Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
Roxy: Levee. Now. Bring whatever stops things from seeing double.
Bastien grabbed his keys and the leather pouch of silvered salt. No explanation, no context—that was Roxy. She didn’t waste words on problems she couldn’t solve herself.
The drive to Algiers Point took twenty minutes through empty streets.
The river smell hit him before he parked—mud and rust and something else underneath, sweet like funeral flowers left too long in heat.
He killed the engine and sat for a moment, letting his senses adjust. The Mississippi stretched black and still to his left, surface too calm for water that should have been moving.
Roxy waited under a broken streetlight, arms crossed.
She looked tired. Hair pulled back tight, almost severe; that meant she’d been awake too long dealing with pack business that wouldn’t wait for dawn.
Mid-thirties, built solid from years of hauling equipment and breaking up fights.
Beta of the Crescent Moon Pack, which meant she handled the problems Tib didn’t want to touch.
“Three of ours are seeing things that aren’t there,” she said. No greeting. “Started two nights ago. Now it’s spread to seven.”
Bastien walked to the levee’s edge. “What kind of things?”
“Echoes. Their own movements three seconds before they happen. Reflections that move on their own.” She moved beside him, boots scraping concrete. “One shifted last night. His wolf had two shadows.”
He crouched and pressed his palm to the water. Cold bit through his glove—winter cold, wrong for October. The surface felt solid. Not ice, but something that had forgotten how to be liquid.
“Mirror Fever,” he said.
“That’s what I thought.” She pulled a flask from her jacket and took a pull. “Except it’s not hitting humans. Just us. Seven wolves in two days, all of them showing the same symptoms. Eyes holding images that aren’t there. Voices echoing before they speak.”
Bastien stood. His reflection in the water moved half a second after he did, lag visible enough to make his teeth ache.
The temporal delay that had infected every mirror in the Quarter was spreading.
Natural water amplifying reflection magic, treating the river itself as one more surface for Gideon’s network to corrupt.
“Where are they now?”
“Quarantined. Pack Alpha’s orders.” She capped the flask.
“I’m here because you’re the only one in this city who might know what we’re dealing with, and because—” She stopped and stared at him.
“Because Gabriel Jr.’s one of them. Tib’s nephew.
Twenty-three years old, good kid, never caused trouble in his life.
And now he’s seeing himself die in seventeen different ways every time he closes his eyes. ”
The way she said it—flat, controlled—told him exactly how scared she was. Roxy didn’t do fear well. She did action, solutions, tactical responses to problems that had clear cause and effect. This was something else.
“I need to see him.”
“Can’t. Quarantine means quarantine. But I can show you this.” She pulled a phone from her pocket, thumbed through photos, handed it over.
The image showed a young man strapped to a bed, chest bare, covered in marks that looked like someone had carved them with light instead of blade.
Glyphs, precise and intricate, spreading from collarbone to navel in patterns that pulsed even in the still photograph.
Bastien had seen these before—Charlotte’s work, refined by someone who’d studied her methods until they could replicate her techniques with disturbing accuracy.
But these were different. More aggressive. As if the mirror magic had adapted to werewolf physiology and found ways to exploit the additional power flowing through their bloodlines.
“When did the markings appear?”
“Hour after he showed symptoms. They started at his sternum and spread outward like something was writing on him from the inside.” Roxy took the phone back, stared at the image for three seconds longer than she needed to.
“Tib wants to know if you can stop it. If you can’t, he wants to know how to contain it so it doesn’t take the whole pack. ”
Bastien looked at the river. His reflection stared back at him, perfectly synchronized now. Then its mouth moved—forming words his actual mouth wasn’t saying, speech articulated through mirror-space while his physical form stayed still.
Every bond demands a sacrifice.
He stepped back from the water.
“It’s not a disease,” he said. “It’s contamination. The mirror network is learning pack bonds, treating your connection to each other as another form of reflection it can corrupt and amplify.”
“English, Durand.”
“The mirrors are storing what they see. Including how werewolves communicate through pack magic. Now they’re replaying it wrong—showing your wolves things that haven’t happened yet, or things that happened to different pack members in different timelines.
The network is teaching glass to speak your language, and glass doesn’t understand context. ”
Roxy processed that. Her hand went to the flask again, stopped halfway. “So what stops it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s what I have.” He turned to face her.
“Gideon Virelli built this system over decades. I’ve had two weeks to figure out how it works.
The mirrors aren’t just reflecting anymore—they’re remembering, storing, reproducing.
They’ve learned to archive conversations and replay them on command.
I call it Glass Tongues. And if they’ve learned pack bonds, if they can access the connections that hold your wolves together—”
“Then they can use those bonds against us.” She said it flat, the way she’d say it’s going to rain or we need more ammunition. ”Can you break the connection?”
