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)
His throat gaped with a single wound, deep enough to drain him efficiently. The blood had pooled into a pattern on the flagstones beneath him, channeled by shallow grooves carved into the stone itself. Not spillage. Collection. But the throat alone would not have killed him—vampires healed from worse. The heart had ended him, pierced. Dispersal should have followed if it was the right tool used. It had not. Armand Fontenot lay there, flesh intact, becoming evidence.
Bastien crouched beside him.
A blade had pierced Armand’s heart—not a wooden stake, but something metal, thin, and exact. The weapon had been removed, but the entry point remained clean enough to read. The killer had damaged the heart without destroying it, as if they understood exactly how much trauma a vampire could sustain without triggering dispersal. This alone was enough to cause concern.
Is he really dead?
Then the sigils.
Shallow cuts wept rather than bled across Armand’s forearms. Bastien counted seven distinct symbols, each completed with careful strokes. Five he recognized—binding marks, containment glyphs, and anchoring signs meant to hold something in place against its will.
The sixth was unfamiliar. New, perhaps, or so old it had passed from common use before his time.
The seventh stopped his breath.
A circle, bisected by two wavy lines, with three small marks above and below. The sigil of House Marchande-Levesque—the bloodline that had died in 1891, murdered, every member, in a single night of coordinated violence that had reshaped the city’s vampire politics for over a century.
No one carved that mark anymore. No one remembered it except historians and the very old, those who had lived through the purge and its aftermath. Bastien himself remembered hearing of the massacre when it happened—the whispers that spread through the city’s hidden communities, the fear that had touched even those outside vampire politics. The symbol had appeared on doors throughout the Garden District. The bodies had been left intact.
Left. Those bodies had been left. Just as this one had been left.
He stood. His hands remained steady through will alone.
The killer had reached back over a hundred and thirty years for this. They had studied the old ways, the old killings, the specific terror of finding a vampire corpse intact when no corpse should exist. They had recreated the methodology with focus that spoke of either obsession or direct knowledge.
And they had placed the symbol of a dead bloodline on a body found in the heart of the Quarter, where every faction with interests in vampire politics would hear of it before sunrise.
Baptiste approached when Bastien emerged from the passage.
“Do you know what it means?”
Bastien watched the sky continue its transition from purple to gray. Nearby, a mockingbird launched into its dawn chorus, cycling through stolen songs. A delivery truck rumbled down Royal Street. The city woke around them, ordinary and oblivious.
“The Marchande-Levesque sigil,” he said. “Someone used it.”
Baptiste’s jaw tightened. “That bloodline’s been dead for—”
“One hundred and thirty-four years.” Bastien looked back at the passage, at the invisible line between street and courtyard, between the world that made sense and the one waiting beyond. “The killer did their research. And they wanted the body found.”
“Why?”
“That’s what we need to determine.” Bastien inhaled. The morning air tasted of blood and jasmine and something burned. “This wasn’t feeding. It wasn’t territory. It was execution—public, deliberate, designed to send a message.”
“To who?”
“To the vampire community I’d imagine. To the old families who remember what that symbol means.” He paused, indexing what he knew, what he suspected, what remained unclear. “And possibly to me.”
The mockingbird cycled through another bird’s song, then another, claiming melodies that didn’t belong to it but were easily recognizable.
Bastien had hours before the city fully woke, before word spread through the vampire community, before fear and suspicion began their work. Hours to learn what he could from a body that should not exist.
“Clear the scene,” he told Baptiste. “No one enters until I say otherwise. I need to examine the sigils more closely, and I’ll need photographs of everything before the body is moved.”
He turned back toward the passage.
The killer wanted the city to notice. They wanted the old families to remember a massacre most had worked to forget. They wanted this body found, this symbol seen, this message received.
They had succeeded.
TWO
The Velvet Hour occupied a building in the Garden District that had been a private residence, then a bordello, then a speakeasy, and now served as neutral ground for those who preferred to conduct their business away from mortal eyes. The façade gave nothing away—just another Garden District mansion painted in faded mauve, its ironwork galleries draped with confederate jasmine that bloomed year-round through means that had nothing to do with horticulture.
Bastien arrived at eleven that night. He had spent the day with Armand Fontenot’s body, noting every sigil, photographing every wound, and finding nothing that explained how the killer had prevented dispersal. The how mattered. The how would lead him to the who.