The Weight of Forever
The back room of the Rue Royale smells of candle wax, bourbon, and old velvet—a scent Nikolai has come to associate with two centuries of decisions that matter more than they should. Red drapes swallow the walls, muffling the trumpet wail bleeding through from the club's front room, where mortal tourists sway to a three-piece band that has no idea what convenes twenty feet away. A single chandelier, its crystals dulled by decades of cigarette smoke no one bothers to clear, throws fractured light across the long mahogany table where he sits.
He does not fidget. Nikolai has not fidgeted since 1789, and he will not begin tonight, no matter how many times his gaze slides to the antique clock mounted above the doorway, its brass hands ticking toward eleven.
"The Delacroix line claims the block between Dumaine and St. Philip has been theirs since before your covenant existed," says Etienne Fontenot, a broad-shouldered vampire with silver rings on every finger and an accent that curls around his vowels like smoke. He represents a visiting bloodline from Baton Rouge, here to stake claims older than most of the buildings still standing. "They want it back. Formally. In writing, if you…
