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)
EIGHT
Genealogical charts covered Bastien’s floor.
He had pulled every document from the three boxes against his wall—parish records, marriage contracts, sire registries, handwritten notes in French and Spanish and occasionally Latin. The papers formed overlapping layers across the hardwood, centuries of vampire lineage rendered in ink that had faded from black to brown to something close to rust. His apartment smelled of old paper and dust and the faint copper undertone that never quite left his skin anymore.
Past two in the morning, and the humidity had not relented. His shirt clung to his shoulders. Beneath his sleeve, the forearm kept its own broadcast — a frequency that had nothing to do with August and everything to do with whoever had ears trained to receive it.
Let them listen. He had work to do.
The five victims’ names anchored separate columns on his corkboard: Armand Fontenot. Solange Vidal. Thierry Arceneaux. Marguerite Deschamps. Adelaide Renier. Beneath each name, photographs, bloodline data, the sigils carved into their flesh. Five words in a sentence he was beginning to read.
He returned to the 1847 tribunal manifest—the water-stained document listing thirty-seven vampires representing twelve bloodlines. The Presbytère gathering. The Unified Feeding Compact that House Marchande-Levesque had proposed and that the assembled families had rejected.
He had been reading the manifest as a target list. The killer worked through descendants of those who had attended, picking off minor members of houses that had witnessed the beginning of the Marchande-Levesque destruction. A revenge pattern spanning generations.
But revenge for what, precisely?
The compact’s rejection had been political, not personal. House Marchande-Levesque had proposed restrictions on feeding territories—shared hunting grounds, regulated access, an end to the territorial disputes that had plagued the city since the Spanish ceded Louisiana to France and France sold it to America. The other houses had refused. They preferred their independence, their private territories, their ability to feed without negotiation.
Forty-four years later, coordinated violence destroyed the Marchande-Levesque family. Every member. Bodies left intact as warning.
He remembered the aftermath. The silence that fell over vampire society, the distance everyone maintained from the Garden District for months afterward, the way certain names stopped being spoken aloud.
The official history held that the Marchande-Levesque family had violated feeding law. That they had killed humans carelessly, attracted mortal attention, endangered the Veil protecting vampire existence. That the other houses had acted in collective defense, eliminating a threat before it could spread.
Bastien had never believed it.
He pulled a different box from beneath his desk—one he had not opened in decades, filled with documents acquired through methods the vampire court would not have sanctioned. Correspondence. Private journals. The kind of records that should have burned with the Marchande-Levesque estate but had found their way into the hands of collectors who understood that information aged better than wine.
The first letter was dated March 1889, two years before the purge.
My dear Henri,
The tribunal has voted. House Beaumont and House Chardon have aligned against us, as we expected. But House Lavigne’s defection surprised me—I thought Margot understood what we offered. She chose tradition over survival. They all did.
The compact is dead. But I fear we have made enemies who will not forget our presumption. We proposed that the old ways were insufficient. We suggested that the houses had failed to adapt. In doing so, we accused them of weakness.
Weakness they will now feel compelled to prove false.
Your devoted servant, Étienne Marchande-Levesque
Bastien set the letter aside and reached for the next.
The correspondence spanned eighteen months. Étienne Marchande-Levesque wrote to a contact Bastien could not identify—someone outside the city, perhaps outside the region, a confidant who received reports of growing tensions without participating in them. The letters painted a picture that had never appeared in official records.
The compact’s rejection had not ended the conflict. It had begun one.
House Marchande-Levesque continued advocating for territorial reform. They approached individual vampires, building support among those who felt excluded from the current system. They documented feeding violations by the established houses—instances where the old families had taken humans carelessly, had attracted mortal attention, had done precisely what they would later accuse the Marchande-Levesque family of doing.
The other houses noticed.
They watch us now, Étienne wrote in August 1890. Not openly—that would acknowledge the threat we pose. But I see their agents in the Quarter. I hear their questions being asked. They are building a case, Henri. Manufacturing evidence. When they move against us, they will have documentation to justify what cannot be justified.
We should flee. I know this. But fleeing means abandoning everyone who trusted us, everyone who believed that change was possible. We cannot betray them.
Though I fear we have already doomed them.
The final letter was dated January 1891, three weeks before the purge.
Henri—
House Lavigne has presented the tribunal with allegations of our crimes. Margot herself delivered the charges. We are accused of feeding violations spanning five years, of endangering the Veil, of conspiring to weaken vampire society through our “reform” proposals.