Chapter 1 - The Invitation
New Orleans, 1899.
The night pressed close, thick with the perfume of night-blooming jasmine and the slow rot that drifted up from the river. Gas lamps flickered behind iron lace balconies, their light swallowed almost at once by the heavy air. Somewhere a banjo mourned, distant and lazy; closer, the Mississippi whispered against the levee like a lover too tired to finish what he started.
Eveline Moreau stepped down from the hired carriage before the wrought-iron gates of Sarpellier House, valise clutched tight against the damp silk of her bodice. At twenty-nine she carried herself with the severe grace of a woman who had once knelt at convent altars and now knelt only to shadows she intended to banish. Her skin was the warm ivory of café-au-lait, her eyes the deep brown-black of bayou water at midnight, framed by lashes so thick they seemed to cast their own shadow. Raven hair was pinned in a coronet beneath a modest veiled hat; her high-necked gown of charcoal bombazine buttoned to the throat and fell in austere lines to the ground, concealing every curve save the faint suggestion of hip when she moved.
She had been summoned.
A letter, written in a hand both elegant and serpentine, had arrived at her rooms above the apothecary on Chartres Street: the Baroness Vionica Sarpellier requested the services of the city’s most discreet spiritualist to “address certain disturbances” at her Garden District residence. The fee offered was obscene. The warnings implicit: come alone, speak to no one, leave questions unasked.
Eveline had accepted without hesitation. The money would buy silence for those who still whispered about the convent girl who read forbidden grimoires by candlelight. The challenge fed the hunger she refused to name. And the rumors—the ones that drifted through the Vieux Carré like smoke—had pricked something deeper than professional pride.
Servants vanishing after dusk.
Guests leaving pale and trembling, eyes dilated, unable to remember their own names.
A woman glimpsed through upper windows: tall, regal, skin gleaming like polished bronze, something sinuous uncoiling behind her in the lamplight.
Eveline feared no spirit, no loa, no possessing demon. She had faced them all and sent them howling.
She feared only the tremor that sometimes woke her in the small hours, thighs slick, dreams filled with soft scales sliding over skin and a voice that purred cher like a caress.
The gates opened without a sound. No caretaker appeared. Eveline walked the shell-lined path alone, heels clicking against the quiet. Spanish moss draped the live oaks like funeral veils; the mansion itself rose before her, three stories of pale stucco and ironwork balconies, windows shuttered, yet light leaked from the cracks—greenish, unnatural, like marsh gas given form.
The front door stood ajar.
Inside, the air was warmer than the night outside, heavy with incense and something sweeter, muskier—river mud and honey and the faint metallic promise of venom. Marble floors gleamed under a chandelier whose crystals had been replaced with faceted green glass; they caught the candlelight and threw serpentine patterns across the walls.
Eveline set her valise on a rosewood table and began her preparations in the grand parlor. She drew a circle of blessed salt mixed with brick dust and crushed vervain. She placed four white candles at the quarters, lit them with murmured prayers in Latin and Creole. From the valise came her tools: a silver aspergillum, a vial of holy water from St. Louis Cathedral, a St. Michael medallion heavy on its chain, her leather-bound grimoire open to the rite of expulsion she had perfected against a possessing rougarou two winters past.
At the center of the circle she set a small brass censer and lit the charcoal; copal smoke rose in slow spirals.
Midnight approached. Eveline removed her hat and veil, loosened the top buttons of her gown so she could breathe, unbound her hair until it spilled down her back in a dark river. She stood within the circle in her chemise and corset, sleeves rolled to the elbow, ready.
She began the invocation.
Her voice was low, steady, rolling through the ancient words—Latin first, then the fiercer Creole petitions to Michael the Archangel, to Ste. Marguerite, to the loa who still answered when called by their true names. She commanded any unclean thing to manifest, to be named, to be cast out.
The candles flared green at the edges.
The smoke twisted, thickened, took on the shape of coils.
