Page 58 of Curse in the Quarter
The echoes weren’t just responding to Delphine anymore. They were anticipating her.
Bastien first noticed while monitoring the courtyard where he’d witnessed Charlotte’s echo preparing tea. He’d positioned observation equipment across the street, cameras with spectral filters that captured manifestations invisible to normal sight.
For days, nothing unusual appeared. But then, one morning, fifteen minutes before Delphine’s usual walk through the area, the echo began forming.
At first just a shimmer like heat distortion. But it solidified into Charlotte’s familiar figure, moving through her morning routine with careful precision. She prepared tea, tended plants that existed only in memory, arranged furniture gone for decades.
Exactly fourteen minutes later, Delphine appeared at the courtyard entrance.
The timing was too precise for coincidence. The echo responded to Delphine’s approach before she arrived. Intent or expectation triggered the manifestation, not simple proximity.
Bastien expanded his surveillance network, positioning equipment at several locations where he’d documented echo activity. Results were consistent and troubling: across the Quarter, manifestations occurred in advance of Delphine’s visits, as if her existence created ripples traveling through space and time.
More concerning was what happened when Delphine failed to appear.
She eventually changed her routine, bypassing three locations where echoes had been forming in anticipation. In each case, the manifestation began as usual, building toward clarity. But when Delphine didn’t come by, the echoes didn’t fade.
They grew stronger.
Without her presence to complete whatever circuit they were part of, the manifestations became agitated, movements erratic and desperate. Charlotte’s echo searched through drawers and cabinets with frantic urgency, as if looking for something misplaced. At another location, an echo in a 1920s dress paced a balcony, checking a pocket watch that showed no time.
Delphine wasn’t just attracting echoes. She was drawing them from whatever peaceful rest they’d found, creating a network of spiritual disturbances that strengthened each day.
Bastien realized his initial assessment was wrong. He hadn’t been chasing echoes—he’d been observing activation of a dormant system, waiting decades for the right catalyst.
That catalyst was Delphine.
The network of sigils Charlotte had created weren’t passive markers. They were components in a larger working, designed to strengthen with use. Each time Delphine visited a prepared location, each moment of unconscious recognition, each instance of inexplicable familiarity added power to the overall system.
Charlotte hadn’t just prepared for reincarnation—she’d built infrastructure that would actively reshape reality to ensure her plans succeeded.
Standing in his surveillance room surrounded by monitors showing empty courtyards where echoes waited for visitors who might never come, Bastien felt the weight of revelation that changed everything he thought he knew about love, death, and the lengths someone might go to preserve both.
The question wasn’t whether Charlotte’s plan wasworking. The question was whether it could be stopped, and what would happen to Delphine if it couldn’t.
As Bastien closed down his equipment and prepared to leave, he carried knowledge that some obsessions transcend death itself. Charlotte’s love had become something larger than emotion—it had become a force of nature, reshaping reality according to its own desperate logic.
At the center of that reshaping stood Delphine, unaware that every step she took was leading her deeper into a web of intent that had been weaving itself around her for longer than she'd been alive.
He watched her apartment window, knowing she was probably lying awake right now, confused by urges she couldn't name. The echo resonance was growing stronger each day, the network of anchor points pulling her toward a destiny that had been planned before her birth. Soon, there would be no more unconscious wandering, no more mysterious attractions she could dismiss as coincidence.
Soon, the calling would become too strong to resist.
The thought filled him with equal parts hope and terror. Hope, because Charlotte's plan was working—the woman he'd loved across centuries was being drawn back to him through forces that death couldn't break. Terror, because he'd seen what happened to souls caught between past and present, unable to fully exist in either.
What if Charlotte was asking Delphine to become someone she was never meant to be? What if the price of their reunion was Delphine's own identity, her own chance at a life free from the weight of inherited obsession?
Bastien pressed his palm against the locket through his shirt, feeling its steady pulse. Tomorrow he would have to decide—let Charlotte's network continue calling toDelphine or find a way to sever connections that had taken centuries to forge.
Either choice might destroy the woman he loved. The only question was which version of her he was willing to lose.
Seventeen
The Garden District mansion loomed against the twilight sky, its neoclassical columns ghostly white in the fading light. Bastien paused at the wrought iron gate, feeling the subtle vibration of magic humming against his fingertips. To mortal eyes, the house appeared abandoned—windows boarded, garden overgrown—but Bastien knew better. The glamour was exquisite, layered with such precision that even most practitioners would walk past without a second glance.
The iron latch yielded to his touch, recognizing something in his magical signature. Inside, reality warped. The abandoned mansion dissolved, revealing an opulent opera house frozen in Belle Époque grandeur. Crystal chandeliers cast prismatic light across burgundy velvet and gilded molding. Box seats rose in elegant tiers, each one occupied by figures who turned their attention toward the stage with predatory focus.
He found Maestro exactly where he’d expected—center stage of his own private theater, fingers dancing across an ancient harpsichord that played melodies from no earthlycomposer. The notes hung in the air like visible threads, weaving patterns that made Bastien’s eyes water if he looked directly at them.
