But it didn’t matter. Nothing could hide the truth of his identity. Not from Bastien.
Nigel.
On the wall above the pool of blood was another symbol:
HIVER, 1872
RUE BIENVILLE
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
The ice grows thinner beneath my enemy. Beneath all his kith and kin.
Now he knows I will take from him those he holds dearest in the world. I will show them no mercy. I will take and take and take until there is nothing left for them to lose.
Soon they will understand there are no limits to my reach. For I have breached Nicodemus’ wall of protectors. His last remaining bastion. Now there can be no succor. Not from my wrath.
He will endeavor to protect his family—as he has for centuries—but there can be no doubt who will emerge victorious in this battle. I alone hold all the cards. No doors are barred to me. There is no mountain too high to climb. There are no reaches in this Hell.
I stand in the shadows, staring up at the Hotel Dumaine. I watch his Court of the Lions skulk through the darkness. Bear witness as an impotent force of police officers descends on the stately edifice. I listen as they speak. As she cries and he rages. As they all wail for what once was.
The loss stings, does it not?
No more than it stung when I lost everything I held dear. When all I valued shattered to pieces, trampled to dust beneath their feet.
My skin is electrified by their torment. My soul flies free.
He knows it is personal now. When his trust is taken from him—when the one he most loves is marked by Death’s lasting kiss—he will know why it was done. Whom to blame.
There is no way for us to turn back. The tinder has been collected. The match has been struck.
Only one of us can survive the fires of Hell.
THE PIANTAGRANE
Celine sat on the edge of the rickety cot in Michael’s office at police headquarters. The ticking of the nearby clock reverberated through her brain, the sound growing louder with each passing second. Rays of filtered light cut across the wooden floorboards beneath her feet, the sun warming in preparation for its grand finale.
Her pulse thudded in her ears as she studied the large slate chalkboard across the way, covered with endless lists and meticulous diagrams Michael had constructed since the night of the first murder along the docks less than one month ago. She paused on the weather-beaten map affixed to a corner of the smooth grey surface. Peered intently upon the details she’d shared of the evening the killer had trailed her down a darkened city street. The things the demon had said to her, both that night and the night William had been killed. The threats the creature had snarled in her ear:
Welcome to the Battle of Carthage.
You are mine.
Death leads to another garden.
To thine own self, be true.
Die in my arms.
She shuddered at the memory of how the demon’s cool breath had rippled down her back. Of the warm copper scent he’d left behind after raking his bloodstained fingers across her face. Celine looked away, her eyes catching on the chalkboard’s most recent addition: the one pertaining to Nigel’s murder last night in the suite at the Dumaine. The tallying of another horrific clue to their collection of symbols.
She sighed, her shoulders bowing forward as if burdened by an invisible weight.
It was the same as it had been for the last few hours.
Celine could make neither heads nor tails of it.
The letters themselves could be as they appeared at first glance: an L, an O, and a Y. But strung together, they held no meaning for Celine, nor did they appear to resonate with Michael or any other member of the Metropolitan Police. They could be initials. Or directives. Or utter nonsense meant to worry them to distraction.
If they were in fact another kind of script altogether, their significance remained beyond Celine’s reach. The first letter could be a backward or sideways L, in either ancient Greek or Latin. Or perhaps even a C? Maybe the killer had written it incorrectly, or perhaps the perspective had been skewed. The second letter was arguably an O, if it was indeed a letter at all. And the last? It could be any number of letters. A or Y or W. Perhaps a U, depending on its origins. It could even be from a language that predated ancient Greek.
Maybe they weren’t letters at all, and Michael had been right to assign them mathematical meaning.
It was exhausting. All the unending possibilities had plagued Celine well past dawn. As the hours had passed, the events of last night had tangled through her mind, leaving behind an eerie mélange of memory. What struck Celine most was the contrast of coldness and warmth. Of darkness and light. The way the air had felt in the maze, thick and heavy. The remembrance of the young girl spilling cool champagne down the skin of her throat, the sparkling glass in the garden silhouetting her shape. The way Celine’s nerves had iced at any threat, her bones pulling taut as if she’d stepped into a bracing winter’s night. The feel of Bastien’s hands searing across her skin, his lips a brand in the hollow of her throat. The delicious warmth pouring down her body even now at the thought. That horrifying moment when a scream had frozen on Celine’s tongue.
The warm smell of blood.
The bitter cold of death.
She clutched the silly note tighter in her palm. The one handed to her in passing by a stone-faced Odette a mere minute after Michael had separated Celine and Bastien upon his arrival to the hotel, intent on squirreling her away to the tri-storied police headquarters in Jackson Square beside Saint Louis Cathedral.
Wherever you are, I will find you at midnight.
—B
It shouldn’t have mattered to Celine that Bastien had thought of her moments after discovering his murdered friend. But it mattered more than she could find the words to say. The note she held in her palm proved they were not simply the “passing acquaintances” they’d agreed to be only days before. They were beyond such inanities. Perhaps it mattered to someone somewhere that Celine was not a proper match for Bastien, nor was he at all the proper suitor she’d envisioned for herself.
But it no longer mattered to them.
Celine saw past Bastien’s masks. He looked beyond her lifetime of artful lies. And when confronted with these truths—the worst things that had happened to them, the worst things they had done—Bastien did not flinch nor did Celine turn away.
These were the only truths that made sense amid such chaos.
Hooking an errant curl behind an ear, Celine strode toward the slate chalkboard to take a closer look at the worn map, pockmarked with metal pins from prior investigations. Again she struggled to understand what had made the killer shift his attentions to her. What had driven him to murder that poor girl along the docks weeks ago. Whether everything was connected and, if so, what the killer’s next step might be. Her gaze caught on the name of the street running in front of the police station, Rue de Chartres.