“When I recovered from nearly drowning in water, unchained otherworldly evil, and magical energy, there was a ghost at my side: Uncle Beau. As I huddled with everyone else in the reeking SuperDome, he slowly told me about how the storm took out more than just the levees, but the magical wards that had kept all kinds of evil locked up in this town. Now that evil was running wild all over the South, and as his heir, it was my job to find those old monsters wherever they hid, bring them back to their cages in New Orleans, and lock them up again.”

Lucian Dark can usually pass as fully Human, even though he’s really a hybrid of Human and one of the native lifeforms from the extra-dimensional realm of Susur. In medieval terms, Chiaroscuro is the progeny of an incubus and a witch.

At their first way-station … the Order was waiting. Hex and the broken remains of The Saints fought off their pursuers long enough to let the rest of the refugees escape for parts unknown, leaving Helena and her unit stranded on Earth.

Outsiders who visit Earth sometimes leave behind the odd trinket. Few of these items can be triggered by mere humans; even fewer can be controlled without killing their users or driving them mad; but a very few can actually be reverse-engineered and mated with terrestrial technology.