Page 63 of Curse in the Quarter (Bourbon Street Shadows #1)

T he new equilibrium felt solid, permanent. Crisis had forced cooperation where diplomacy had failed. But with external threats resolved, internal reckonings awaited.

“Do you think,” she had said finally, her voice carrying the weight of someone testing dangerous ideas, “that some kinds of love are strong enough to survive anything? Not just distance or time, but . . . bigger things. Changes we can't imagine.”

Bastien had stopped walking, turning to study her profile as she watched the river. “What kind of changes?”

“Death,” she had said simply. “Different lives. Becoming different people entirely. Do you think love could survive that? Could we choose the same person again and again, across versions of time we don't understand? ”

The question had pierced him with its prescience, as if her soul already knew what trials lay ahead. “I believe,” he had said carefully, “that some love lives in every version of time. That the deepest connections transcend individual lifetimes.”

Delia had smiled then, squeezing his hand. “Then we have nothing to worry about, do we? No matter what happens, no matter how far apart we might be pulled—we'll find each other again.”

“Always,” he had promised, meaning it with every fiber of his being. “In every lifetime, in every version of ourselves. Some bonds are too strong to break.”

Bastien found himself standing outside the Obscura Archive at closing time, waiting for Delphine with the kind of nervous energy he hadn't felt since he was young enough to believe love was simple.

The magical crisis had passed, the supernatural community had settled into its new equilibrium, and for the first time in months, he had space to think about something other than territorial politics and Veil breaches.

Not the least of which was what could only be referred to as a “date” with Delphine.

The something he wanted to think about most was walking toward him through the Archive's glass doors, her dark hair catching the last light of evening as she locked up behind herself.

Delphine moved with the confident grace that had marked her even during the confusion of partial awakening, but there was something different in her posture now—a settled quality that suggested she had found her footing in whatever new reality she was building for herself.

"You're punctual," she said, approaching him with a smile that transformed her entire face. "I like that in a man."

"I like being somewhere you want me to be," Bastien replied, meaning it more than the casual words suggested .

They had been meeting like this for weeks now—coffee after her work, walks through the Quarter that stretched longer each time, conversations that danced around the edges of whatever was building between them without quite naming it.

Professional collaboration had evolved into something that felt dangerously close to courtship, though neither of them had been brave enough to call it that.

Tonight felt different. Tonight, Bastien had decided, he was going to ask the question that had been building in him since the first day she had looked at him without confusion, without the weight of half-remembered dreams shadowing her eyes.

"Walk with me?" he suggested, offering his arm in a gesture that belonged to another century but felt natural between them.

Delphine accepted the offered arm, her hand warm against his sleeve as they started down the sidewalk toward the French Quarter proper.

The evening air carried scents of jasmine and coffee, the eternal perfume of New Orleans Spring, and somewhere in the distance a street musician played jazz standards that drifted through the twilight like smoke.

They let the city set their pace. A streetcar bell chimed somewhere beyond the Quarter, and the sound slipped through the evening like a memory trying to find its shape.

They turned down Chartres and then along a quieter side street where the galleries were closing and the shopkeepers swept the day’s dust into neat piles.

Bastien matched her stride without thinking.

He’d learned over a century that people spoke more freely when no one was rushing them.

“Have you ever had a dream,” Delphine said after a block of companionable silence, “where you wake up and the part of you that knows it was a dream loses the argument?”

He tilted his head. “Sometimes.”

She exhaled a small, self-aware laugh. “Lately I’m collecting them.

They don’t feel like fiction. They feel anchored.

I know the weight of the doors, the smell of the air.

I can tell you which floorboard will complain in a house I’ve never stepped inside.

” She glanced up at a wrought iron balcony dripping with jasmine.

“It’s like the city is slipping me notes while I’m asleep. ”

“What do the notes say?”

“Bits and pieces. Fragments.” Her hand tightened a fraction on his arm. “A melody I can hum but can’t name. A map I could draw, but only in the dark. Sometimes there’s a man. I never quite see his face, but I know I’m safe.” She made another small, dismissive sound. “I’m aware of how that sounds.”

