Page 4 of Curse in the Quarter
Above them, the theater’s roof began to buckle. Inmoments, the entire building would collapse, trapping them both in the wreckage of someone else’s ambition.
He could save himself. His angelic nature would protect him from the worst of the destruction. But Delia was human, fragile, already wounded by magical forces that were tearing her soul apart piece by piece.
The choice wasn’t really a choice at all.
Bastien wrapped his arms around her and let his power flare outward, creating a shield of divine energy around them both. The chaotic magic crashed against his defenses like a tide against a seawall, and he felt something deep in his core crack under the strain.
The soul rupture was immediate and agonizing—not just the severing of their bond, but the violent separation of powers that should never have been divided. His angelic essence recoiled from the chaos, leaving him more human than he’d been in centuries, more vulnerable than he’d ever allowed himself to be.
But it held. His shield held, and Delia breathed safe within his arms.
For perhaps thirty seconds, no more.
Then the Saenger Theatre collapsed around them, and the fire claimed what remained.
When the flames finally died, when the magical chaos exhausted itself and left only ash and ruin, Bastien found himself kneeling in the wreckage of what had been the stage. His clothes were scorched, his hands burned, but he was alive.
Delia was not.
She lay in his arms as she had in life—peaceful, beautiful, unmarked by the flames that had taken everything else. But her eyes were closed now, and the gentle rise and fall of her breathing had stopped forever.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, though he wasn’t sure if he was apologizing to her or to himself. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. I’m sorry I waited too long.”
In the distance, bells were ringing—the cathedral, the fire brigade, voices calling through the smoke-filled streets. Help was coming, far too late to matter.
He sat with her until dawn, holding her in the ruins of their tomorrow. And as the first gray light crept across the devastated district, he found himself humming—very softly, very quietly—the melody she had sung on the boarding house steps.
The tune would follow him for the next hundred and nineteen years, an echo of the love that had been and the life that might have been. But in that moment, kneeling in the ashes of the only happiness he’d ever known, Bastien simply held her close and let the music carry his grief to the lightening sky.
The melody died with her, and something in his chest that had been whole for barely a single evening shattered into pieces that would never quite fit together again.
One
NEW ORLEANS, 2025
The scream tore Bastien from sleep.
He bolted upright in the king size bed above his Dauphine Street office, sweat cooling on his skin as phantom smoke cleared from his lungs. The nightmare always began the same way—racing through gas-lit streets while magical fire consumed everything in its path. It always ended with Delia in his arms, her brown eyes wide with confusion as she looked at him without recognition.
One hundred and nineteen years, and the dream never changed.
Bastien swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the keepsake locket on his nightstand. The metal felt cold against his palm, lifeless as it had been for decades. Charlotte had once crafted it to pulse with her essence, to guide him to her soul across lifetimes. Now it served only as a reminder of promises broken and chances lost.
Three-fifteen in the morning. The French Quarter beyond his window dozed in that liminal hour when the supernatural and mundane worlds bled together mostfreely. A vampire hurried past the alley entrance, her glamour flickering as dawn approached. A few blocks over, he sensed werewolves finishing their monthly run through abandoned buildings near the river.
All of it felt wrong today. Off-kilter in ways that made his fallen angel senses prickle with warning.
He dressed in his usual dark slacks and white shirt, the uniform of a man who moved through the world without drawing attention. The .38 went into its shoulder holster, blessed silver bullets in his jacket pocket. Stakes and iron filled the kit bag by the door. Tools of a trade that didn’t exist on any official registry, serving clients who couldn’t take their problems to normal authorities.
Private investigator. The license was legitimate, even if most cases involved things that wouldn’t appear in police reports.
Bastien descended the narrow stairs to his office, cataloging details that had shifted overnight. The protective wards carved into his doorframe flickered with diminished power. The blessed salt line across his threshold bore disturbances from something that left no footprints. Even the iron wind chimes on his balcony hung motionless in air that should have carried the constant river breeze.
He brewed coffee with steady hands and tried to ignore the growing certainty that something ancient was stirring in the city’s mystical depths. Something that had been sleeping for over a century.
The first case files arrived as he settled at his desk. A woman in Tremé reported seeing her deceased grandmother rocking on the front porch. A bartender on Bourbon Street swore his cocktail shaker had started mixing drinks by itself. Three separate clients described dreams of peoplethey’d never met calling their names through smoke and flame.
Standard supernatural incidents, except for their timing. All reported within the past seventy-two hours. All clustered in the same general area of the Quarter.
