Page 54 of Curse in the Quarter (Bourbon Street Shadows #1)

T he Quarter had definitively developed a fever.

The following day, Bastien walked Royal Street as glyphs carved into doorframes pulsed like exposed nerves, radiating heat that had nothing to do with August humidity.

Every ward Charlotte had woven through New Orleans two centuries ago was overloading, responding to power it recognized but couldn’t contain.

It had been weeks since the cemetery, since Delphine had commanded spirits with abilities that should have taken decades to master even for a high level witch.

The protective barriers around her apartment flickered now like dying lightbulbs, overwhelmed by whatever was building inside them.

She was changing faster than any gradual revelation could accommodate, and the Quarter itself bore witness to her transformation.

A saxophone player’s melody materialized as ribbons of blue light, hanging in the air before dissolving into sparks.

The musician played on, oblivious to reality bending around his music.

Bastien pressed against a brick wall as notes twisted through frequencies that existed between worlds, each one tearing small holes in the Veil that separated the living from the dead.

The woman selling pralines on the next corner had tears streaming down her face without apparent cause.

Her customers paid with trembling hands, none of them understanding why the simple transaction felt weighted with grief that wasn’t their own.

A tour guide’s voice cracked mid-sentence as he described the history of a building that had never burned, describing flames and screams that existed only in collective memory bleeding through the thinning barriers.

Bastien paused at the intersection of Royal and Ursulines, watching a child point at empty air and ask her mother about the pretty lady in the old dress.

The mother saw nothing, hurried her daughter along, but Bastien caught a glimpse of what the child had witnessed—a woman in early 1900s clothing, translucent and flickering, drawn to this plane by energies she couldn’t resist.

The weight of everything he hadn’t told Delphine pressed against his ribs like broken glass.

Each lie by omission carved deeper grooves into his conscience.

Every conversation where she looked to him for answers he couldn’t give was another crack in whatever trust existed between them.

The question of protection versus truth haunted his every step through these streets that no longer felt entirely real.

His phone buzzed—a text from Detective Novak reporting another incident.

A wedding reception in the Garden District where the bride had collapsed during her vows, speaking in a voice that wasn’t her own about a love that spanned centuries.

The groom had tried to wake her, but she’d stared through him as if he were the ghost, calling for someone named Henri who’d died in 1847 .

Another text, this one from Father Miguel at St. Louis Cathedral.

The blessed candles in the sanctuary were burning with flames that cast no light, and parishioners were confessing to sins they’d never committed themselves, describing lives they’d never lived.

The holy water had turned warm, as if heated by some internal fire.

Jackson Square buzzed with tourists who paused mid-step, blinking in confusion as waves of déjà vu washed over them.

A fortune teller’s cards burst into flames without explanation.

A palm reader closed her booth early, claiming the lines on every hand she touched were changing while she watched, showing deaths and loves from decades past. The magical chaos was bleeding into mundane experience, and still Delphine remained unconscious of her role in it all.

Bastien pulled out his phone to check the time and saw seven missed calls from other practitioners around the city.

He didn’t return them. What could he tell them?

That the woman they sought to understand was innocent of any intentional wrongdoing?

That she was as much a victim of these forces as anyone else?

That the power tearing holes in reality came from a soul that remembered lifetimes of love and loss but whose conscious mind remained mercifully blank?

A dog began howling somewhere in the distance, joined by another, then another, until the sound created a chorus that seemed to mourn for griefs that predated the animals’ births.

The cry rose and fell like a funeral dirge, echoing off buildings that had witnessed similar awakenings in centuries past.

Three weeks before the fire. Delia asleep in the narrow bed of her boarding house room, moonlight streaming through gauze curtains which illuminated the curve of her bare shoulder.

Bastien lay beside her, listening to the rhythm of her breathing, when she began to dream.

Her body tensed, fingers clutching at the sheet, and his name escaped her lips—not the soft murmur of a lover, but something urgent, desperate.

“Bastien.” The word carried weight, as if she were calling to him across some vast distance. “Promise me you won't forget.”

He'd pressed his lips to her temple, tasting salt from tears she'd shed in sleep. “I promise,” he'd whispered back, never imagining that within weeks she'd be ash and memory, and those words would become the heaviest burden he'd ever carry.

He found himself walking toward the Marigny before making a conscious decision to seek guidance, his feet carrying him through streets that pulsed with increasing intensity.

Every step closer to Maman’s sanctuary brought new signs of magical disturbance—streetlights flickering in patterns that seemed to spell out indiscernible words, fire hydrants weeping blood-red water, shadows that moved independent of their sources.

Maman’s house materialized between one step and the next, porch light cutting through the otherworldly haze that clung to these between-streets like fog.

She waited in her rocking chair, but tonight her usual embroidery lay abandoned on the table beside her.

Instead, she held a piece of bone scrimshaw carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly.

“The city screams,” she said without preamble, ancient eyes reflecting depths he’d never seen before.

“The old wounds continue to open. The past bleeds through into present, and the Veil grows thin as gossamer.” She set down the scrimshaw with hands that trembled slightly.

“Show me what you see, child. Show me what calls to her. ”

Her touch transported them into the spiritual landscape where Maman did her deepest work, a realm where souls appeared as points of light connected by threads of relationship and history. New Orleans spread below them like a constellation, every person a star in a vast network of human connection.

But at the center, where Delphine’s essence should have glowed steady and contained, was devastation.

Her soul print ripple had become a tsunami of power.

Waves crashed outward in regular intervals, each pulse growing stronger than the last. Where they struck other souls, those connections blazed like solar flares, as if her awakening was catalyzing dormant abilities throughout the city.

The pattern was beautiful and terrifying—a spiritual wildfire with her consciousness as the spark, burning through every psychic barrier that had kept the past safely buried.

Bastien watched in horror as the ripples reached the edges of the city, touching the consciousness of people who had never displayed any arcane sensitivity.

A businessman in the central business district suddenly remembered a wife he’d never had, from a life he’d never lived.

A teacher in Algiers woke from dreams of battlefields she’d never seen, speaking fluent French she’d never learned.

A child in the Bywater began drawing pictures of people who’d died before her birth, their faces rendered with impossible accuracy.

“How long before it peaks?” His voice cracked on the question.

“Not long now.” Maman’s grip tightened on his hands, her spiritual form flickering with the effort of maintaining this shared vision.

“I’ve studied the old texts, child. The accounts of other such awakenings from the archives in Haiti, the records kept by the medicine women of my grandmother’s time.

Once the acceleration reaches this intensity, nothing can slow it.

The soul will reclaim what it knows, regardless of the vessel’s readiness. ”

“And if she’s not ready? If the awakening shatters her mind?”

“Then she becomes a doorway that cannot be closed. A conduit through which the past pours into the present until the distinction between what was and what is dissolves entirely.” Maman’s voice carried the weight of terrible knowledge.

“New Orleans could become a city where every death that ever occurred here walks alongside the living. Where every love, every loss, every moment of joy or sorrow plays out simultaneously across all time.”

They returned to ordinary perception with jarring suddenness. Bastien slumped forward in the rocking chair, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what approached. All his careful planning, his belief that gradual revelation could ease her transition—rendered meaningless by forces beyond his control.

“I wanted to protect her,” he said, the words tasting like ashes.

“Give her time to adjust before telling her what she really is. But is keeping the truth worse than revealing it? The delayed revelation cost keeps growing. Each day I stay silent, each conversation where I deflect her questions—am I making this worse?”