Mate of Shadows

Celestine Broussard kills the Model T's engine half a mile from the sugar mill and sits in the dark until her eyes adjust. Cypress roots gnaw at the mud like old bones. She pulls the silver knife from her boot and checks the blade by touch, because the shadow-sense at the base of her skull has found a cold thread running west through the reeds, and she knows what is waiting at the end of it. She is twenty minutes too late. The boy is twelve years old and his throat is open ear to ear, and the thing that did it is still in the mill, blonde and pale as bone in expensive dark linen, a fleur-de-lis burned into the skin at the base of his thumb. She throws the knife. He catches it between two fingers. *"Pretty,"* he says. *"But slow."* Then he tells her the equinox is coming, and that her mother will know what that means. She drives back to the French Quarter with jazz drifting from a speakeasy two streets over, and finds a sheet of cream-coloured stationery on the floor inside her sister's bedroom door. Three words in an educated hand. Odette is gone. The window is open, and there is no blood and no broken glass. Celestine is a Liaison of the Order, and her mother is the Order's matriarch, the woman who enforces the Accord between the living and the dead in this district. The mark on the killer's wrist belongs to the Devereux coven. So she goes to Julian Devereux, coven leader, amber-eyed, a man who collects debts the way other people collect stamps, and demands her sister back. Julian did not take Odette. Julian has a dead child on his conference table and a council that wants to hand someone over quickly, and he is the only one who can walk Celestine into the parts of the city that will not open for an Order badge. Their first witness is dead before dawn in a mausoleum in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, one finger pointed at a blank stone wall, and a shade rises out of her throat. What they uncover runs back through Celestine's own family: her mother's warded crypt and older lies, a cousin named Nina with an acting Sentinel's authority and an ambition that outgrows it, a stone with a fleur-de-lis split across it, and a faction of vampires who think the Accord is weakness. A vampire romance set in the bayou and the Quarter, ending on a bond that cannot be undone. Closed-door.