Page 6 of Curse in the Quarter
Bastien leaned forward to read faded ink, noting phrases that made his chest tighten with old pain. Spiritual convergence. Life-thread severance. The Lacroix bloodline and their experiments with forbidden magic.
“There’s more,” Maman said quietly. “Pattern suggests the original ritual wasn’t completed. Whoever started it was interrupted before they could finish the working.”
“Meaning it’s still active. Still trying to complete itself after all this time.”
“When the dead song plays again,” she said, closing the journal with finality, “you’ll have to choose. Between letting the past stay buried or accepting that some stories don’t end just because people die.”
The words struck him with the force of revelation. He saw Delia’s face in lamplight outside her boarding house, heard her voice asking him to stay for coffee, felt the weight of the ring he’d never had the chance to give her.
“I should go,” he said, rising with perhaps more haste than warranted.
“Bastien.” Maman’s voice stopped him at the door. “Whatever’s coming, whatever that old magic is trying to finish, remember that some chances don’t come around twice. But some do.”
He left without responding, stepping back into rain that had grown heavier during their conversation. The French Quarter around him felt different now, charged with potential energy. Whatever was stirring in the depths of the city’smagical ecosystem was building toward something significant.
The walk back to his office took him past the rebuilt Saenger Theatre, where tour groups gathered to hear ghost stories that were only stories because most people couldn’t handle the truth. The original building had burned in 1906, consumed by magical fire that left nothing but ash and regret. What stood there now was modern, clean, carefully designed to hold no memories of what had come before.
But as Bastien paused across the street, he felt it.
The same mystical signature that had surrounded the original theater on that terrible night. Ancient power, awakening after more than a century of sleep. Soul-tethering magic beginning to coil and gather strength, preparing to complete work left unfinished.
His hands clenched as phantom flames danced at the edges of his vision. He was twenty-six years old again, racing through gas-lit streets toward a woman who wouldn’t recognize him, carrying a ring he would never give and dreams that would turn to ash.
“Not again,” he whispered to the rain. “I won’t lose her again.”
But even as he spoke the words, he knew they were meaningless. Delia was gone, had been gone for 119 years. Whatever the resurgent magic was reaching for, it couldn’t bring back the dead.
Could it?
The question followed him up the stairs to his office. His desk was exactly as he’d left it earlier, but something fundamental had changed. The keepsake locket beside his coffee cup was no longer lifeless.
It was pulsing with faint silver light.
Bastien picked it up with unsteady hands, feeling themetal warm against his palm for the first time in decades. The engravings Charlotte had carved into its surface seemed to shift in the light, symbols that spoke of love transcending death and bonds that could survive any severance.
He knew what lay inside the locket’s hidden compartment—a pressed violet Delia had once tucked behind his ear. A flower that should have crumbled to dust long ago but remained mysteriously preserved, waiting for the day when it might bloom again.
The pulse grew stronger as he held it, matching the rhythm of his heartbeat. Outside, thunder rolled across the Quarter, and somewhere in the distance, a church bell began to toll the hour.
Four o’clock in the morning. The hour when the Veil was thinnest, when the boundary between past and present became permeable.
Bastien opened his case files again, studying the pattern of incidents with new understanding. The reports weren’t random supernatural events—they were echoes. Fragments of memory bleeding through from 1906, carried on the same magical currents that were awakening the locket.
A grandmother rocking on a porch might be someone’s great-great-grandmother, killed in the original fire but somehow preserved in the city’s mystical memory. A self-mixing cocktail shaker could be the ghost of a long-dead bartender, still serving drinks to customers who existed only in recollection. Dreams of strangers calling through smoke might be the voices of the original ritual’s victims, still trying to complete connections that had been severed by flame and chaos.
The locket pulsed again, brighter this time, and Bastien felt something shift deep in his chest. A loosening of bondshe’d thought permanently sealed, a stirring of hope he’d buried beneath decades of grief.
Whatever was coming, whatever the arcane recursion was building toward, it had found him. The question now was whether he would have the courage to face it—and whether this time, he might be strong enough to change how the story ended.
He set the locket carefully on his desk and reached for his phone. If the past was truly returning, if the old magic was awakening, then he needed allies. People who understood the dangers they were all about to face.
The first call went to Vincent Tremé, a psychic who specialized in temporal disturbances. The second to Tib Thibodeaux, whose werewolf pack had territorial claims throughout the bayou parishes. The third to Tomas Navarro, one of the old vampires who remembered what the Quarter had been like before the treaties.
Each conversation was brief, professional, carefully neutral. But beneath the surface, Bastien heard what he was listening for—the same unease he’d been feeling, the same sense that something fundamental was shifting in the city’s supernatural landscape.
By dawn, he had confirmation. The recursion wasn’t limited to his immediate area. Reports were coming in from across the Quarter, from Uptown, from the Marigny. Everywhere that had been touched by the original 1906 incident was showing signs of magical instability.
And at the center of it all, growing stronger with each passing hour, was the signature of soul-tethering magic. The same forbidden working that had torn his world apart over a century ago.
