#klamille

Kol rolled his shoulders and picked at a speck of dirt under his fingernail. "You two were just standing around doing absolutely nothing. Someone had to get an actual look at the house."

"And now you have tipped them off," Rebekah snapped. She turned away from the glass, her heels clicking loudly against the floorboards. "Kieran is paranoid. If he thinks we are closing in, he will put a piece of wood in our brother's chest before we even reach the front steps."

"He does not know a thing," Kol said. He dropped his boots to the floor and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "The girl was completely clueless, and she had the keys to the attic right in her pocket. She is already looking for him."

Elijah stepped right into Kol's personal space, forcing his brother to look up. He kept his hands at his sides, but the muscles in his back coiled tight. "We had a careful plan, Kol. You do not go rogue when our brother is chained like an animal inside a church."

Kol stood up, squaring his shoulders to match Elijah's height. "Your plan was incredibly slow. I gave her a push. We need someone on the inside who does not follow the rules. When she opens that door, we walk right in."

Rebekah walked over and grabbed Kol by the shoulder. "We are dealing with a faction of humans who hate us. You are treating this like a game. If that girl tells her uncle what she saw, Kieran will lock the place down even tighter."

Kol brushed her hand off his jacket. "She will not tell him. She is hiding things from him. I could smell the guilt all over her."

Elijah stared at him, his jaw clenching tight as he calculated the risk of Kol's interference. He looked at the spilled bourbon on the table, then back to his arrogant brother. The damage was already done. They had to adapt.

"If she is hiding things from Kieran, she is vulnerable," Elijah said, his voice dropping into a smooth, authoritative register. "We need someone to gain her trust. Someone to befriend her."

"I will do it," Rebekah said instantly, stepping forward. "I can blend in with the locals far better than he can."

Kol let out a sharp laugh. "Please. You will lose your temper the moment she looks at you wrong. I already made the introduction. I should be the one to get close to her."

Elijah pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling a sharp headache forming behind his eyes. "Enough. Both of you." He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a silver quarter, and tossed it onto the coffee table. It landed with a sharp clatter against the wood. "Flip it."

Kol grinned. He snatched the coin off the table and flicked it high into the air. He caught it against the back of his hand. "Tails."

He pulled his hand away. The eagle faced upward.

"Perfect," Kol said, tossing the coin back onto the table. "I will go make a new friend."

Rebekah crossed her arms again, her jaw tight. "And what am I supposed to do? Sit here and watch him ruin the plan?"

"No," Elijah said, turning his attention to his sister. "I have a different task for you. I need you to go to the bayou. Track down Haley and Jackson. Make sure they remain hidden."

Rebekah let out a heavy sigh, but she gave a short nod.

"There is one more thing," Elijah said, looking between both of his siblings. "Kieran has the attic sealed. We will need a witch to break the boundary."

Kol shoved his hands into his pockets, his smirk returning in full force. "Do not worry about that. I know exactly who to call."

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The bathwater had gone cold around her, but Camille didn't move to drain it. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, the stake resting flat against her thigh, both hands wrapped around it like it might slip away if she let go. Her breath came in short, uneven pulls that she couldn't quite slow down no matter how many times she counted to four in her head.

She kept seeing it. The veins, spidering dark under his eyes. The way the white of his eyes had flooded red, bloodshot and wrong, right before his face wasn't a face anymore.

Her hands were shaking again. She pressed them flatter against the wood, willing them still.

This is what it felt like, wasn't it. This exact thing, the racing heart and the cold sweat and the certainty that reality had come unglued at the seams. She had read about it in the pamphlets her mother left on the kitchen counter after Sean died, the ones about psychosis and breaks and early warning signs. She had sat across from a grief counselor who used words like ideation and asked her gently, so gently, if she ever heard things that weren't there.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was her turn.

