Page 42 of Curse in the Quarter (Bourbon Street Shadows #1)
The locket at Delphine’s throat suddenly erupted with searing heat, its metal surface glowing white-hot against her skin. She gasped and jerked backward, her hand flying to her throat as the arcane echo flare sent violent ripples of energy through the room.
Books tumbled from their shelves. The windows rattled in their frames. The very air seemed to vibrate with unleashed power. Bastien’s collection of rare texts scattered across the floor, their pages fluttering like wounded birds.
“What’s happening?” Delphine cried, struggling to remove the burning locket.
The metal seemed fused to her skin, glowing with an inner fire that cast dancing shadows across the walls. The intricate engravings on its surface had come alive, moving and shifting like living things.
Before Bastien could respond, her phone chimed with an incoming text. Still dealing with the flaring locket, she gestured frantically toward it. “Check that—please!”
Bastien grabbed her phone, his blood turning cold when he saw the message. From Maman, just one word: “Soon.”
The locket’s glow intensified, and Delphine’s eyes began to flutter, the same distant look he’d seen during her episodes starting to take hold.
Her awakening was accelerating beyond anything he’d anticipated.
The careful, gradual approach he’d planned was crumbling—time was running out for gentle revelation .
“Delphine,” he said urgently, moving around the desk toward her. “Look at me. Stay present.”
But she was already slipping away, her consciousness diving toward memories he’d tried so hard to keep buried. The locket pulsed like a second heartbeat, calling her home to a past that might destroy her.
“I remember . . .” she whispered, her voice taking on an ethereal quality. “Starlight on stone. Your hands teaching mine to trace the ancient symbols. The taste of magic on midnight air . . .”
“No,” Bastien said sharply, grasping her shoulders. “Not yet. You’re not ready.”
The barriers were crumbling, the memories flooding back like water through a broken dam. Soon, she would remember everything—their love, their loss, and the terrible price they’d both paid for defying fate.
The locket gave one final, brilliant flare before settling back to its usual warm glow. Delphine blinked, the distant look fading from her eyes, but Bastien could see the change in her. Something fundamental had shifted.
“I had the strangest feeling just then,” she said softly, her hand still pressed to her throat. “Like I was remembering a dream. Or maybe dreaming a memory.”
The night sky spread above them like dark velvet studded with diamonds. Charlotte lay beside him on the blanket they’d spread across the flat section of the estate’s roof, her head pillowed on his shoulder as they watched the stars overhead.
“Do you think they’re watching us?” she whispered, her breath warm against his neck.
“The stars?”
“The souls who came before. The ones who loved like this and lost each other to time.” She shifted to look at him, her eyes reflecting the starlight. “Do you think they envy us for having this moment?”
Bastien traced the line of her cheek with his fingertip, marveling at how the moonlight turned her skin to silver. “I think they celebrate us. Every love that echoes theirs, every connection that proves such bonds can exist—it validates their own experience.”
“Promise me something,” Charlotte said, her voice growing serious.
“Anything.”
“If something happens to us, if we’re separated by time or death or magic—promise me you’ll look for the echoes. Promise me you’ll recognize my soul, no matter what form it takes.”
He kissed her forehead, breathing in the familiar scent of jasmine and starlight that always surrounded her. “I promise. Across lifetimes, across centuries, across the very boundaries of death itself—I will always find you.”
She smiled then, the expression so radiant it rivaled the stars above them. “And I’ll always come back to you. No matter how many lives it takes, no matter what obstacles fate puts in our way. Some echoes are too strong to ever truly fade.”
They lay there in comfortable silence, watching meteors streak across the sky like celestial benedictions.
Neither spoke of their fears—that their families would discover their secret, that the otherworldly forces gathering around the estate might tear them apart, that love alone might not be enough to protect what they’d found.
In that moment, beneath the eternal stars, they believed in forever.
Bastien watched Delphine touch the locket at her throat and wondered if she could feel the echo of the promise from long ago.
The barriers were weakening with each passing hour.
Soon, she would remember that rooftop, remember the vows they’d made under starlight, remember everything that came after.
