under the tape and entered the cemetery.
The tombs rose around him in rows, whitewashed stone glowing faintly in the darkness, each vault holding generations of remains stacked in the New Orleans fashion—bones pushed to the back as new bodies took their place in the heat that reduced flesh to skeleton within a year and a day. Spanish moss hung from the few trees that grew between the crypts. The smell of old stone and damp earth mixed with something else: blood, hours old, and the copper tang of ritual smoke.
He followed the narrow pathways between tombs. Names carved into marble recorded families that had shaped the city: Laveau, Moreau, Pinckney, names that appeared in the histories tourists read and in the hidden records only the old kept. The crime scene waited near the back wall, in an alcove formed by three family vaults that created a small courtyard invisible from the main pathways. Marguerite’s sire was interred here—the Lavigne tomb, its marble façade carved with angels whose faces had eroded to blank ovals. Candle stubs and wilted flowers marked where Marguerite had made her annual offerings in years past.
He found her on the ground before the tomb, arranged with the same care as all the others.
The positioning matched exactly. On her back, arms at her sides, eyes open to a sky framed by the vaults that surrounded her. Her expression held that same frozen recognition—the moment of understanding, the instant when she had seen what approached and known she could not stop it.
The throat wound gaped, deep and exact. The heart bore its puncture, metal thin and true. The sigils traced their path across her forearms: binding marks, containment glyphs, anchoring signs. And over her heart, carved with careful strokes, the Marchande-Levesque symbol.