“Not without breaking the mirrors. All of them. Every reflective surface in the city.”
“Then break them.”
“And trigger a cascade that would fracture reality across six parishes? No. We need another approach.” Bastien wasn’t actually sure that would happen, but the fact of the matter was they couldn’t destroy every reflective surface in the city either way.
Roxy turned away from him, looked out at the water that refused to move.
“You know what the worst part is? They can feel it happening. Gabriel says it’s like someone’s rewriting his memories while he’s still using them.
He’ll remember a hunt from three years ago, and halfway through, the memory changes—shows him dying instead of bringing down the deer.
Shows the pack turning on him. Shows Tib putting him down because the infection made him dangerous. ”
Her voice didn’t waver. That was the thing about Roxy—she’d learned a long time ago that emotion was luxury you couldn’t afford when people were counting on you to solve problems.
“Based on how quickly it has manifested, how long do you think before it spreads to the rest of the pack?”
“Tib thinks we have three days. Maybe four.” She glanced at him. “Your archivist still asking questions?”
He stopped watching the water and turned to Roxy. “What?”
“Delphine. Last time I saw her, she was digging into Lacroix family records like her life depended on it. Which I guess in some ways it does. You still keeping her in the dark about what’s really happening while everyone else knows the truth?”
“She knows enough.”
“Does she know the mirrors are learning to speak? That they’re storing every word anyone says within range? That this Gideon’s network has probably archived every conversation you’ve had with her for the past month?”
Bastien didn’t answer.
“Thought so.” Roxy pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“You want my advice? Stop protecting her from the truth. Tell her what’s coming.
Because when this thing escalates—and it will escalate—she’s going to figure it out anyway.
And she’ll hate you more for lying than for whatever danger you were trying to keep her safe from. ”
“That’s not your call to make.”
“No. It’s yours. But you’re making the wrong one.
” She took a drag and exhaled smoke that curled in the humid air.
“I’ve watched you dance around her for months.
Watched you pretend everything’s normal while the city falls apart around you.
And I get it—you love her, you want to keep her safe.
But safety’s an illusion, Durand. Especially now. ”
“Your point?”
“My point is that Gabriel’s seeing himself die because the mirrors learned pack bonds and started showing him every possible future where things go wrong.
And you’re doing the same thing with her—running through seventeen scenarios where telling her the truth ends badly, paralyzed by possibilities that haven’t happened yet.
” She flicked ash into the water. “Maybe you should answer some of her questions. Before the mirrors do it for you.”
Bastien turned back to the river, watched his reflection watch him back. The lag was still there—half a second between movement and mirror, between action and consequence.
“The network’s getting smarter,” he said.
“Every surface it infects teaches it something new. It learned visual delay first. Then spatial distortion. Now it’s learning language, relationships, the connections that hold people together.
If it learns enough—” Bastien ran his hand through his thick, dark hair and sighed.
“It could tear us all apart from the inside.” Roxy finished the cigarette and ground it under her heel. “So what do we do?”
“I keep mapping the network. I’m trying to find the central node, the anchor point where Gideon’s coordinating everything. Cut that, and the rest might destabilize enough to break the pattern.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we figure out a plan B.”
“You don’t have a plan B.” Roxy rolled her eyes.
“Working on it.”
Roxy laughed—short, sharp, the kind of sound that had nothing to do with humor. “You know what Tib said when I told him I was coming to meet you? He said, ‘Durand’s good at improvising. Let’s hope that’s enough.’ High praise from a wolf who doesn’t trust anyone outside the pack.”
“I’ll try to live up to it.”
“Do that.” She started walking back toward the treeline where she’d parked.
“And Durand? About your archivist. I know you think you’re protecting her by keeping secrets.
But from where I’m standing—as an objective observer, and a woman who would be pissed if the man I cared for was lying to me all this time—all you’re doing is making sure she’s unprepared when everything goes to hell. Think about that.”
She disappeared into the shadows before he could respond.
Bastien stood at the levee for another ten minutes, watching the river that wasn’t moving and the reflection that lagged behind reality by margins small enough to miss and large enough to matter.
The water had learned to hold still. The mirrors had learned to speak.
And somewhere in the city, Gideon was teaching glass to understand connections it had no business comprehending—pack bonds, soul tethers, the threads that held people to each other across time and separation.
His phone buzzed.
Delphine: Found something in the 1763 records. You need to see this.
He looked at his reflection one more time. It smiled at him—expression that never touched his actual face, emotion manifesting in mirror-space while his physical form stayed neutral.
Then the reflection’s lips moved, forming words without sound:
She’s already asking the right questions. How long before she asks them to the right surface?
Bastien turned away from the water and headed for his car.
Behind him, the Mississippi stayed perfectly still, reflecting the predawn sky like a mirror someone had laid flat across Louisiana, waiting for something to shatter it.