The Truth He Hid in the Treme

Chapter 1

ONE

Bastien woke before she did. He had woken first every morning since she started staying over, and the habit still surprised him. For most of his long life, waking had meant assessing what he had lost. Now it meant the warm shape of her against his side and the slow sound of her breathing.

He turned his head on the pillow and studied her face in the gray light.

Her auburn hair lay across the linen. One hand had curled near her mouth.

The small scar above her eyebrow caught the early light, and he looked at it longer than he needed to.

He had loved this soul through two other faces.

He had buried both of them. He chose not to walk down that hallway in his mind this morning.

He chose the woman in front of him instead, and the choice came easier than it once had.

He eased out from under the sheet without waking her and went to the kitchen.

The kitchen of his apartment on Dauphine smelled of last night's rain through the cracked window.

He ground the beans by hand because the noise of the machine felt wrong in a quiet house.

He had kept the same ritual for a hundred years, long before anyone shared the rooms with him.

The difference now was that he made enough for two.

She came in before the pot finished. She wore the black shirt he had left on the chair, and crossed the kitchen with easy comfort in her gait.

“You make it too strong on purpose,” she said. She lifted the cup out of his hand before he had taken a sip.

“It is the only correct way to make it.”

She drank, frowned at him over the rim, drank again. “This could strip paint.”

“You say that every morning. You drink it every morning.”

“Someone has to keep you humble.” She rose onto her toes and kissed him, unhurried, tasting of his coffee.

She had stopped asking with her eyes first, weeks ago.

She kissed him now without hesitation, sure he would still be standing there when she opened her eyes.

That small confidence undid him more than any grand thing she had ever done.

He had never had this with Delia. In that other century a woman did not wander a man's kitchen in his shirt, steal his coffee, and call it humility.

He had loved Delia inside the careful borders of her time.

No one had ever teased him before breakfast. He found that he wanted it badly enough to be a little frightened of it.

“You are doing the thing,” she said.

“What thing.”

“The staring thing. Where you look at me like I am about to vanish.” She set the cup down and flattened her palm against his chest. “I am not going anywhere, Bastien.”

“I know.”

“Say it like you believe it.”

“I am working on it.” He covered her hand with his. Her warmth pressed through his shirt, and for a moment he kept nothing in his head but that. “Give me another hundred years.”

“You are not getting another hundred years before breakfast. Feed me.”

He made eggs while she read over his shoulder, which meant she read his case notes and offered commentary he had not requested.

The file was thin, and that pleased him.

A pendant had gone missing from the lockbox of one of Tib's wolves, an old silver piece that had crossed the water from Acadia generations back.

The pack had been ready to tear into one another over it.

Bastien had spent two evenings in the bayou and found the answer with embarrassing speed.

One of the younger wolves, barely old enough to drive and furious after a shouting match with his uncle, had buried the pendant under the porch to watch the family suffer for it.

Bastien had dug it up, returned it, and declined the reward.

No curse. No old god. No blood on the cypress. A sulking boy with a shovel.

“So the great supernatural investigator of New Orleans,” Delphine said, “spent his week recovering a necklace from under a teenager's porch.”

“The pack considered it a grave matter.”

“I am sure they did.” She stole a piece of egg off his plate before he had served his own. “You know what I think? I think your reputation finally caught up with you. Every monster in this city heard Bastien Durand is in love and content, and they all decided to behave.”

He considered the idea while he poured her more of the coffee she pretended to hate. “If that is the price of behaving monsters, I will pay it gladly.”

She went quiet for a moment, studying him. “You mean that.”

“I have spent a very long time being needed for terrible things,” he said. “I find I prefer being needed for breakfast.”

She smiled at her plate and let him keep the words without teasing.

When the plates were cleared, she walked with him to the office, because she had no reason not to.

The Quarter belonged to the early hour. Shopkeepers hosed the night off the banquettes.

A trumpet warmed up somewhere off Royal, the player running the same four bars over and over until they came out clean.

