Page 55 of Curse in the Quarter
“You’re working for a fae?” he asked.
“Working for? Oh, my dear detective, you misunderstand the nature of our relationship entirely.” She set the vial down with careful precision. “The Maestro doesn’t employ servants. He conducts symphonies.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Her smile returned, sharp and knowing. “It means you’ve been dancing to his music far longer than you realize. Every choice you’ve made, every path you’ve walked, every time you’ve chosen duty over love—all of it orchestrated by a mind that thinks in centuries instead of moments.”
The implications hit him hard. If the Maestro was real, if he truly possessed the kind of power Voss was suggesting, then everything Bastien thought he knew about his cases, about the magical crimes plaguing the city, might be nothing more than elaborate stagecraft.
“He’s not just buying fragments,” he said, the pieces clicking together with horrible clarity. “He’s collecting them for a specific purpose.”
“Now you’re beginning to understand.” Voss picked up another vial, this one containing what looked like crystallized screams. “Soul fragments aren’t just magical components, Bastien. They’re instruments. And the Maestro has been building quite the orchestra.”
He thought about the victims he’d found over the past months, each one drained of their essence in increasingly sophisticated ways. He’d assumed they were dealing with a killer who was getting better at their craft, but what if it wassomething else entirely? What if someone had been fine-tuning a process across multiple incidents, perfecting a technique for harvesting specific types of spiritual energy?
“How long has this been going on?” he asked.
“Longer than you’ve been alive. Longer than your father was alive . . . Yes, I do mean The Father. The Maestro plays a very long game, detective. He’s been weaving threads across bloodlines and time itself, creating patterns within patterns within patterns.”
The words triggered another memory, this one hazier and tinged with the quality of dreams. Bastien was standing in a cemetery at night, rain turning the earth to mud beneath his feet. A woman with auburn hair was walking away from him, her shoulders shaking with sobs he’d caused but couldn’t understand. The details were frustratingly vague, but the emotional weight was crushing—the certainty that he’d failed someone he loved, that his choices had led directly to their destruction.
“You’ve felt it before, haven’t you?” Voss’s voice cut through the fragmentary recollection. “That sense of déjà vu when you make the same mistakes? That feeling that you’ve stood in this exact spot, having this exact conversation, watching the same tragedy unfold?”
He had felt it. More times than he cared to admit. Moments when the present seemed to echo with the weight of repetition, when he’d catch himself making choices that felt both inevitable and wrong.
“He’s been manipulating events across multiple lifetimes,” he said, understanding crystallizing in his mind. “Not just mine. Others too.”
“Lifetimes, bloodlines, entire family trees.” Voss began packing her vials away with practiced efficiency. “The Maestro doesn’t think in terms of individualexistence, Detective. He thinks in terms of patterns that span generations. Her current incarnation is just one note in a much larger composition.”
“What’s he building toward?”
“That, my dear tether widow, is a question you’ll have to ask him yourself.” She shouldered a worn leather satchel and stepped away from her makeshift stall. “Though I suspect you won’t like the answer.”
“Where are you going?”
“Away from here. Away from you. Away from the crescendo that’s building.” She paused at the mouth of the alley, her pale figure already beginning to blur into the surrounding shadows. “A word of advice, Bastien Durand—when you finally have your standoff with the Maestro, remember that he’s been composing your story for far longer than you’ve been living it. Every choice you think is yours, every moment of agency you believe you possess, has been calculated and orchestrated by a mind that views free will as nothing more than an interesting variable in an otherwise predetermined equation.”
“Voss, wait?—”
But she was already gone, vanishing into the maze of back streets like smoke. He was left alone in the alley with nothing but the lingering scent of burned sage and the weight of new knowledge.
He leaned against the brick wall, his mind racing through the implications of what he’d learned. The Maestro wasn’t just another magical criminal hiding in the city’s shadows. He was something far more dangerous—a conductor orchestrating events across timelines Bastien couldn’t even comprehend, manipulating the fundamental forces that governed life, death, and rebirth.
And somehow, Bastien was central to his plans. Atwinge, not quite pain, ached where his wings were . . . before. Not a sensation he felt often, but he knew it was the magic surging through the city, and his proximity to Delphine.
The level of Maestro’s puppeteering should have been terrifying, but instead he felt a strange sense of clarity settling over him. For months he’d been chasing fragments of a puzzle, trying to understand why the magical crimes in the city seemed to follow patterns that defied conventional investigation. Now he knew—they weren’t random acts of violence or greed. They were movements in a symphony that had been playing for generations.
His phone buzzed with a text message. He pulled it out, expecting an update from the precinct, but the screen showed only a number he didn’t recognize and a message that made his blood run cold:
Unknown Number:
The third movement begins. You can’t stop it. I’ll see you at the conservatory. —M
The screen went dark before he could respond, leaving him staring at his own reflection in the black glass. Behind his familiar features, he could swear he saw the ghosts of other faces—and his wings.
If the Maestro's message was true, Delphine's life hung in the balance once again.
So what choice did he have? If the Maestro truly had been orchestrating events across multiple incarnations, then running would only delay the inevitable. And if there was even a chance that Delphine was in danger, that history was preparing to repeat itself in the cruelest possible way, then he had to act.
