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)
“Another body,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’m coming with you.”
He did not argue. The months of attempting to keep her at a distance from the crime scenes had collapsed alongside every other form of restraint he had maintained around Delphine LeClair. She had contributed pattern recognition and archival connections that his centuries of experience had not produced. And the woman who had silenced his curse with her mouth would not be told to stay behind.
They dressed in silence. She wore yesterday’s clothes, the blouse wrinkled from the floor, the trousers creased at the knees. He wore what he always wore for fieldwork.
The drive to the Seventh Ward took twelve minutes through morning traffic. Delphine drove. Bastien sat in the passenger seat and tracked the curse mark’s behavior as they moved northeast through the city. The signal had resumed its full volume the moment they left the safehouse. Delphine’s proximity had reduced it; distance restored it.
North Prieur Street held the architecture of a neighborhood that had survived flooding and neglect and partial recovery in uneven measures. Shotgun doubles lined the block, some renovated with fresh paint and iron railings, others carrying the marks of decades without investment. The abandoned double sat mid-block, its weatherboard siding gray with age, its porch sagging at the left corner where a support had rotted through. A ligustrum hedge had consumed the side yard.
Baptiste stood on the porch. His posture told Bastien everything the phone call had not. His hands hung at his sides, and they did not move. Baptiste’s hands moved when the work was manageable. When they went still, the work had exceeded the parameters he had set for himself across years of investigating deaths that did not follow mortal rules.
“In the front room,” Baptiste said as they climbed the porch steps. He looked at Delphine. His expression did not change, but his attention registered her arrival alongside Bastien at this hour. He said nothing about it. “The door was open when I arrived. The contact who called it in said it was open when she passed at six-fifteen this morning.”
Blood hit Bastien at the threshold. Sharper than the previous scenes, carrying an iron concentration that told him the body had not been dead long. The burned-herb residue of ritual smoke hung thicker here than at any prior site. And the air itself pressed against his skin with a wrongness that had nothing to do with temperature—a frequency that told his body the space ahead contained a violation of the physical world.
The front room of the shotgun held a body.
The vampire lay on the bare wooden floor, facing the open front door. The killer had arranged the body with the same geometry Bastien had documented at every prior scene. Arms at the sides, eyes open, skin intact and uncollapsed, holding the appearance of life in the way that only prevented dispersal could achieve.
But this body carried marks the others had not.
The sigils cut deeper into the flesh than any previous victim’s had. The binding marks on the forearms reached through the dermis and into the muscle beneath, the grooves wide enough to expose tissue that should have stayed invisible. The containment glyphs at the wrists showed the same increased depth. The anchoring signs along the biceps had cracked the underlying bone in two places.
Over the heart, the Marchande-Levesque symbol repeated three times. Concentric rings of the same design, each carved at a different depth, the outermost shallow and the innermost reaching tissue that Bastien had never seen exposed at a murder scene.
The channels carved into the floor beneath the body ran deeper than those at prior sites. The grooves cut through the worn hardwood and into the subfloor, following lines that Bastien recognized from the practice site they had found in the Tchoupitoulas basement.
“The victim,” Bastien said.
“Louis-Charles Garnier.” Baptiste read from his notes without looking at them. He had memorized the information during the time he had spent alone with the body before making the call. “Hundred and twelve years undead. A vampire from the Bellamy line turned him in 1914. Minor status. No political affiliations on record. He ran a repair shop on Claiborne for the past forty years.”
“Bellamy line.” Bastien’s jaw tightened. The Bellamy family had participated in the 1847 tribunal that authorized the Marchande-Levesque purge. Another bloodline connected to the event that someone was carving into the city’s dead.
Delphine knelt at the edge of the carved channels, her notebook open, her pen moving. She sketched the concentric symbols over the heart with the same attention she gave archival documents, her lines clean and unhurried despite the smell and the wrongness pressing against the walls of the room. She measured the spacing between the three iterations with her fingers, noted the depth differentials, recorded the angle of each carving relative to the body’s centerline.
“The progression is intentional,” she said. Her voice held the analytical register she used when evidence spoke faster than she could transcribe it. “The previous victims carried one symbol over the heart. This one carries three. The depth increases toward the center. The outer ring matches the depth from the earlier scenes. The middle ring doubles it. The inner ring triples it.”