Evil Abounds: An Alpha Guardians Prequel by Vivian Wood

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    Chapter One
Mere Marie
    New Orleans, Louisiana — 2015
    M ere Marie was roused from a light doze near midnight, though she wasn’t sure what had disturbed her rest. A flicker of icy air against her skin perhaps, or a shifting of the deep shadows cast by the last few candles she’d left burning. Though it was the 21st century, some 220-plus years since Mere Marie’s birth, and modern conveniences abounded, she still preferred some of the more romantic notions from her early life. Candles were always lit after dark at Maison Laveau, and dark always seemed to come early in the sultry New Orleans summer nights.
    Pulling her shawl more snugly around her shoulders, Mere Marie rose from the comfortable leather armchair she preferred for resting. An immortal, a member of the Kith, as the paranormal community were often called, Mere Marie had no need for true sleep. Not the way humans did. But, like the candles, it was an old habit that she simply kept for the sake of keeping. She followed many of the old ways, worshiped her ancestral spirits, lived in the same house where her mother and her mother’s mother worked as maids, her New Orleans lineage going all the way back to the city’s foundations. Further, even, because Mere Marie knew several ancestral spirits whose memories traced a winding path back to Haiti.
    The age of her beautiful house, added to its location in the vibrant, thriving Vieux Carre, meant that Mere Marie might simply have heard a muffled sound, some distant shout of celebratory joy from a tourist experiencing the French Quarter’s charm for the first time. Her bedroom window faced the quieter side of Vieux Carre, but she still got occasional bits and pieces of late night revelry.
    When Mere Marie turned toward the window, intending to open first the glass pane and then the tightly-shut wooden storm shutter in order to peer out into the street, she stilled. The candlelight turned the window into a murky mirror, and the hazy reflection told Mere Marie that she was not alone in the room. Mere Marie saw herself of course, a diminutive Creole woman appearing about sixty years age. Her long, dark hair was neatly braided and wound around her head, her white night rail rumpled. Her high, proud cheekbones, her broad, flat nose, and her distinctive cafe au lait skin tone showed Mere Marie’s mixed ancestry, common in women from the class into which Mere Marie had been born - Gens de Couleur Libres, or Free People of Color.
    Standing only a foot behind her was a fiercely tall, finely turned-out gentleman of obvious and recent African heritage. His presence made every hair on Mere Marie’s body stand on end. What in the world was Le Medcin doing in her house? During the witching hour, no less.
    “Monsieur,” Mere Marie said, watching his reflection. She knew better than to try to turn around and face him, but she couldn’t stop staring at him, her fascination only increasing with each passing moment. She wasn’t sure if he was a god, an ancient spirit, or something else entirely, but Le Medcin’s power was such that it drew one in, even someone as old and powerful as Mere Marie. All she knew was that Le Medcin worked for the highest of higher powers, a distant sort of benefactor to humankind and Kith, the final authority in all matters both in this world and the next.
    On the surface, Le Medcin was nothing but a handsome, well-to-do Free Person of Color, wearing an elegant if outmoded black suit with tails and a sky-high top hat. He clutched a gold-tipped cane. His dark skin seemed to be stretched a little too tightly over his bones, and when he moved or spoke Mere Marie had the distinct impression that she could see right through to his skeleton. She’d dealt with him perhaps a dozen times in the last hundred years, and each time had been just as off-putting as the last.
    Le Medcin rarely came to the human world. He presided over the world of spirits, those who had passed through the human world and