She wanted her uncle. She wanted to shake him awake and demand he tell her what was locked in his attic and why, but she already knew how that conversation would go. He would look at her the way her mother looked at her now, careful and searching, and he would say something about stress and grief and a new city being a lot to take in, and he would not answer a single one of her questions. He'd shut the door on it the way he'd shut the door on the attic itself.

Her throat tightened. She let it, just for a second, one shaky breath that was almost a sob before she swallowed it back down.

And then, underneath the fear, something else surfaced. Small at first, easy to miss.

Sean used to talk about a man in the walls. Near the end, before it got bad enough that nobody believed him anymore, he used to say there was something watching the house, something with eyes that bled red when the light hit them wrong, something only he could see. Everyone had written it off as the start of the break. Their mother cried about it in the kitchen when she thought Camille was asleep. The doctors had a name for it and a dosage to go with the name.

But Camille had just watched a man's face do exactly that. Veins spread like ink under his eyes. Gold yellow flooding through white.

What if Sean hadn't imagined it.

Her stomach dropped, a slow, sick lurch that had nothing to do with the cold water. She sat very still, letting the thought settle into place, testing the shape of it before she let herself believe it. If Sean had seen something real, then all of it, the hospital stays, the medication, the way everyone talked about him afterward like he was a cautionary tale, all of it had been about something nobody had bothered to actually look at.

She needed to know. And she wasn't going to find that answer by asking Kieran, who would sooner nail the attic door shut than explain what was behind it.

She needed to go back up there. But not yet, not blind. Not until she understood what she was dealing with.

Camille pulled the plug and stood, water sheeting off her skin as she reached for the towel. She caught her reflection in the mirror over the sink, pale and wide-eyed, damp hair sticking to her neck, and made herself look away from the version of herself that looked like she was unraveling. She toweled off, dressed, and sat down at the vanity, running a brush through her hair in slow, even strokes until the tangles gave way and her hands had stopped shaking. She straightened her shoulders in the mirror. Practiced her face until it looked like nothing had happened.

The house was quiet except for the hum of the old refrigerator. She sat at the small desk in the corner of her room and opened her laptop, the glow of the screen too bright in the dim room. She typed carefully, deleting and rewording twice before she let herself search anything, half convinced Kieran would somehow know what she'd looked up. Local folklore. New Orleans occult history. Old blood rites, hauntings, things people in this city didn't talk about outside of tourist shops.

Most of it was junk, ghost tour nonsense dressed up for tourists with cameras. But three pages in, she found a listing for a bookstore tucked into a side street off the Quarter, one that specialized in what the description vaguely called regional esoterica and folklore texts. The kind of place that didn't show up unless you were looking for it.

She wrote the address down on the back of an old receipt and folded it into her pocket.

Camille shut the laptop and sat with her hand flat on the lid for a moment, listening to the house settle around her. Then she got up, crossed to her dresser, and slid the stolen keys back into the drawer where she'd found them, arranging them exactly the way they'd been. She crouched beside the bed, lifted the edge of the mattress, and tucked the stake into the gap between the frame and the box spring, pushing it back until it disappeared from view.

She had just straightened up, smoothing the comforter back into place, when she heard the front door creak open downstairs and the heavy, tired scrape of her uncle's shoes against the mat. A beat later, his keys hit the entryway table with a familiar clatter.

"Camille?" he called up the stairwell, his voice rough from a long day. "You up here?"

She smoothed her shirt down, checked her face in the mirror one more time, and stepped out into the hallway. "Yeah. Up here."

She came down the stairs slowly, watching him shrug out of his jacket and hang it by the door. He looked older than he had that morning, the lines around his eyes carved deeper by whatever parish business had kept him out so late.

"You eat?" he asked, not quite looking at her as he loosened his collar.

"Not really hungry." She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, hands folded in front of her, and let a little of the shakiness she still felt bleed into her voice, not performed exactly, just not hidden either. "I've mostly just been sitting up there. It's a lot, being in a new place. I keep thinking about Sean."