A laugh answered her—low, feminine, rich as cane syrup poured over hot iron.
The salt circle hissed and blackened in a perfect spiral.
Eveline’s breath caught, but her voice never wavered. “By the power of Heaven and the names I have spoken, I compel you to show yourself and depart.”
The air shimmered before the cold marble hearth. Emerald flame erupted without fuel—silken, liquid, licking upward in slow, sinuous waves. Within the fire a figure took form.
Not a ghost.
Not a loa.
She stepped from the flames as though they were parting curtains of green silk, untouched, radiant. Tall—taller than Eveline—regal in a way that made the room feel suddenly small. Skin the deep burnished bronze of river-polished cypress at sunset, kissed with an otherworldly sheen. Hair a cascade of obsidian waves that moved as though stirred by unseen currents. Eyes slit-pupiled gold-green, glowing faintly, ancient and amused. Small iridescent scales glimmered at her temples, along the elegant column of her throat, and scattered like jeweled freckles across the swell of her hips.
A long, powerfully muscled serpentine tail—emerald scaled, black at the edges, ending in a broad spade tip—swayed behind her with languid menace. Translucent fangs, delicate and venomous, gleamed when she smiled.
Her gown—if it could be called that—was woven of living scales that shifted and parted with every breath: slits revealing the long curve of thigh, the full swell of breast, the shadowed dip between hip bones. It clung and released like a second skin, promising more with every flicker of candlelight.
Eveline’s heart slammed against her ribs. This was no possessing spirit. This was ancient. This was other.
The creature—Vionica Sarpellier, though Eveline did not yet know the name—tilted her head, studying her as though she were a rare orchid pinned beneath glass.
“You came to bind me, cher,” she purred, voice velvet dragged over river stones, accented with the soft lilt of old New Orleans and something far older. “Instead, you will learn how sweetly one can be bound.”
Eveline gripped the St. Michael medallion, raising it between them. “I command you, in the name of—”
Vionica lifted one elegant hand. The medallion grew suddenly scalding; Eveline dropped it with a gasp, palm stinging.
“Names have power,” the baroness murmured, gliding closer. The blackened salt circle smoked and crumbled beneath the slow sweep of her tail. “But only if you know the one who answers. And you, sweet exorcist, do not yet know mine.”
She circled the ruined sigil with predatory leisure, tail flicking idly. Up close her beauty was devastating—cruel, magnetic, ancient. Heat radiated from her body, carrying that scent of river mud and honey now laced with something darker. Hunger.
Eveline’s knees weakened despite every vow she had ever made. She had spent years burying the forbidden yearnings that rose in the quiet of her rooms: soft feminine mouths, commanding hands, the exquisite terror of surrender. Never had those dreams worn scales and fangs.
Vionica stopped inches away, forked tongue flickering once—testing the air, tasting Eveline’s quickening pulse.
“Such a fierce little priestess,” she whispered. “All that delicious repression wrapped tight around a core of molten want. I can smell it from here.”
A single clawed finger traced the air above Eveline’s cheek—never touching, yet the skin tingled as though branded.
“I have waited in this house a very long time,” Vionica continued, voice dropping to a caress. “Starved for proper worship. For proper surrender. And you have opened the door so prettily.”
Eveline found her voice. “I will close it again. You will leave this place.”
The baroness laughed again, the sound curling low in Eveline’s belly like smoke.
“Oh, cher. The house is mine. The night is mine. And very soon…” Gold-green eyes bored into brown-black. “You will be mine.”
She leaned closer, lips nearly brushing Eveline’s ear, forked tongue grazing the shell just enough to send a shiver racing down her spine.
“Run if you wish, little exorcist. The chase only makes the tasting sweeter.”
Vionica dissolved back into emerald flame and shadow, leaving only the lingering scent of honeyed venom—and the unmistakable, traitorous throb of arousal between Eveline’s thighs.
The ritual was over.
But something far more dangerous had only just begun.