“Like you’re noticing patterns,” he said. “Most people train themselves not to.”

“That’s generous.”

“It’s accurate.” He kept his tone even, certain—the kind of certainty that offered ground to stand on. “Our minds put things together long before we have language for them. It isn’t a failure. It’s a sign something meaningful is trying to reach you through whatever door you’ll open.”

They crossed into a narrow lane where gas lamps haloed moths in warm amber.

A trumpeter practiced scales behind a second-story window; a wrong note made them both smile.

Down the block, a kid chalked an elaborate hopscotch that stretched into a constellation.

Delphine watched him for a moment, thoughtful.

“Sometimes the dreams feel like that,” she said. “ Outlines first. Then numbers. If I follow the pattern the right way, I land where I’m supposed to.”

“And if you step out of sequence?”

“The square disappears.” She shrugged, wry. “Which, yes, is dramatic even for my subconscious.”

He almost told her he knew the feeling. That there had been lifetimes when one wrong step had erased an entire future he thought was fixed. Instead: “You’re not losing your mind.”

“Good to know,” she said lightly, though the relief was real. “Because I’ve also been… hearing things. Music that isn’t there. Or is there, but only for me.”

“What kind of music?”

She frowned, searching. “Old. Not like an era, more like an attitude. It sits in my throat like I’ve sung it a thousand times, and if I could get the first bar right, the rest would follow.”

He felt the locket against his sternum, a familiar weight, and did not touch it. “You don’t have to force it.”

“I know.” She slowed, turning them toward a courtyard where a fountain whispered over stone. “It’s just—when I’m awake, I can almost name it. When I’m sleeping, I’m already singing it.”

He let the sound of the fountain fill the space where an explanation might have gone. The blade at his side—quiet tonight, content to be only a presence—rested like a promise, not a tool. He took a breath.

“You told me once,” she said, “that sometimes meaning arrives before understanding. I didn’t realize you meant it literally.”

“I’m occasionally literal.”

“Occasionally,” she echoed, amused. “Do you ever get the sense that you’re… overlapping with yourself? That you can feel more than one version of who you are at the same time?”

The question landed close to bone. “Sometimes,” he said, and left it there. A line between honesty and confession that he could hold without lying.

They resumed walking. A second line drifted along Royal, a small one—just a snare, a tenor sax, and a handful of locals who couldn’t help themselves. Delphine’s step found the beat. He matched it, and for a block they let the music set their cadence.

“I had one dream that felt less like a dream,” she said. “A river. Evening. I could smell mud and magnolia. There was a steamboat, and—” Her mouth tilted. “A man who kept asking me whether I believed in anything beyond the horizon.”

“Did you?”

“In the dream?” She nodded. “Absolutely. Awake, I’m not sure why I was so confident.”

“Confidence often arrives with evidence,” he said. “Even if the evidence is felt rather than cataloged.”

She studied him sidelong. “You’re very gentle with this.”

“With you,” he said before he could stop himself, and kept walking as if he hadn’t said anything at all. “What else?”

If she noticed, she let him keep the dignity of pretending.

“It’s not always pleasant. Sometimes I’m…

angry when I wake up. Or grieving something I can’t name.

Or I catch myself reaching for someone who isn’t there.

” She huffed out a breath. “And then I realize I’m doing it in the middle of Rouses and people are staring because I’m singing to the produce. ”

“The produce has heard worse,” he said, deadpan. It won her laugh—quick, surprised, grateful. He found he wanted it again.

“I’m serious,” she said, but the sharp edge had rounded. “I don’t want to read too much into it. I don’t want to become the kind of person who sees ghosts in laundry and omens in coffee grounds.”

“You’re not that person.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you don’t want to be,” he said. “And because you’ve spent your life asking better questions than most people dare. You don’t chase shadows. You wait until they stand still long enough to introduce themselves.”

She considered that, then nodded once, slow. “What if the shadows are mine?”

“Then they’ll be patient,” he said. “And if they aren’t, I will be.”