The afternoon light had shifted, casting longer shadows across his study. Delphine sat quietly for several minutes, her fingers still pressed to the locket as if drawing comfort from its warmth. When she finally spoke, her voice carried a weight that hadn’t been there an hour before.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “About the dreams, the feelings of recognition. They’re getting stronger.”
Bastien’s pulse quickened. “Stronger how?”
“Yesterday, I walked past a café in the Garden District and had to stop. For a moment, I could swear I smelled jasmine and heard piano music, but there were no flowers nearby and no music playing.” She looked up at him then, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
“I stood there for ten minutes, waiting for something I couldn’t name. ”
The café she described was three blocks from where Charlotte’s family had owned a townhouse. The same corner where Delia had waited for him on rainy afternoons, humming melodies that seemed to come from nowhere.
“And the music,” Delphine continued, her voice growing softer. “There’s this melody that’s been following me. I catch myself humming it, but I don’t know where I learned it. It feels important, like a message I’m supposed to understand.”
Bastien’s hands went cold. The melody. The same haunting tune that had connected every incarnation, the musical thread that bound their souls across centuries. If she was remembering that . . .
“Could you hum a few bars?” he asked, though he dreaded the answer.
Delphine closed her eyes and began to hum, her voice soft and achingly familiar. The melody that drifted from her lips was the same one Charlotte had hummed while gardening, the same tune Delia had played on the piano in her tiny apartment, the musical signature of a love that refused to die.
The locket pulsed in rhythm with her humming, growing brighter with each note. Bastien gripped the edge of his desk, fighting the urge to cross the room and gather her in his arms, to tell her everything and damn the consequences.
When the melody faded, Delphine opened her eyes. “Do you recognize it?”
“Yes,” he whispered, the admission torn from him. “I recognize it.”
“From where?”
He could lie. Should lie. But looking into her face, seeing the hope and confusion and desperate need for answers, he found he couldn’t form the words that would deny her truth.
“From a time when music meant something different,” he said carefully. “When melodies carried messages that words couldn’t express.”
Delphine leaned forward, her eyes intense. “Tell me about it. Please.”
“There was a woman who used to hum that tune,” Bastien said, each word carefully chosen. “Someone who believed that music could bridge any distance, that the right melody could call a soul home across any void.”
“What happened to her?”
“She loved someone she wasn’t supposed to love. And when the world tried to tear them apart, she chose to trust in something stronger than death itself.”
Delphine’s breath caught. “The echoes.”
“The echoes,” he confirmed.
They sat in silence for several minutes, the weight of unspoken truths heavy between them. Charlotte’s journal lay open on the desk, its pages filled with the careful documentation of a love that had transcended every obstacle fate could devise.
Finally, Delphine reached for the journal again, turning to a page near the back. “There’s one more entry I want to read to you,” she said. “It’s dated just a few days before . . .” She paused, consulting her notes. “Before Charlotte disappeared.”
Bastien’s chest tightened. He knew which entry she’d found without needing to see it. Charlotte’s final message, written the night before she’d attempted the ritual that would bind their souls across time.
“'Tonight I begin the working that will either save us or destroy us both,'” Delphine read, her voice steady despite the slight shake in her hands.
“'B begged me not to attempt it, but he doesn’t understand—some loves are worth any risk, any price.
If this succeeds, we will find each other again and again, lifetime after lifetime, until the stars themselves burn out. If it fails . . .'”
She paused, squinting at the faded ink. “'If it fails, at least I will have tried. At least I will have proven that some connections are stronger than death, stronger than time, stronger than any force that seeks to divide hearts that recognize each other across eternity.'”
The words stilled his heart in his chest. He remembered Charlotte writing that entry, her hand steady despite the magnitude of what she was about to attempt. She’d been so certain, so convinced that love alone would be enough to overcome any obstacle.
“'I have prepared everything,'” Delphine continued reading.
“'The locket that will carry our connection forward, the words that will bind my soul to his across every incarnation, the hope that love, once true, can never truly die.
Tomorrow night, beneath the dark moon, I will speak the words that will echo across centuries.
And if the universe has any justice, he will hear them and remember. '”