Crimson in the Crescent (Bourbon Street Shadows #3)

Chapter 1

ONE

The restaurant had been her idea. The jazz club after had been his.

Walking her home was negotiated somewhere between the second glass of wine and the moment the trumpet player hit a note so clean it silenced the room for three full seconds—the way only New Orleans could silence a room, not with absence but with reverence.

“I’ll walk you,” he’d said.

“You don’t have to,” she’d said. They’d both known he would anyway.

August in the Quarter never truly cooled.

Even past midnight the air pressed close, thick with river humidity and the residual warmth of a day that had climbed past ninety before noon.

Delphine walked beside him with her heels in one hand, bare feet on the still-warm pavement, her dress a dark sweep of fabric that caught the light from iron-bracketed streetlamps.

She’d worn her hair up. It had come mostly down.

He’d noticed both states in equal detail, which said something he wasn’t ready to examine at this particular moment.

“You were watching me again,” she said. Not an accusation. An observation.

“I watch everything.”

“You watch me differently.”

He didn’t argue the point. After months of careful distance—Delphine had earned the right to name what she saw. She usually named it accurately, particularly when it came to his attention on her.

They turned onto her street. The magnolia on the corner was blooming late, its white cups heavy on the branch, scent landing like something pressed from another century. He’d walked her to this door before. Many times. He knew the exact number, which was another thing he chose not to examine.

“Come up,” she said, at the foot of the steps.

The words were simple. Everything beneath them was not.

He glanced at her with a slight smirk. She looked back at him with directness implying it was more than a nightcap invitation.

Delphine LeClair did not dissemble. It was one of the things about her that had undone him slowly, the way a tide moves, not dramatically but with complete and total inevitability.

“Delphine.” The word held suggested restraint he was having a hard time holding onto and knew he’d give in soon. It was what he wanted, the intimacy with her he’d craved, but he was a patient man.

“Don’t.” She tilted her head, her remaining hairpin catching the light.

“Don’t give me the version where you have seventeen excellent reasons this is complicated or it’s too soon, or whatever it is this time.

I know it’s complicated. I’ve always known it was complicated since the day you strolled into the Archive.

” A beat. “We are on our own timeline, and I know you want to. Come up.” She batted her eyelashes playfully at him and tugged on the lapel of his jacket.

He followed her up the stairs.

Her apartment was dim, one lamp burning in the corner, the ceiling fan turning slow enough to be decorative.

She set her shoes by the door and moved into the kitchen—muscle memory, automatic—and he heard the familiar sounds of her reaching for glasses, then stopping.

Reconsidering. She came back into the front room without them.

He was still standing near the door.

“You’re doing it,” she said.

“Doing what.”

“Calculating.” She crossed the room until she was close enough that the distance between them became a decision rather than a fact. “I can see it from here. You get very still when you’re calculating.”

“I’m always still.”

“Not like this.” Her hand came up, not to touch him but to gesture at the space between them. “This is different. This is the still where you’re about to say something thoughtful and careful and designed to protect me from something I’ve already decided on.”

He had, in fact, been about to say something along those lines.

Charlotte had loved him before he understood what love cost. Delia had loved him not knowing what he was—had said some truths are the only things that make life worth living on a cobblestone street in 1906, in gloves, with a clock tower marking the hour like a chaperone.

They had moved slowly then because that was what the world expected, the traditions of the time period, and because she had been careful, and because he had not wanted to rush anything that felt, after centuries, like grace.

Delphine was not careless. But she did not move like a woman who believed the world’s expectations applied to her.

He was still adjusting. Mostly he liked it.

Occasionally it nearly stopped his heart.

While he’d been fully present in the day to day of contemporary human activities, he hadn’t partaken in any of the vices offered after dark.

He’d been a man on a mission since the day he fell.

He enjoyed how forward Delphine was—emotionally, physically—but he owed her some truths before he visited her bed. She deserved his honesty.

