The book did not burn him when he touched it.
That alone was offense enough.
Alastor closed it with a snap of gloved fingers, the sigils along its spine whispering like insects trapped under glass. Human ink. Human paper. Human audacity. And yet—how obliging of it—to open a door where none ought to be.
The air twisted.
Static laughed.
And New Orleans—his New Orleans—rose before him like a half-remembered hymn.
Not Hell’s mockery of it. Not the embalmed postcard of nostalgia. The real thing. Damp brick, iron balconies sagging under history, music bleeding faintly from somewhere it had no business surviving. The city breathed. It always had.
Alastor inhaled, slow, reverent.
Ah. How he had missed the rot.
He stepped through.
The book sealed itself behind him with a sound like a coffin lid being kissed shut.
Alastor lingered in the shadows, the black fog of his presence coiling around the edges of the human world. The city sprawled before him—alive, clumsy, and unrefined—but it was familiar in a way that no other place had been since New Orleans. A part of him ached for it, a whisper of nostalgia curling in his chest, but that ache was drowned almost immediately by something sharper.
She stepped into view, moving through the street with an ease that both tormented and enticed him. From the distance, he drank in her motion, each turn of her head, the way she carried herself—a ghost of someone he had once stalked, someone he had chased in fevered obsessions.
Not her. Never her.
But the cruel symmetry made his pulse surge.
Delicious.
He could almost hear the static hum behind his teeth, that electric anticipation. It had been too long since he had felt the thrill of intrusion, the sharp bite of claiming a moment before it was offered. She was leaving her job, unwary, untethered—and he was already moving.
No greeting. No pretense. He crossed the space between them like a shadow devouring light, drawn by a pull older than memory. Each step was a theft, a theft of time and air. His eyes never left her, and though he knew, with cruel certainty, that she could never be what he lost, the obsession flared anyway.
“Evening,” he said, voice low, static-tangled, slicing through the mundane chatter of the street. “I’ve been… watching for someone like you.”
He lingered too long, letting the dark fascination hang in the air, as if it might suffocate the world around her—or perhaps only her.