“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.

The reports usually arrive after a sighting of a strange shape-shifting creature, and are on topics as far-ranging as cover-ups of dangerous, badly-designed bridges to connections between port officials and pirates. It is an open secret that several trans-national oil company executives have pooled their resources to put out a bounty on the creature.