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The scent of the river hit him first. It was the same—a thick, wet perfume of silt, decay, and distant salt. It was the only thing that was. Louis de Pointe du Lac stood at the edge of Jackson Square, the marble figure of Andrew Jackson forever rearing on his bronze horse, and felt the vertigo of epochs. The cathedral still stood, its three spires piercing the bruised twilight sky, but it was a postcard now, framed by neon-lit cafés selling frozen, sugary concoctions and the relentless, syncopated thump of music that was not jazz, but something brasher, born of silicon and bass.
He had not meant to come back. Not in a hundred years. Not in two. But a restlessness, a pull as undeniable as the moon on the tide, had drawn him across the Atlantic. He had told himself he was a connoisseur of change, that he wished to see how the mortal world had spun on without him. It was a lie. He had come to visit a grave, but the grave was gone. The entire city was the grave, paved over, lit up, and dancing on the bones.
He walked, a shadow in a bespoke charcoal suit, unnoticed in the throngs of revelers. The gas lamps were electric replicas. The banquettes where gentlemen once discussed cotton prices now held tourists scrolling on glowing screens. The very cobblestones felt false beneath his Italian leather shoes, sanitized and preserved for show. His New Orleans—a city of whispered secrets, cloying heat, and velvet darkness—had been embalmed and put on display. The grief he had carried, a cold, polished stone in his immortal chest, suddenly had nowhere to reside. It was homeless, adrift in this theme park of itself.
A group of laughing women spilled out of a bar, their faces painted with glitter. The sight, the sound of unburdened female joy, was the trigger. The present dissolved.
The room in the Théâtre des Vampires was not large. It smelled of dust, old stage paint, and a cold, communal malice. Louis stood, paralyzed, as if his own spine had been replaced with ice. Claudia. His Claudia. Not his daughter, yet his entire world.
She was in a chair, looking small, her golden curls matted. She wore the yellow dress he had bought for her in Paris, now stained. Her doll, the one she had kept for decades, lay shattered on the floor. She did not look at him. Her gaze was fixed on the window, where the first cruel hint of dawn was bleaching the sky.
“Louis,” she said, and her voice was not a child’s. It was the ancient, weary voice of the woman trapped inside, the voice he heard in their quiet hours. It was full of a terrible understanding.
He tried to move, to scream, to shatter the world. Santiago’s grip was iron. “Let the sun judge,” he hissed, his breath a foul thing against Louis’s ear.
The shutter was cranked open. A sliver of light, innocent and golden, cut across the dusty air. It touched the hem of her yellow dress. Smoke, thin and gray, began to curl. Claudia did not scream. A small, shuddering sigh escaped her—a sound of release, of a finally broken promise. Her eyes met his then, and in them he saw not accusation, but a profound, devastating pity… for him.
The light crawled up her body. The smoke thickened, became black, acrid. The beautiful, monstrous child he had made, the creature of porcelain and nightmare, the only love his withered heart could still manage, was coming apart. The sound was the worst of it. Not a roar, but a soft, wet crackling, like green wood on a fire. Her form blurred, melted, collapsed in upon itself. The yellow dress was a flaming jewel for an instant before it too was ash. The last thing to vanish was her eyes, holding his, until they were simply two points of darkness swallowed by the light.
The shutter slammed down. The room was dark again, save for the glowing, smoking pile on the floor. A pile so small. Louis’s knees gave way. The grief did not come as a wave; it was the ocean itself, and he was at the bottom, the pressure crushing his chest into dust. He had thought his turning was death. He was wrong. This was death. This was the true, everlasting death, and it was not his own.
A streetcar, its bell clanging with cheerful insistence, rattled down the track named for a saint. The sound pulled him back. He was on Canal Street, but it was a canyon of glass and steel. The smell of ash and burning childhood was gone, replaced by fried dough and exhaust.
He understood now. He had carried the memory of that room, of that pile of ash, across continents and centuries. He had nurtured it, a sacred, horrible relic. He had believed it was tied to that place—to Paris, to that theater. He had come to New Orleans, the city of her making, half-expecting to find her ghost in the humid air, to commune with their shared, poisoned history.
But the city had moved on. It had forgotten the plague, the wars, the vampires in its midst. It had forgotten Claudia. It had rebuilt itself in bright, plastic layers over the old pain. His grief, however, had not evolved. It was pristine, perfect, and utterly anachronistic. It was a first edition locked in a climate-controlled vault, while the world outside published in digital streams. The place of its birth was gone, but the grief lived on, a self-sustaining star burning in the void of him.
Louis turned away from the bright lights, melting into the darker, quieter streets of the Faubourg Marigny. Here, the old houses slumbered, and the live oaks dripped with ghostly Spanish moss. The river scent was stronger. It was the only witness that remained. He did not find peace. But he found a new, chilling clarity. His punishment was not to haunt places, but to be haunted by a memory so absolute that it made every place, even this unrecognizable cradle, feel like a hollow set piece. The world was mortal, and it forgot. He was not, and he could not. The grief would outlive every brick, every street, every name on a map. It was the only thing he had left of her, and so, with a lover’s terrible devotion, he would keep it.