Chapter 6
SIX
The morning came easier than the two before it.
He woke to find her already up and at the window, wrapped in his robe, watching the Quarter shake off its night, and the sight of her on her feet and steady loosened a knot in him he had not known he was holding.
Outside the window the Quarter was doing its slow morning resurrection, hosing the night off the stones, folding the drunks and the ghosts alike back into the daylight hours when the city agreed to pretend it was an ordinary place.
A mule cart went by below. A woman opened her shutters across the street and said good morning to a cat that had been dead, he was fairly sure, some thirty years.
He watched Delphine watch all of it with her coffee and her borrowed robe, alive and steady in the gray light, and he let himself have the moment fully, because he had learned across a great many mornings that this was the whole of what he had ever wanted and never once been permitted to keep.
“You are awake,” he said.
“I am awake. I slept the whole night. No theaters, no smoke.” She turned and caught the look on his face.
“And yes, before you ask, I feel fine. I felt fine when I woke, I felt fine when I made the bed, and I feel fine now that you are asking me for what is going to be the first of many times today.”
“I have not asked you once.”
“You have asked me with your eyes since you opened them.”
She was not wrong. He went to the kitchen to make himself useful instead of watchful, and he set the pan on and cracked the eggs and reached for the chicory, and at some point between one task and the next he began to hum.
He did not decide to. The tune came up out of him on its own, low and half-formed, an old melody worn so smooth by his memory that he no longer heard himself carry it.
It was the one she had hummed in her sleep since the first night she stayed, the one she had never been able to name when he asked her where she had learned it.
It had lived in him for a very long time, and it came easiest when his hands were busy and his guard was down.
Behind him, Delphine went still.
He turned at once, the fear already up in his chest. She was not gone this time. Her eyes were on him, present and wide, one hand pressed flat to the counter.
“You used to do that,” she said softly. “While you cooked. You always hummed that one while you cooked.”
Neither of them moved. The tune hung in the kitchen with nowhere to go. He waited for her to drop into the dark, braced to catch her, and she did not drop. She stayed, blinking at him, thrown by it, and he saw his own shock mirrored back in her face.
“It's gone,” she said. “Whatever it was. It came and it left. I just knew, for one second, that I had stood in a kitchen and listened to you hum that exact song.” She pressed her hand harder to the counter. “That has never happened standing up before.”
He turned the flame off under the eggs and crossed to her and took the hand that was holding the counter.
He did not tell her it frightened him that the memories had learned to come without warning, without smoke, without the mercy of taking her under first. He did not tell her that the song was real, that she had stood in a real kitchen a hundred years gone and listened to him hum it over a real breakfast. He held her hand and he kept his voice level.
“I have been thinking about it,” she said into the quiet.
“The fire I keep dying in. The theater.” Her thumb moved against his.
“You told me once about Delia. That you loved her, a long time ago, and that you lost her in a fire.” She lifted her eyes to his.
“It's her fire, isn't it. The one I keep ending up inside. I'm dreaming the night she died.”
He had known the question would arrive. He had not known it would arrive in his own kitchen with her hand warm in his, looking at him with so much careful sympathy for a grief she thought was only his.
“Yes,” he said, because she had earned that much, and because he had no lie left that he could stand to tell her. “The fire you keep seeing is the fire that took Delia.”
“And you were there.”
“I was there.”
Her face crumpled with a tenderness that nearly broke him. “Oh, Bastien. You have been standing here listening to me describe the worst night of your life back to you, over and over, and you let me. Why would you let me do that?”
Because it is your night too, he did not say. Because you were not describing her death to me. You were describing your own. “Because you needed to say it,” he answered. “And because I would rather hear it from you than have you carry it alone.”
She stepped into him and put her arms around his ribs and held on. He held her back, and over the top of her head he looked at nothing, and he understood that the ground he had been standing on for a century had begun, very quietly, to come apart.
He left her reading on the couch with a promise extracted from both of them, hers to call at the first wrong feeling, his to answer on the first ring, and he went to Rampart Street.
Maman's shop held its usual cool dark, the air thick with dried herb and candle smoke, the shelves crowded with bottles that caught the light and held it longer than glass should.
He had been coming to this shop on Rampart for the better part of a century, and it had not changed in any way that mattered, though the street outside had changed past all recognition three times over.
The same dim held the same crowded shelves.
The same jars kept their patient dreadful contents.
The same smell of tallow and river-mud and something sweet gone slightly wrong hung in the air, the smell of a place where the veil between the city's two worlds had worn thin from long handling.
Maman had worked her craft out of these two rooms since the days when men still fought duels beneath the oaks, and stepping into them had always been, for Bastien, a stepping out of time altogether, down into the old dark New Orleans that went on living beneath the bright new one.
She did not look surprised to see him. She set a second cup down before he had asked for coffee.
“I did not come to have you look at her again,” he said.
“I know why you came. Sit.” She poured. “You came to ask me about the fires. You want to know if a clever enough hand could hide a working inside one, bury it so deep that even you walk through and feel nothing.”
“Could it.”
“Magic can be hidden, mon c?ur. You know this. A good practitioner can fold a working small and quiet and tuck it where no one thinks to look.” She wrapped her hands around her cup.