Kieran's whole posture changed at that, the way it always did when Sean's name came up, a flinch he tried to cover by turning toward the kitchen. "I know it's hard, sweetheart."

"I found this bookstore online," she said, keeping her tone light, almost offhand, like the idea had only just occurred to her. "Local history, folklore, that kind of thing. I thought maybe if I had something to focus on, some project or whatever, it'd help. Give me somewhere to put my head instead of just sitting in that room all day."

He paused with his hand on the kitchen doorframe. "Where is it?"

"Just off the Quarter." She watched his shoulders tense at that, exactly like she knew they would, and pressed on before he could say no outright. "I know, I know the rule. I wouldn't even ask, except." She let her voice catch, just slightly, and looked down at her hands. "I need something, Uncle Kieran. I can't just sit in a house all day thinking about him. I need one thing that's mine."

Kieran was quiet for a long moment, his jaw working like he was chewing on the refusal before he said it. She could see the exact second the guilt won out over the caution, the way his shoulders dropped half an inch.

"Daytime only," he said finally. "You go straight there and straight back. No wandering, no side streets. And you're back before dark, no exceptions."

"Thank you." She meant it more than she expected to, even with the lie sitting warm and guilty in her chest.

He studied her for another second, like he wanted to say something else, something about rules or about Sean or about the thing he clearly wasn't telling her. Instead he just nodded once, short and final, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Camille let out a breath she'd been holding since the front door opened and climbed back up the stairs to her room.

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Camille woke to sunlight cutting thin lines across the ceiling through the blinds, and for one disoriented second she forgot where she was. Then the room settled back into place around her, the porcelain dolls on the shelf, the stack of warped board games, and the memory of the night before settled with it, heavy and immediate.

She lay still for a moment, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, running through it again. The eyes. The stake still tucked under her mattress a few inches from where her hand rested now. She made herself breathe slow until the tightness in her chest eased, then pushed the blanket back and got up.

She took her time getting ready, longer than the trip probably called for, but the routine of it helped. She showered, dressed in jeans and a plain shirt, nothing that would draw a second look. She sat at the vanity and pulled her hair back, checking her reflection twice, adjusting a strand that wouldn't sit right, until she looked like someone doing research and not someone who'd spent half the night sitting in a cold bathtub.

Kieran was already at the table when she came downstairs, a mug of black coffee in front of him and the newspaper folded open to the local section. He didn't look up right away, and she took the moment to pour her own coffee and sit across from him before he finally set the paper down.

"Sleep alright?" he asked.

"Fine," she said, which wasn't quite true, but close enough to pass. She wrapped both hands around her mug more for something to hold than the warmth. "I'm going to head to that bookstore today."

He nodded slowly, considering that, his eyes moving over her the way they had the first day, like he was reading for something underneath the words. "Alright." A pause, and he turned his mug a quarter turn on the table before he went on. "We have Mass tomorrow. Early service, so I'll need you up before eight." He looked at her steadily. "Today I want you back before dark. Not right at dark, before it. I don't want you walking those streets when the light starts going."

"I know the rules, Uncle Kieran."

"I know you know them." He said it without any real edge to it, more tired than sharp. "I'm not trying to lecture you. I just want you rested tonight. It's been a lot of new all at once, this city, this house. A decent night's sleep will help more than you think, especially before tomorrow."

She turned her mug slowly on the table, matching his earlier gesture without meaning to, and something in her chest tightened at the word tomorrow. If they were up early for Mass, and then whatever came after, church people, coffee hour, the whole slow ceremony of it, that was most of the day gone. She'd been counting on tomorrow to get back up to that attic while he was distracted with parish work. Now she'd be sitting in a pew instead, watching the whole day slip past her.

"How long does the early service usually run?" she asked, keeping her voice idle, like she was just making conversation.

