Page 15 of Curse in the Quarter (Bourbon Street Shadows #1)

“We got another one, Mr. Durand. Same markings, same symptoms. But this time it’s someone who had contact with your first victim.”

Bastien reached for his clothes, exhaustion making his movements clumsy. A week since he’d revealed the truth to Delphine at the Archive. Seven days of watching her process revelations about reincarnation and soul-binding magic while he maintained distance that felt like slow starvation.

“Where?”

“Charity Hospital. Marcus Lafitte—bartender at Blue Note Café where your Emmett Carrow has been drinking. Came in around midnight screaming about fire and women made of ash.”

Bastien was already moving before Novak finished speaking. The drive through empty predawn streets took less than ten minutes but felt like hours as implications crystallized in his mind. Direct transmission between victims meant the contamination was evolving, adapting, growing stronger.

Charity Hospital rose from the medical district like a monument to human suffering, its emergency entrance bathed in fluorescents that leached color from everything they touched.

Bastien found the private room by following the scent—jasmine twisted through something metallic and wrong, like perfume poured over heated copper.

But concentrated now. Aggressive.

“Started two hours after his shift,” Detective Novak said, not bothering with his notebook. Some cases resisted documentation. “Witnesses say he was fine, then collapsed in the parking lot like someone had set him on fire from the inside.”

Marcus Lafitte writhed against restraints that kept him from clawing at his own skin. Late twenties, lean from years behind the bar, but the markings across his torso told a different story entirely.

Soul burn glyphs carved themselves into his flesh in real-time, following vascular pathways that illuminated with each heartbeat. Not tattoos or scars—living symbols that pulsed with silver light, etching themselves deeper with every breath.

“Christ,” Bastien whispered, watching new patterns branch across the man’s ribs.

“Gets worse when he’s conscious,” a nurse said from the doorway. “Keeps asking for someone named Charlotte. Says she’s calling him home through fire that doesn’t burn.”

Marcus Lafitte’s eyes snapped open at the sound of voices. Pupils blown wide, he still focused with terrifying intensity on Bastien’s face .

“You know her,” he gasped, fighting the restraints. “The woman in white. She showed me your face in the flames. Said you’d understand what’s happening to me.”

Ice shot through Bastien’s chest. The victims weren’t just being marked—they were making direct contact with Charlotte’s spiritual essence.

“Tell me about the customer who paid with old coins.”

“Felt like winter given form. Spoke in a voice that carried accents from dead languages.” Marcus’s back arched as new sigils burned themselves across his collarbone. “Asked if I knew people who ‘carried old songs in their blood.’ When I said no, he smiled like I’d given the wrong answer.”

“What happened when you touched the coins?”

“Turned to ash in my palm. But when I breathed it in . . .” His voice broke into a keen of pure anguish. “That’s when she appeared. Beautiful and terrible and so alone. Standing in fire that should have consumed her but only made her glow brighter.”

The same vision Emmett had described. Charlotte’s essence, preserved in her family’s soul-binding experiments, reaching across centuries to mark random strangers for inclusion in a cosmic working none of them understood.

“Has anyone else been affected? Other employees?”

“Emmett said something about meeting a woman at the Archive. Researcher who helped him understand what was happening.” Marcus convulsed as symbols spread across his chest like infection. “Said she had kind eyes and knew things about old families that she shouldn’t know.”

Delphine.

Emmett had sought her out, drawn by the same mystical compulsions that marked him. And she, unaware of her role in the spreading contamination, had given him exactly the assistance his damaged soul craved.

Direct contact between victim and anchor point. The soul stream drift was accelerating.

Bastien left the hospital with Marcus Lafitte’s screams echoing in his ears and the certainty that time was running out. Every hour that passed meant more potential vectors, more innocent people marked for inclusion in Charlotte’s incomplete transformation.

His phone rang as he reached the French Quarter—Maman Brigitte’s voice tight with urgency.

“Don’t come to the shop. Meet me at Marie Laveau’s tomb. There are things we can’t discuss where walls have ears, and wind carries whispers to the wrong listeners.”