The air carried wet stone, frying dough from the corner, and the green smell the river pushed uptown when the wind sat right.

The Quarter at this hour was a place caught between its two lives, and he had never been able to see only one of them.

Black iron dripped its lace from every gallery.

A shuttered fortune-teller's stall waited for the tourists it would charm by noon, and beside it, unseen by any of them, a thin gray shape that had sold fish here two centuries gone laid out a phantom catch on a stall long since rotted to nothing.

He had loved this city through all its ages, its rot, its beauty, and its refusal to let anything, even the dead, truly leave.

This morning he loved it lightly, for the first time in longer than he could name, because he was moving through it with a warm hand in his.

He reached for her hand without thinking about it.

He noticed the reaching only after their fingers had already laced, and the noticing stopped him for half a step.

A century in this city, and he had crossed these same stones a thousand times alone, careful of being seen, careful of being known.

Now he held a woman's hand on Dauphine in plain daylight and no part of him wanted to let go.

He had never done this with Delia. The conventions of her day would not have allowed it, and he had told himself for decades that he did not mind.

He had been wrong about that. He had been wrong about a great many comforts he never let himself want.

“You added milk to the grocery list,” Delphine said. “On your phone. By yourself.”

“I did.”

“I am proud of you. Last week you sent me a photograph of the list instead of opening the list.”

“The application is not intuitive.”

“It is a list, Bastien. It has one job.”

“Then we agree it is beneath my attention.” He held the office door for her, and she walked under his arm into the front room that still smelled of old paper and the cedar he kept in the drawers.

Tib arrived within the hour to collect the pendant.

The alpha filled the doorway, gray threading his beard now, a man who looked more comfortable in a feed-store cap than in the suit some other city's packs would have demanded of their leader.

He took the silver piece, turned it once in his palm, and grunted his approval.

“Boy is grounded till he is forty,” Tib said. “Roxy wanted to make it sixty.”

“Teach him to fish instead,” Bastien said. “He was bored and angry. Bored and angry boys dig holes.”

“You would know.” Tib pocketed the pendant. He nodded at Delphine with the rough courtesy he gave the few humans he trusted. “Ma'am. You keeping him decent?”

“Trying. He still cannot work his phone.”

“None of us can. That is the natural order.”

Bastien walked him to the door. He expected the visit to end there. Most of his work ended that way now, with a recovered object, a handshake, and no one dead. Tib paused on the threshold, though, and rubbed the back of his neck.

“There is one more thing. Probably nothing.”

“Go on.”

“Fire in the Tremé overnight. Old shotgun double off North Villere, empty for years.” Tib worked his jaw while he chose his words.

“Couple of folks on the block are spooked. Say the flames moved wrong. One of them swears she saw a woman standing inside the burn before the roof went, just standing there in the middle of it, and then gone.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I believe she believes it. Smoke does things to people. But you know how it goes. Anything they cannot explain, they figure it lands on your desk eventually.” Tib shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Figured I would say it before somebody else did.”

“I appreciate it.”

Tib left. Bastien stood a moment with his hand on the doorframe and turned the report over without much weight behind it. A woman in the fire was the kind of thing fear built out of nothing. He had walked through a hundred haunted houses that turned out to be bad wiring and guilty consciences.

His phone rang before he had decided whether to care.

The number belonged to Maya Ortiz. He had her saved because their paths had crossed often enough over the years to make it worth the trouble.

She ran fire investigation for the city, and she had the rare good sense to call him when a scene refused to add up and the rarer good sense to let him handle the part of it she did not want to understand.

“Durand,” she said, no warmth wasted. “You hear about the Tremé fire?”

“Word reached me a few minutes ago.”

“I have got three witnesses telling me the same impossible story and a burn pattern I do not love. I do not think it is your kind of thing. I want you to tell me it is not your kind of thing so I can stop wondering and put my people where they are useful.”

“You want me to rule it out.”

“I want you to do what you do and let me get back to work. Can you come?”