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BLOOD & MEMORY
LUCIEN
New Orleans, The Devil’s Quarter
Rain fallsthe way it always does in this city, slow, deliberate, like it’s in on some private joke.
It sluices down the wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter, collecting in the gutters, turning the cobblestones into black glass.
Somewhere below, jazz drifts from a bar that never closes, saxophone notes curling like smoke through the mist. Mortals laugh, drink and sin while the city lives and decays at once.
I watch it from my balcony.
The shutters of my abode stand open, wind snapping the curtains around me. Lightning flickers over the Mississippi, turns its surface to molten pewter. The storm’s reflection dances across the crystal decanters in my study, touching on blood, whiskey, and memories. I’ve been here long enough that people call meMonsieur D’Armand.
Some think I’m a recluse.
Others whisper that I’m the devil in tailored black.
Both are correct.
My lair, this decaying mansion of carved mahogany and faded frescoes, reeks of history. The walls hum with it. Every object here has been touched by blood or grief. The grand piano downstairs hasn’t been played since 1894, but sometimes at night I hear her melody still.
Elara’s melody.
The only tune I ever learned by heart.
Lightning flashes again and I see my reflection in the tall mirror by the hearth: too pale, too still, a slash of blood-red lips and crimson gold eyes burning like twin embers. A ghost dressed in obsidian and regret.
I’ve lived too long. Fed too long. Lost too much.
Three centuries ago, I was a man with a purpose, burning with love, hunger, and vengeance in equal measure. Now I am merely the echo of that man. A monster carved hollow by rage and obsession and jealousy.
Every Halloween, the ache returns. The same ache that started the night I lost her.
Elara.
Her name still cuts like broken glass in my throat.
I remember everything.
The taste of her laughter.
The way she looked at me when she bit my wrist for the first time—fearless, trembling and utterly divine.
She was powerful even then, as a witch’s apprentice dabbling in forbidden arts, fascinated by me. I should have killed her the moment she stepped into my path. Instead, I loved her with the kind of devotion that consumes everything sane.
And then she destroyed me.
Or…well, she tried to.
The night of the betrayal still replays like a curse I can’t outrun. I remember the candlelit hall of the abbey where theyhid her. The smell of salt and blood. The chant of the coven as they bound me to the altar, her voice among theirs.
They said she gave me up.
That she’d offered my immortal blood for her own power.