“There are things I haven’t—”

“Bastien.” She paused, taking a moment to look at him. “Is any of it going to change the fact I’m standing in my apartment at midnight waiting to…kiss you?” The pause held more than expectation.

He considered her question honestly. “No.”

“Then it can wait until morning.”

She stepped into him.

He’d kissed her before. They had shared chaste intimate moments.

Always on the edge of restraint. This was not that.

This was her hands finding the lapels of his jacket with a directness that would have scandalized the 1906 version of himself and did something considerably different to the contemporary version of him.

He caught her waist. His intention had been steadying.

It became something else entirely as desire like he’d never experienced on a physical level surged from within him.

She tasted like the wine from dinner, like a night that had been building to exactly this, a choice made by Delphine both clearly and without reservation.

He kissed her the way he’d been not-kissing her for months of careful evenings, which was to say thoroughly, and with more feeling—lust—than he generally permitted himself in the presence of other people.

Their tongues met, and Delphine’s intake of breath let him know he could allow his restraint could fall, at least just a bit.

She made a small sound against his mouth and pulled him closer by the jacket, deepening their kiss before she ran her hands along his chest and pressing her body to his.

His hands tightened at her waist, then, as if there were an inch between them, one hand ran up her back into her soft hair as he devoured her mouth with his, and the other began drifting lower, just above her rear.

Later—years later, if he was honest with himself, if not for what happened next—he would not be able to say precisely how they moved from the middle of the room to the couch, only that the distance closed in the way distances close when both people have decided they’re finished pretending they want any space at all.

Her heels had already been discarded. His jacket found the back of the couch.

She’d made some efficient movement with the light sweater she’d been wearing over her dress and moved her lips to the column along his neck.

Chills ran through him and his hold on her tightened.

“Are you overthinking?” she asked against his jaw.

“I’m not thinking at all, cher.”

“Liar.” But she was smiling, he could feel it, and then she shifted against him in a way that made thought briefly impossible regardless.

The strap of her dress slipped. She let it.

He looked at her—couldn’t help it, the lamplight doing something unconscionable, the strap against her upper arm, the small deliberate smile on her face—and felt the weight of everything he’d been holding at distance for longer than he could remember at the moment.

He kissed her throat. She tipped her head back.

His fallen nature had not, apparently, made him any less susceptible to this particular variety of human gravity.

If anything, the opposite, which was something he’d considered in the abstract many times and was now discovering in practice had been a significant underestimation.

His desire to have her, to connect with her in the most intimate but carnal way, was bubbling to the surface in such a way he was becoming lost to it.

Her fingers found the buttons of his shirt.

His phone rang.

He ignored it.

It rang again.

She pulled back slightly, her hand stilling on his chest. Not withdrawing—just pausing. Listening. “You should answer; something tells me it’s important,” she said.

“Ignore it,” Bastien said, almost breathless, and with a mind for only one thing.

It rang a third time. Then a fourth, immediate, before the echo of the third had finished.

He closed his eyes.

“Go,” Delphine said. Not angry. Just Delphine, reading the situation with that clarity that had been making his life simultaneously easier and more complicated for three years.

Her hand flattened against his chest—present, deliberate—before she moved back.

“Whatever it is, it’s not calling four times for nothing. ”

He answered.

It was. When he peered down at the screen he recognized the name instantly and concern replaced the heady feelings he had just moments ago. Baptiste did not call at midnight without reason.

Baptiste’s voice came through without preamble, because Baptiste had been a vampire for sixty years and had no patience for the social architecture of bad timing. “Dumaine Street. Between Bourbon and Royal. You need to see this yourself.”

“A body?”

Bastien had worked with Baptiste for three decades. He had heard him move through crises, through faction politics, through the precise variety of horror that accumulated in a city where multiple supernatural communities existed in uneasy proximity. He had never heard Baptiste sound like this.

“It’s still here. And you need to see it for yourself. Come at once.”