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)
Her fingers touched his skin.
Heat exploded through him.
Not pain, not precisely, but an intensity that drove the breath from his lungs and set white spots dancing across his vision. She muttered some words, and the mark responded to her touch with fury, with recognition, with something that felt obscenely close to welcome. Her hand pressed flat against the darkened flesh, and Bastien felt the connection between them open, felt her perception flow into the space where the mark lived, felt her ancient knowledge brush against whatever had taken residence in his arm.
She then said more words in a language older than French, older than Latin. Syllables with consonants that scraped and vowels that howled. Her eyes closed. Her other hand moved through the air, tracing patterns that left faint trails of light in the dimness of her shop.
Candles on every surface bent their flames toward the two of them, drawn by whatever was occurring in the space between their bodies. Shadows on the walls contracted. A jar on the highest shelf trembled, its contents shifting with visible agitation.
Then she withdrew her hand, and the heat subsided to its baseline warmth.
Maman stepped back. Her face had gone the gray of old concrete, and her eyes held something Bastien had never seen there before.
“That is not contamination,” she said. “That is a curse. Deliberately placed. Carefully constructed. Designed to do exactly what it is doing.”
Confirmation landed with physical force. Bastien had suspected since the fourth crime scene, since the killer anticipated his arrival, since his own flesh responded to ritual magic as though prepared to receive it.
“What does it do?”
Maman moved to her shelves, pulling down jars and bottles with hands that trembled at the edges. “Sit. I need to examine this properly. What I felt was only the surface.”
He sat. She arranged her materials on the table between them, clearing space among the photographs of the dead. A bowl of water drawn from the Mississippi during the new moon. A blade with a handle made from cemetery wood. Powders in colors that had no names in any language Bastien spoke.
“I had to put a protection on myself before touching it. You’ve got yourself a situation here, Bastien.”
Bastien already knew that, so no response was necessary. She then worked in silence for several minutes, mixing components with the precision of someone following instructions memorized generations ago. Pale amber emerged from the combination, viscous, smelling of rain and copper and something acrid underneath.
“Your arm,” she said.
He extended it. The darkened skin sat exposed in the shop’s dim light, stark against the paler flesh surrounding it, the lines within seeming to move when viewed from certain angles, shifting configurations that suggested language without offering meaning.
Maman dipped three fingers into the amber mixture and pressed them against the mark.
This was worse than before. Deeper. The mixture burned not in the flesh but somewhere beneath it, somewhere the body should not have been able to feel.
Her eyes went unfocused, seeing things that existed in layers the ordinary world could not access. Her lips moved, counting or cataloging or both. Her other hand traced the air above his arm, following lines invisible to him but clearly visible to her practiced perception.
“Beacon,” she said finally, withdrawing her fingers. “You are carrying a beacon.”
“Explain.”
“What lives in your arm draws everything with trained eyes. You are broadcasting your position and your nature through every wall in this city.” She wiped her fingers on a cloth beside the bowl. “Every practitioner with sufficient skill can feel you. Every entity that feeds on power knows exactly where you stand. The anonymity you maintained for two centuries is gone.”
Bastien absorbed this, feeling implications spread through his understanding. He had survived in New Orleans precisely because he existed between factions. Not vampire, though he could move among them. Not witch, though he understood their work. Not aligned with any power that might demand his service or his elimination. His neutrality had been his armor.
And someone had stripped it away.
Even here, inside Maman’s wards, inside protections that had held for decades, the broadcast continued. Every practitioner with sufficient skill knew he stood on Rampart Street at this moment, knew he had sought counsel, could guess the nature of his concern. What lived in his arm did not care about sanctuary. It transmitted through walls and wards alike.
His hands curled into fists at his sides. The violation of it burned hotter than anything in his forearm. Someone had touched him. Had placed this thing in his flesh without his knowledge, without his consent, had turned his body into a transmitter serving their purposes.
The fury rose through his chest, hot and clean. He did not let it reach his face.
“Who placed it?”
“I cannot tell you that. The signature is obscured, the same way the murderer’s signature is obscured in those sigils.” She gestured toward his notebook, still open on the table. “But I can tell you this requires knowledge that few possess. The casting must be performed in proximity to the target. Someone got near enough to touch you without your awareness, and they placed this curse with precision that speaks to decades of study.”