Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
For the first time in two weeks, that felt honest.
Chapter
Nineteen
Bastien found the first failure at half past three in the morning.
The fountain in Pirate’s Alley should have hummed when he passed it. Should have shown the faint blue glow that meant his sigil work was holding, keeping mirror resonance from bleeding through every reflective surface in the Quarter. Instead, the chalk lines crumbled when he touched them. The copper wire lay cold against brick.
Something had drained the ward completely.
He knelt and examined the pattern more closely, flashlight beam tracking across stonework that showed no signs of tampering. No smudging. No evidence that anyone had deliberately disrupted his work. The sigil had simply stopped functioning, energy siphoned away by forces pulling harder than containment could resist.
His phone buzzed.
Maman: Check your nodes.
He was already moving to the second site.
Same result. Chalk lifeless, resonance gone. By the fourth location, the pattern was clear. The lattice he’d spent two weeks building was collapsing faster than he could shore it up. Not because of flawed construction, the math was sound, the materials were right. Something else was pulling power from his wards, learning how to counter them.
The fifth site sat in a narrow alley behind a restaurant that had closed hours ago. When he rounded the corner, the chalk sigil glowed violet instead of blue. Wrong color. Wrong frequency. The copper wire vibrated at a pitch that made his teeth ache.
The lattice wasn’t just failing. It was inverting.
Bastien pulled fresh chalk from his bag and started redrawing the containment pattern, adding layers that might buy him a few more hours before this site collapsed too. Sweat dripped from his temple despite the pre-dawn cool. His hands moved through ritual he could perform in his sleep, muscle memory freeing his mind to calculate how much time remained before instability became crisis.
Not much.
Footsteps echoed down the alley.
He stood and turned. Delphine approached, stopped a few feet away and studied the glowing sigil with the same focus she brought to Archive documents.
“Maman called me,” she said. “Told me you’d probably be here working yourself into exhaustion and could use another pair of hands.” Her gaze moved from the chalk pattern to his face. “Also that you’d try to send me home, and I should ignore you.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Neither is letting you handle this alone.” She crouched beside the sigil and examined the copper wire arrangement. “What a.m. I looking at?”
He should insist she leave. Should maintain the distance that kept her separate from work that could pull her into forces she didn’t understand. But exhaustion made argument difficult, and the lattice needed more than his efforts alone could provide.
“Ward network,” he said. “You know I have been anchoring sites across the Quarter to contain mirror resonance. Someone’s learned how to corrupt them. This one’s inverted—drawing power in instead of bleeding it out.”
“So we fix it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Then we make it simple.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and opened the notes app. “Tell me what you need. I’m good at organizing data. That’s literally my entire profession.”
The offer surprised him. Just practical help from someone who understood that some problems required methodical work instead of heroic intervention.
He pulled out his own phone and showed her the map where he’d marked each lattice site. “I need to know which locations are still active, which have failed completely, and which are showing signs of inversion. The inverted ones are dangerous—they’re feeding power into whatever’s trying to destabilize the network.”
“Got it.” She stood and brushed dust from her knees. “I can check the ones in here and here.” She pointed to the two on the outskirts of the Quarter. “You handle the Quarter proper.”
“Delphine—”
“If you’re about to say something protective and infuriating, save it.” Her expression carried determination he recognized from arguments they’d had about research methods and proper citation format. “I know there’s risk. I can feel it. Something’s been pressing against my thoughts for days now, this awareness of glass surfaces and reflections that shouldn’t matter as much as they do. Whatever you’re trying to contain, it was made clear the other day that it’s already noticed me. Pretending otherwise just means I’m less prepared when it escalates.”
She was right. He’d known it for weeks but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the truth. Her bloodline made her part of this whether he involved her or not. Keeping her ignorant wouldn’t keep her safe.
“All right,” he said. “But if the mirrors start showing anything unusual—delays in reflection, images that don’t match reality, voices that sound familiar but aren’t—call me immediately and leave the area.”
“Promise.” She took a photo of his map. “Meet back at your place in two hours?”
“Two hours.”
She left the alley with purpose, already focused on the work ahead. Bastien watched her go. Affection and fear, too close to separate. Then he turned back to the inverted sigil and got to work.