Twenty minutes later, Bastien pushed through the wrought iron gates of St. Louis Cemetery No.

1. Even at seven in the morning, the place felt like a city abandoned by the living.

He walked the familiar gravel paths past early tourists seeking spectacle and locals who still believed in the power of the dead to influence the living.

Above-ground tombs cast long shadows that seemed to move independently of the sun, and Spanish moss draped the ancient oaks like blankets that rustled without breeze. The kind of place where death was architecture rather than absence.

Maman Brigitte stood beside the most famous tomb in New Orleans, her hands pressed flat against marble that had absorbed centuries of desperate prayers.

She wore street clothes instead of her usual ritual garments—jeans and a Saints T-shirt that made her look like any other local paying respects to the dead.

“Bad news travels fast in our community,” she said without preamble. “Word is spreading about the hospital incident. People are scared.”

“They should be. The contamination is getting stronger, more aggressive.”

“Worse than that.” She turned to face him, her expression carrying weight he’d rarely seen. “This morning, I woke to find three different protection spells on my front door. Anonymous gifts from practitioners who are terrified enough to waste expensive magic on warnings.”

As the implications settled, his pulse stuttered, a beat too slow to be comfortable. If the local occult community was mobilizing protective measures, they’d recognized a threat that extended beyond individual victims.

“What kind of warnings?”

“Symbols that translate roughly to ‘the chains are spreading’ and ‘old hungers wake.’ Someone is using techniques that haven’t been seen since Prague.

” She placed her hand on his arm, fingers surprisingly strong.

“Bastien, there’s something else. Three other cities have reported similar incidents this week.

Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston. All places with documented Lacroix bloodline connections. ”

Whatever was spreading through New Orleans wasn’t contained to their city. It was activating simultaneously across the entire southeastern region, following bloodline patterns that stretched back centuries.

“The Archive connection?”

“Has to be. Genealogy research is a growth industry, and family history databases are more connected than ever. Someone researching Lacroix connections in Atlanta could access the same documents Delphine has been working with here.” Maman’s voice dropped to whisper.

“The contamination isn’t just spreading through physical contact anymore.

It’s propagating through shared information. ”

“Digital transmission?”

“Spiritual resonance carried through electronic networks. Every time someone accesses Charlotte’s documented magical theories, every genealogical search that touches her bloodline, every family tree that includes Lacroix connections—it’s all creating pathways for the soul-binding magic to travel.”

The scope was staggering. Not just the forty people who visited the Archive daily, but potentially thousands of genealogy researchers across multiple states, all unknowingly accessing contaminated information that marked them for inclusion in cosmic transformation.

“What stopped it in Prague?”

“Fire. They burned everything—documents, bloodline records, family trees, even the buildings where contaminated research had taken place. Then they went after the anchor points.” Her expression grew grim. “All of them. No exceptions, no mercy, no chance for the chains to reestablish themselves.”

“How many people died?”

“Officially? Cholera outbreak that claimed three hundred lives in a single week. Unofficially? Every person who’d been touched by the soul-binding network, plus most of their immediate families.

” She gestured toward the tomb beside them, where visitors had left flowers and coins and desperate prayers.

“Prague’s solution was effective because it was absolute. ”

They stood in silence, surrounded by centuries of New Orleans’ dead and the weight of choices that could define the living. Marie Laveau’s tomb seemed to lean closer, as if the most famous practitioner in the city’s history was listening to their conversation and preparing to render judgment.

“There has to be another way,” Bastien said finally.

“There is. But it requires the anchor point to understand what she is and make conscious decisions about transformation instead of letting it happen by accident.” Maman reached into her jeans pocket, withdrawing a small mason jar filled with what looked like ordinary dirt.

“Graveyard soil from seven different cemeteries, mixed with salt that’s been blessed by priests from five different faiths.

It won’t stop the soul-binding, but it will create interference in the spiritual networks. Enough to give you time.”

“Time for what?”