Kieran glanced up, faintly surprised by the question. "Hour, hour and a half with the greeting after. Why, you worried about sitting still that long?"

"Just wondering what the rest of the day looks like." She took a sip of coffee to cover the way her mind was already working, already trying to figure out where a gap might open up, some stretch of time small enough for her to slip up those stairs unnoticed. "I don't really know the schedule yet."

"You'll get used to it." He said it like that settled the matter, and went back to his paper.

She turned her mug on the table again; slower this time, thinking. Tomorrow was starting to feel like a door closing before she'd even had the chance to try it.

"I'll be back in plenty of time," she said, mostly to fill the silence, and stood, rinsing her mug in the sink before she grabbed her bag.

The walk into the Quarter took longer than she expected, the morning heat already pressing thick and wet against her skin by the time the streets narrowed and the buildings crowded closer together, wrought iron balconies overhead dripping with ferns. She checked the address on the crumpled receipt twice before she found it, a narrow storefront wedged between a shuttered café and a shop selling faded postcards, its window crowded with old glass bottles and a hand-lettered sign that read Blackwell's Curiosities & Rare Books.

A bell over the door jingled when she stepped inside. The air smelled like old paper and something herbal underneath it, dried and faintly bitter. Shelves ran floor to ceiling in crooked rows, stuffed with books that looked older than the building itself. She wandered a little before approaching the counter, letting her fingers trail along a few spines, in no hurry to explain herself to anyone.

A man stood behind the counter, sorting through a stack of returns, dark skinned with a shaved head and the kind of stillness that made him easy to miss until he looked up. His eyes moved over her once, unhurried, before he set the books down.

"Morning," he said. "Help you find something, or you just browsing?"

"Looking for something, actually." Camille stepped closer to the counter, choosing her words carefully. "Local history, folklore, that kind of thing. Old stories about this city."

"Lots of that around here." He leaned back against the shelf behind him, arms loosely crossed, in no rush either. "You want the version they sell the tourists, or something with more meat on it?"

"Something with more meat," she said.

He considered that for a second, like he was deciding whether she meant it, then turned and pulled a slim, worn book off a shelf behind him, the cover cracked and the title too faded to read from where she stood. He didn't hand it over right away, just turned it over in his hands.

"You new to the city?"

"Just moved here."

"Whereabouts?"

She hesitated half a beat too long. "Staying with my uncle. Off the Garden District, kind of."

He nodded slowly, like that tracked with something, though he didn't push on it. "Well, this one's a good place to start if you want the real history and not the ghost tour version. New Orleans has layers most people never bother digging into." He finally set the book on the counter between them, keeping his hand resting on top of it a second longer than necessary. "I'll say this much, though, since you're new. This city's got a way of rewarding curiosity you didn't ask to have rewarded. Some folks dig around in the old stories just for fun and it stays that way. Others go looking and find out the stories weren't just stories." He shrugged, easing the weight of it with a small, easy smile, like he hadn't meant to sound so heavy. "Take that for whatever it's worth."

Camille's fingers closed around the book, the leather cool under her palm. "Is that a warning?"

"Just something I tell everybody who comes in asking for the real stuff." He slid the book the rest of the way toward her. "Most people don't need to hear it twice."

She turned the book over in her hands, weighing it, weighing him. "I'll keep that in mind."

"You do that." He rang her up without further comment, and she paid in cash, tucking the book into her bag. As she turned to go, he added, almost offhand, "Come back if you've got questions. I know more than what's on these shelves."

She thanked him and pushed back out through the door, the bell jingling behind her, the comment sitting oddly in her chest the whole walk back toward the rectory, not quite a warning and not quite nothing either.

She didn't notice the woman near the back of the shop, half-hidden behind a shelf of dusty jars, who had gone still the moment Camille walked in and stayed that way, watching, until the bell rang again on her way out.

Agnes waited by the window until the girl was well down the street before she pulled a phone from her cardigan pocket and pressed it to her ear.