Page 88 of Curse in the Quarter
“You’re staring again,” she called over her shoulder, pretending not to be flattered, but he could see how she enjoyed his attention.
“You’re hard not to stare at,” he’d drawled, leaning back on one elbow, a blade of grass between his teeth and an utterly ridiculous smile he couldn’t seem to shake.
“You’re full of it,” she said, grinning as she walked toward him, skirts hitched above her ankles, cheeks flushed with sunlight and mischief. “Lucky for you, I happen to like trouble.”
She dropped beside him, curling into his side without hesitation, her fingers slipping into his. The silence that followed wasn’t heavy or awkward—it was familiar. The kind that only came with knowing someone all the way down to the bone.
“I wish we could stay like this,” she’d whispered once, nose brushing his temple.
“We will,” he’d answered, believing it with a kind of dangerous hope. “One way or another, I’ll always find my way back to you.”
She’d kissed him for that. Soft, sure, the kind of kiss that felt like both promise and possession.
And for that brief sliver of time, before fire and fate, they had been nothing more and nothing less than what they were?—
His Delia.
And her Bastien.
Unbreakable.
He’d become a walking reminder of everything wrong with her world instead of a guide toward making it right. His presence was pressure rather than comfort, obligation rather than choice. The emotional tether between them washis fault—his silence, his careful distance, his belief that protection meant withholding truth.
Every time she looked at him, she saw mysteries she couldn’t solve, questions that frightened her, power that threatened to overwhelm her carefully constructed life. He was the crack in her normal world through which chaos poured, the reminder that her peaceful existence was built on foundations of lies.
He turned from the scene of her laughter and walked deeper into the Quarter’s maze of streets. Behind him, Delphine’s voice carried on the night air, bright with uncomplicated joy. The sound followed him for blocks, a reminder of what he was choosing to protect and what it was costing him to preserve.
The magical fever in the city’s bones grew stronger with each step, reality wearing thin under the pressure of approaching transformation. A streetcar passed him going the wrong direction on a route that had been abandoned in the 1960s, filled with passengers in period clothing who stared out windows at a New Orleans that existed only in memory.
Tomorrow would bring new signs of her awakening, new evidence that time was running out. The truth would demand to be spoken, the choice would demand to be made. But tonight, somewhere in the glowing warmth of a sidewalk café, Delphine was laughing with a friend over coffee.
He wouldn’t be the reason she broke too soon.
Twenty-Seven
Gabriel Jr.’s howls cut through the bayou night. The phone shook against Bastien’s ear as Roxy’s voice cracked with exhaustion. “Wolves have begun hearing voices through their bond magic, and one has gone feral.”
The Votum Aeternum hummed against Bastien’s palm as he dressed, responding to disturbance in the spiritual atmosphere. Outside his window, the Quarter writhed with unnatural shadows that moved independent of wind or light source. Street lamps flickered in patterns that suggested interference from forces operating beyond electromagnetic explanation. Whatever infection had reached Crescent Moon territory wasn’t staying contained within pack boundaries.
The drive through empty streets felt like traveling backward through geological time, civilization falling away to cypress and Spanish moss as asphalt gave way to gravel roads that wound through wetlands older than human settlement. When he reached pack territory, the sky held phosphorescent wrongness that reminded him of glyphflares but spread across the entire dome of heaven like aurora borealis displaced from polar regions.
Roxy met him at the tree line, her usually immaculate appearance disheveled in ways that spoke of hours spent wrestling with forces beyond normal comprehension. Dirt caked her fingernails, sweat darkened her shirt despite the cool night air, and panic lived in her eyes like something with teeth.
“Started yesterday evening,” she said, leading him deeper into the wetlands along paths worn by generations of pack members moving between human and wolf forms. “Pack bonds carrying voices from decades past. At first, we thought it was just interference from city’s magical activity.” She paused beside an ancient cypress whose trunk bore fresh claw marks gouged deep enough to expose heartwood. “Then Gabriel Jr. shifted without the moon or choice and started speaking languages none of us recognized.”
Bastien examined the gouges, running fingers along edges that felt wrong beneath his touch. The wood was corroded as if something acidic had eaten through more than bark, leaving channels that pulsed with faint bioluminescence. Whatever had marked this tree possessed properties that violated natural law in ways that made his skin crawl with recognition.
“Where is he now?”
“Secured in the hunting cabin. We had to use silver restraints.” The admission broke something in her voice, pack bonds recoiling from necessity of containing one of their own with materials that burned werewolf flesh on contact. “He’s our youngest. Barely two years since first shift. If whatever this is can break a new wolf so completely . . .”
They walked deeper into pack territory past landmarksthat now felt alien under the strange half-light. Ancient burial mounds built by indigenous peoples before European contact rose from swampland like sleeping giants, their earthwork geometries disrupted by new patterns that twisted the mind and eyes. The bayou had fallen unnaturally silent, predatory quiet that suggested even insects and amphibians recognized the presence of something that didn’t belong in natural ecosystems.
The hunting cabin sat on stilts designed to withstand seasonal flooding, its weathered planks bearing fresh scratches and what looked like burn marks arranged in spiraling configurations. From inside came continuous growling punctuated by bursts of movement that shook the entire structure, wooden joints creaking under stress they weren’t designed to handle.
Tib Thibodeaux emerged from shadows as they approached, his alpha presence somehow diminished as if the pack bond that usually gave him such steady authority had been compromised at its foundation. Lines of exhaustion marked his face, and his hands trembled with barely controlled rage at his inability to protect a pack member from forces operating beyond his understanding.
“Every time I establish connection, something else pushes back,” Tib said, voice hoarse from hours of attempted communication. “Not Gabriel Jr.—something using him as conduit. Something that knows our bond structure well enough to turn it against us.”
