Read Chapter 7: The Opera Ghost's Legacy

The vault air was cold and mineral, like breathing inside a mountain. Julien’s breath fogged as he laid the leather-bound folio on the reading table. The clasp was stamped with a fleur-de-lis and a date: 1874. He hadn’t needed the anonymous caller’s tip to know this was the right file. His pocket watch had begun a low, insistent hum the moment the archivist’s key turned in the lock.

Romy stood by the door, arms crossed. “You know this is a pre-Section file. Technically, we shouldn’t be in here without a magistrate’s seal.”

“Verne gave me the case. The case led me here.” Julien snapped the clasp open. The paper inside was brittle as autumn leaves, the ink faded to a rusty brown. He turned pages slowly, cataloging witness statements, crime scene sketches, and a single photograph of a burnt-out theater box.

“Vampire of the Opera,” he murmured. “1874. Three victims, all exsanguinated, all found in the upper galleries. The killer was never caught.”

Romy stepped closer, peering over his shoulder. “The old Garnier was still under construction. They didn’t even have the lake yet.”

“So where was the opera being performed?” Julien asked.

“The Salle Le Peletier. Burned down in 1873.” Romy’s brow furrowed. “So they were between houses. A temporary venue, maybe the Cirque d’Été.”

Julien flipped to a section titled *Witness Statements*. Most were illegible scrawls or terse police notations. But near the bottom of the stack, tucked between two pages, was a single sheet of heavier stock—cream-colored, with a wax seal that matched the Brotherhood’s mark on his watch.

It was a deposition, handwritten in a precise, elegant script. The signature at the bottom made his blood go cold.

*Élise Garnier-Moreau.*

His great-great-grandmother. The woman in the photograph inside his watch. The woman the antique dealer had said was connected to the first unsolved crime.

“Romy,” he said slowly. “What year did my great-great-grandmother die?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

He turned the page toward her. “Because she signed a witness statement in 1874. And if she was alive then, she was already in her sixties.”

Romy read the signature, then looked at him. “People live longer in our world, Julien. Some much longer. You know that.”

“Our world wasn’t her world.” He tapped the page. “She was a schoolteacher from Lyon. A mortal. There are birth records, marriage records, death records—all downstairs in the civil registry. She died in 1891.”

“Then this is a coincidence. Or a namesake.”

“The file lists her as living at 14 Rue des Petits-Champs. That’s the same address as the watchmaker who made my watch. The same address from the Brotherhood’s records.” Julien’s voice was rising. He forced it down. “This isn’t a coincidence. This is a trail.”

He pulled the watch from his pocket. The case was warm, almost feverish, and the second hand was ticking faster than it should. He held it over the deposition, and the hum deepened.

“It’s keyed to this,” he said. “Not to the vault. To the name.”

Romy came around the table, putting herself between him and the file. Her face was careful, the face she used when interviewing a hostile witness. “Julien. You need to step back.”

“Step back from what?”

“From the shape you’re forcing onto this.” She gestured at the spread of documents. “You’ve got a dead antique dealer in Montmartre, a gargoyle’s claw marks, and a fake death certificate for your mother. That’s a case. This—” she tapped the deposition, “—this is ancestry. It doesn’t solve Étienne’s murder, and it doesn’t tell us who drained him dry.”

“It’s telling me someone has been leaving a breadcrumb trail for my entire life,” Julien said. “My mother wrote my name in Étienne’s address book, Romy. Before I even had a name. She knew I’d end up here.”

“Or she knew someone in the family would.”

“She wrote *my* name. Julien.” He pushed the watch back into his pocket. “She was hiding the nature of her own death from Section 13. She was writing warnings in logbooks. She was leaving instructions that said ‘the watch will open the door.’ Who prepared her for that? Who gave her the watch?”

Romy was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was softer. “You’ve been transferred to Section 13 for three weeks. In that time, you’ve found a murder, a conspiracy, and at least four generations of Moreau fingerprints on supernatural crimes that were never solved. What are the chances that all of that is coincidence?”

“Zero,” Julien said.

“Then what are the chances that you’re being *led*?” Romy’s eyes were sharp. “Someone pre-authorized your archive access. Someone knew you’d be in that antique shop. Someone called you with this file’s location. You’re following a path that was paved before you were born, and that isn’t investigation—that’s a script.”

Julien opened his mouth to argue, but the words died in his throat. The watch was humming again, a low vibration he could feel through the fabric of his coat. He pulled it out, and the second hand had stopped.

Pointing at the deposition.

Pointing at the signature.

*Élise Garnier-Moreau.*

He read the statement again, slowly this time. It described a performance she had attended on the night of the second murder. She had seen a figure in the shadows of the upper gallery—not a man, she wrote, but something that *wore* a man the way a coat wears a hanger. She had followed it. She had seen it feed.

But it was the last line of the statement that made his hands shake.

*I know the name it whispers when it believes itself alone. I know the bloodline it fears. As long as one of my children carries the watch and the name, it will not return.*

Below that, in a different ink, a later addition. The same handwriting, but older, shakier.

*I have arranged for the watch to pass down the line. It will find the one who can see. It always has.*

Julien looked up. Romy was watching him, her expression unreadable.

“She knew,” he said. “She knew what was coming. She wrote this fifty years before she died, and she made sure the watch would find me.”

“‘The one who can see,’” Romy quoted. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” But he did know. The way he could see the edges of things—the faint filigree around certain people, the way light sometimes didn’t land quite right on objects that pretended to be natural. He had never told anyone. He had thought it was an eye condition.

Now he wondered if it was a family heirloom.

He flipped to the final page of the file. It was a notation in a different hand—a Section 13 archivist, years later.

*Case 1874-09 remains open pending identification of primary agent. All witness testimony sealed by order of the Brotherhood of the Silver Hour. The family name is not to be further investigated by active personnel.*

The name was not written. It didn’t need to be.

Julien closed the file. The watch’s second hand resumed its normal sweep, as if the case had been acknowledged and dismissed.

“She saw the killer,” he said. “My great-great-grandmother saw the thing that drained Élise Garnier. She knew its name. She was afraid it would come back.”

“Was it the same thing that killed Étienne?” Romy asked.

“I don’t know.” Julien stood, tucking the file under his arm. “But I know who might. You said there’s a fae courtesan who was involved in the 1960s cases. A woman named La Moire.”

“That’s not a case lead, that’s a needle in a mythological haystack. Half of Section 13’s old files reference her, none of them give a current location.”

“Then we find her.” Julien headed for the door. “Because my family has been paying a debt in ‘vein and blood’ since 1874, and I’m tired of seeing the invoices without knowing what we bought.”

Romy caught his arm. “Julien. If you go down this path, it’s not just an old case you’re opening. It’s the whole Moreau line. Three generations of cover-ups, falsified deaths, Brotherhood contracts. You might not like what you find at the end.”

He met her eyes. “My mother didn’t die in a car accident. My great-great-grandmother saw a monster and wrote about it in a sealed file that was waiting for me.” He touched the watch in his pocket. “I think the only thing worse than finding out what my family did would be not finding out.”

He pulled open the vault door, and the corridor beyond was dark, the archive lights flickering on as he stepped through—as if the building itself was waiting for him to move.

Behind him, Romy let out a breath. “I’ll find La Moire. But I’m not doing it for the case.”

“Why, then?”

“Because someone needs to make sure you come back.” She walked past him into the shadows, and Julien could have sworn the watch ticked twice at her passing.