Page 55 of Blood & Ash

New Orleans, 1878. Memphis, 1903. St. Louis, 1921. Chicago, 1958. Ashton Grove appeared at the bottom beside the date of Sable’s attack.

Marcus carried the page to the window. The morning light revealed marks pressed into the paper from whatever Sebastian had written on the sheet above it. He angled the page and read the shallow impressions one word at a time.

Ysolde Duchesne.

A second line contained a reference number and the name of a private collection in Louisiana. Beneath it, Sebastian had written one question: Scar beneath left ribs?

Luca entered before Marcus could replace the page. His gaze went from the empty room to the paper in Marcus’s hand. “He left that deliberately.”

“He turned it face-down.”

“Sebastian does nothing accidentally.” Luca took the page and read the impressions. “Ysolde.”

“You know the name.”

“I heard it once in New Orleans. The house was burning, and Sebastian was standing in the doorway as though something outside was tearing him in half.” Luca touched the faint letters with one fingertip. “He never spoke it again.”

Marcus pointed to the question about the scar. “Sable has one there. I saw it in the clinic.”

“So did Sebastian when she attacked the nest.”

They looked at the map of dates again. Chicago, 1958, had been underlined twice. A notation beside it read metabolic stabilization unsuccessful, binding substituted.

“She wasn’t always a hybrid,” Marcus said.

“Or the hybrid state was failing.” Luca folded the paper along its existing crease. “Sebastian went to prove Sable is Ysolde.”

“Then why refuse to tell us?”

“Because if he’s wrong, he has opened a grave he spent a century closing.” Luca slipped the page into his coat. “If he’s right, Arrow has been using the dead against us longer than anyone knew.”

Marcus looked around the stripped room. Sebastian had taken only one bag, leaving four centuries of possessions behind. The absence suggested he expected either a quick return or no return at all.

“We tell Gabriel,” Marcus said.

Luca shook his head. “Not until Sebastian returns or we’ve proof. Gabriel already has a sick pack and Arrow inside his territory. A dead woman with two names gives him nothing he can act on.”

“Del may understand the binding notation.”

“Then show her but keep the name out of the packhouse for now.” Luca moved toward the door. “This isn’t loyalty to Sebastian. It’s containment.”

Marcus followed him into the corridor. He didn’t agree with the secrecy, but he understood the danger of giving frightened people one more shadow to fight. For now, Ysolde Duchesne existed only in the pressure marks left on a page.

Chapter 16

The lamp on the worktable had burned low. Its flame threw long shadows across the stone floor of the carriage house clinic. Delphine sat at the microscope with her back straight and her breath held somewhere behind her ribs.

Blood had dried under two of her fingernails, the right index and the left middle, in a brown crust that flaked when she flexed her hand. She had cut herself reaching for the silver nitrate bottle three hours ago. The cut was thin and had already closed. She hadn’t stopped to bandage it.

The eyepiece pressed against her right eyebrow. The cells swam into focus at two hundred times magnification. The border between healthy tissue and degradation was knife-sharp, with no transition. The white suspension of sodium thiosulfate and silver nitrate clung to the damaged cells without pulling them apart. It simply held, like a hand placed flat against a door that had been trying to open.

Delphine counted. One hundred. One hundred and twenty. One hundred and fifty. The cells didn’t move. The degradation had stopped at the border and stayed stopped. The counteragent held.

She pulled back from the eyepiece. Her neck ached. She had been bent over the scope for seventeen minutes. The slide on the stage was the twenty-fourth test. The twenty-third had held for two minutes before the relapse came, cell by cell, the same creeping dark from the center out. This one had passed two minutes. Passed five. Passed ten. She had stopped checking the clock after that and started counting her own pulse instead.

She said nothing. The clinic held its quiet. The autoclave had finished its cycle an hour ago. The centrifuge sat idle on the folding table. Outside, the night pressed against the single window above the reagent shelf. No sound came through the glass.

Marcus stood at the worktable. He held a vial of reagent in his right hand. Silver nitrate, one percent, the concentration they had settled on after the nineteenth test. His hazel eyes were on Delphine’s face. He hadn’t moved since she leaned into the scope. His jacket was unbuttoned. His sleeves were rolled past his elbows. The forearms below the cuffs carried small scars, the kind that came from working with his hands and forgetting, now and then, to be careful.