Quill Asher runs a true-crime Substack with eighty thousand paid subscribers.
Two weeks ago he wrote a long essay about my serial. The headline ran:
"She isn't writing fiction — she's summoning the dead."
It put me on the trending feed for the first time in my life. I screenshot it and sent it to Daphne with a row of grateful emojis. I subscribed to him for five bucks a month.
Looking at him in person, in a New Orleans police conference room, I am cold all over.
Ember is between us before I finish the breath.
"Who let you up here."
Quill produces, unhurried, a Cypress House lanyard with a media-credential card.
"Ms. Lascelle's marketing director cleared me through the front desk. I'm here to walk Ms. Mosely through the staging order for tonight."
Ember reads the lanyard like it is a manuscript he is finding errors in.
"What's your relationship to the user account Nightwatch."
Quill smiles. The smile is patient.
"Detective. I'm just a reader."
He looks at me over Ember's shoulder.
"The most attentive reader you have."
My fingers find each other and lock.
"You know about the photo."
"The whole city's about to know about the photo." His tone is gentle, almost apologetic. "Look."
Daphne is already swiping.
She turns her phone toward me.
X Trending, top three.
#SeventhNightKiller
#MWrenPredictsMurders
#DontStopPosting
Below the hashtags, the quote-tweets are an open sewer. People are placing bets. A reply guy with eleven followers has posted a bracket — sixteen names ranked by who they think dies in Chapter 15.
A blue-check is offering thousand-dollar odds.
I look at it until my hands and feet go numb.
Quill says, quietly, "You see, the world likes your story."
I slap him.
The conference room goes still.
His glasses slide a quarter inch down his nose. The cheek above the frame turns pink in a clean stripe.
He does not get angry. The corners of his mouth lift.
"There she is."
He touches his lip with the back of his thumb.
"You're starting to behave like a protagonist."
Ember locks Quill's wrist and pivots him toward the door.
"You're coming with us."
Quill goes without resisting. He turns his shoulder as he passes me. His voice drops to a level only I can hear.
"At eight tonight, Quentin Hargrove will die."
"But it won't be me who kills him."
I look up at him.
He leans an inch closer. His breath smells like coffee and nothing else.
"M. Wren. In your fiction, the real villain never walks on first."
They take Quill to Interview Two.
I sit on the vinyl couch in the witness lounge and listen to Daphne argue with her boss on speakerphone.
The boss is Beau Lascombe, CEO of Cypress House. He is in a car somewhere on I-10, by the sound of the wind.
"Daphne. The room is booked. The catering is paid. The Quarter hotel will not refund. The wholesaler from Houston flew in. Three networks are in the lobby right now. If Wren does not put her ass on that stage at seven, the morality clause kicks in and Cypress House sues her, not the other way around."
Daphne's voice is even. "Beau. There is an active multiple-homicide investigation. The detective on the case is standing in my conference room right now."
"They have the guy. I just saw it on Twitter. They picked him up at the precinct."
"They have a guy. He hasn't been charged."
"All the more reason. She goes on, clears her name, sells out the print run. You tell Wren if she's not in the chair at six-forty-five, the contractual penalty is eight hundred thousand dollars and that is a phone call I will personally make to a collection agency on Monday."
He hangs up.
Daphne throws her phone at the couch.
I look at it.
"I'm worth eight hundred grand now."
Nobody laughs.
Ember has been standing in the doorway. He has been quiet. Now he says, mildly:
"Go."
Daphne whips around. "Are you out of your mind."
"Whoever is doing this wants her on stage at seven," Ember says. "That means tonight is the trap. If we don't walk into the trap, we don't catch the person setting it."
He does not look away from me when he says the rest.
"I will be in the front row. Every door will be ours. There will be plainclothes between you and every member of the audience. You will not be alone for one second of tonight."
I look at him.
"Detective. Why should I trust you."
He goes into his coat and brings out a thin manila folder, soft at the corners from being carried.
The folder has been on someone's desk for a long time.
He opens it to a page in the middle.
A survivor roster from the 2009 St. Anastasia fire. Eleven names. Children identified after the building was cleared.
My name is on it.
So is one other, circled in red ballpoint that has gone brown with age.
Silas Thorne.
