schma10
- Reads 476
- Votes 112
- Parts 10
New Orleans, Louisiana. June, 1998
The Beauregard Institute has a student debt problem. To address it, a handful of broke, supernaturally gifted students take on freelance monster-hunting assignments for the Arcane Debt Reduction Initiative (ADRI), for short. It's a high-stakes work-study program where the "tuition" is paid in blood. For every supernatural threat neutralized across Louisiana bayou, the school chips away at the student's mounting loans.
Take these two college students, for example:
Maeve Locklear, an eighteen-year-old medium who finds the living more exhausting than the dead.
Tess Beauvais, a carefree nineteen-year-old witch who masks a dangerous strength.
Maeve's first official night shift was supposed to be easy: take out a former information broker. The pay was decent, and the target was supposedly small-time. That is until a horde of anomalies ambushes the drop-off.
While Maeve narrowly escapes the carnage, the shadows of the bayou follow her back to campus.
The Institute's hallowed halls, once smelling of old paper and floor wax, now reek of copper and ozone. A series of impossible murders begins to plague the faculty, scrawled in the very ichor Maeve saw in the streets.
Tess and Maeve make demands to their handler, Rourke Salvatore, only for him to hand them their paychecks and bench them in his boarding house.
Now, don't get them wrong; the duo wants to forget the night ever happened. But with the monsters still hot on their tail, enlisting the help of a slippery pirate is the only way to ensure they live long enough to graduate.