“But hidden is not the same as gone. A buried thing still breathes. It leaves a smell, a warmth, a wrongness in the grain of a place, and a man who knows how to look will always find the edge of it if he is patient. You have been patient. You have walked both those houses with everything you have.”
“And found nothing.”
“And found nothing.” She let that sit between them.
“That is what troubles me, and I will be honest with you, it troubles me more than a curse would. I have spent my whole long life cleaning up after things that leave a mark. In all that time I have never met a true working that left none at all. Either your arsonist is the most gifted hider who ever lived, gifted past anything I have heard of, or there is no working in those fires to find.” She looked at him over the cup.
“I cannot tell you which. I will not tell you it is safe to stop looking. But I will tell you that if you keep hunting for magic in that smoke, you may be hunting a thing that was never there.”
He left Maman's shop with no more than he had carried into it, and the afternoon had gone hot and white by the time he found Tib at the back table of a bar off Decatur, a plate of red beans in front of him and a paper cup of coffee he had clearly judged and found wanting.
“I already know what you are going to ask,” Tib said, “and the answer is no. I had two of my people walk past both scenes once the smoke cleared. Quiet. Downwind, careful, nobody sniffing around where the cameras could see. You want to know what they got?”
“Tell me.”
“Smoke. Gasoline, or close enough to it. Burned wood, burned wiring, and about forty frightened humans who had stood too near it.” Tib pushed the beans around.
“No sulfur. No grave-cold. No fae sweetness, no vampire, nothing dead, nothing summoned. If a working had gone off in either of those houses, one of mine would have caught the bottom note of it a block out. They caught nothing but a crime.” He shrugged.
“For whatever a wolf's nose is worth to you. It has never once been wrong about this.”
“It is worth a great deal,” Bastien said, and meant it, and disliked what it told him.
Back at the office he did the thing he had been avoiding, which was to take the case seriously on its own terms.
For two centuries he had worked his cases inward, magic first, the unnatural assumed until ruled out.
He cleared the corkboard on the wall and started again from the other direction.
He pinned up Maya's diagrams of both scenes, the three origins circled on each.
He pinned the witness statements beside them, the contradictions underlined in his own hand.
He tacked a map of the city to the center and pushed a pin into the house off North Villere and a second pin into the corner double across town, and he stood back and looked at the shape of two pins and admitted he could not yet see one.
His phone buzzed on the desk. Maya.
Mya: Lab came back. Same accelerant, both scenes. Commercial grade, same product. Same buyer, most likely. You were right to make me wait on it.
He typed back a short reply and set the phone down.
The board in front of him had no demon in it, no curse, no relic, no name from his own world.
It had a person with a steady hand, a can of accelerant, and a reason he could not yet read.
He had spent his whole life certain the worst answers lived on his side of the veil.
He stood in his office and let himself consider, fully and without flinching, that this one did not.
She asked him that evening, after the dishes, with the lamps low and the windows open to the street noise.
“Tell me about her,” she said. “About Delia. Not the fire. I have enough of the fire to last me. Tell me something good. Tell me one good thing about her, so she is more to me than the way she died.”
He could have refused her. He had refused everyone for a hundred years. He looked at the woman on the couch with her feet tucked under her, asking to know the woman she did not know she had been, and he found he did not want to refuse her at all.
“The first time I made her laugh,” he said, and sat down beside her.
“I had been trying for weeks to impress her. I was very serious in those days. I thought a serious man was an impressive one, so I stood very straight and chose my words very carefully and bored her half to death, I am sure, though she was too kind to say so.”
“That sounds like you.”
“It was worse than me. Then one evening a storm came up off the river with no warning, the kind that empties the sky all at once. I had my coat off and around her shoulders before I had thought about it, very gallant, very grave, certain I had finally struck the right note. And I stepped back to admire my own gallantry and put my foot straight into a gutter running over its banks, to the ankle, in front of God and half the street.” He felt his own mouth tilt at the memory.
“I stood there with one ruined shoe and all my dignity in the gutter with it, and she laughed. She laughed until she had to hold the wall. She laughed until she cried, and she apologized while she did it and could not stop, and it was the best sound I had heard in two hundred years.”
Delphine was laughing now, her hand over her mouth, her eyes bright. “You did not.”
“I did. And I decided, standing in that gutter, that I would happily ruin every shoe I owned if it kept her making that sound.” He looked at her, at the laugh he had earned twice now across the gap of a century.
“So that is my good thing. That is what I would want you to know about her, before anything else. That she had a laugh worth wrecking yourself for.”
She leaned over and kissed him, still smiling against his mouth, and the story passed from him to her and became, in the passing, a thing they both now held.
She fell asleep before he did. He sat at the desk with the lamp turned down and took out the notebook.
The apartment was quiet around him, quiet in the particular way of the small hours in the old Quarter, when even the ghosts had gone in and the only sound left was the river and the wind moving in the banana leaves of the courtyard below.
He had kept this book for a hundred years as a ledger of everything the fire had taken from him.
Tonight, for the first time in all that time, he was going to write in it a thing the fire had given back.
He turned past the pages he had filled with the theater and the smoke and the dying, past the record of grief he had been keeping since the first episode.
He found a clean page near the front, smoothed it flat, and uncapped the pen.
At the top, in the careful hand he had not used for anything tender in longer than he could remember, he wrote four words, and then he began, underneath them, to fill the page.
Things She Remembered About Loving Me.