"After the fire," Ember says, "two children went missing. Confirmed alive at scene, never recovered from the medevac roster. One was you. The other was Silas Thorne."
I read the name and my heart does something it shouldn't.
Silas. Silas Thorne.
The name is strange on my tongue and not strange at all. The way a word in a language you used to speak as a child is.
I look up at Ember.
"Is he alive."
"I don't know."
He has barely finished the sentence when my phone buzzes again.
A new email. Nightwatch.
No subject. One attachment.
A photograph. A boy of fourteen, fifteen at most, standing in front of a charred concrete foundation. White-painted clapboard ruins behind him. He is holding a children's storybook with a burn line eaten halfway across the cover.
I cannot make out his face. The phone resolution is too low. But I know the way he is standing.
I turn the picture around in the email viewer.
Across the back, in pencil, in a child's hand:
I've been alive.
Waiting for you to finish.
The launch is in the second-floor ballroom of a converted boutique hotel on Royal Street. Cypress House calls it intimate. It seats four hundred plus a press riser.
The whole back wall is a floor-to-ceiling LED panel. A Twitch and YouTube simulcast feed runs on it tonight, with chat overlay scrolling on the right-hand third in white text on black.
I see the chat through the green-room mirror before I see myself.
shes here???
omg her face
M WREN
who dies tonight take bets
Daphne is pinning my lavalier inside the collar of the black dress Cypress House sent over. The dress is wool crêpe and fits like it was made on me. Red lip. Concealer under both eyes that does not cover what it is meant to cover.
In the mirror I look like the cover art of my own book.
Daphne's fingers, working the wire, tremble once.
I catch her wrist.
"Daph."
She doesn't look up.
"What else are you not telling me."
Her face changes the way river ice changes the second it gives.
"Nothing."
I keep my hand on her wrist and I do not move.
She closes her eyes.
"The hit-and-run, three years ago, was not random."
The room shrinks to a single point.
"What."
"I pulled the security footage off the building across the street. The plates on the SUV were cloned. I tracked the original VIN. The owner was a holding company tied to the Ashland Foundation."
"Daphne."
"The driver got out. He went through your bag while you were on the ground. He took the manila envelope you'd brought to the meeting."
My voice is in a place I don't recognize.
"What was in the envelope."
"You told me — that morning, before you went out for coffee — you'd brought your evidence on the St. Anastasia fire."
I let go of her wrist.
"And you sat on this for three years."
Daphne's eyes do not leave the mirror.
"I told one person on our board, in confidence, that you were writing about St. Anastasia. They said they would handle it. They said it would be quiet. They said no one would touch you. I thought —"
"You thought they meant they'd buy me off."
"I thought they meant anything but what they meant."
Her eyes are wet. They do not spill. She does not give me a tear. I think that is the only thing she does right tonight.
"Why are you telling me now."
"Because if you walk out there and you don't know, I —"
She doesn't finish.
I pull my arm out of her hand. My anger comes up so fast I have to swallow it back down to keep it for later.
There is no later. There is just out there.
A stage manager pokes her head in. "Two minutes, Miss Mosely."
I look at the mirror one more time and I do not recognize the woman in it. Then I go.
The walk down the side hall is short. The applause sounds like rain on a tin roof and goes on too long.
I step out into the lights. I cannot see anyone in the first ten rows; the rig is too bright.
Ember is somewhere on the aisle. I have to take that on faith.
The host is a woman from a local lit-fest, all blonde curls and PR voice. She walks me to a tall stool and a microphone.
"M. Wren," she says. "Welcome. Some of our viewers tonight want to know — where do you get your ideas?"
I hear myself read the rehearsed line off the prompter.
"I get them in dreams."
A woman in the third row stands up. She is twenty-two, in a sweatshirt that says BAYOU TRUE CRIME POD.
"Who dies next?"
There is a half-second of silence.
Somebody in the back laughs.
I grip the microphone.
They are not looking at me the way an audience looks at a writer.
They are looking at me like a body about to open.
Ember stands up in row two. His eyes are sweeping the room.
The LED wall behind me goes black.
For three seconds the only sound in the ballroom is the air handlers.
Then the wall comes back on.
White text on black. Twenty feet high.