Madame of New Orleans | Evangeline "Eva" Boudreaux

Evangeline "Eva" Boudreaux was born and raised in the heart of New Orleans, Louisiana, a city where the air was thick with history, music, and the scent of Creole cooking. She grew up in the French Quarter, where her grandmother, Mama Odette, ran a small but well-loved voodoo shop tucked between a jazz club and an old bookstore. The shop, La Lune Mystique (The Mystic Moon), was filled with the scent of burning sage, shelves lined with glass jars of herbs, and candles flickering against the walls adorned with faded photographs of ancestors.

Her mother, Lisette, was a jazz singer with a voice as smooth as honey, and her father, Gabriel, a boatman who ferried tourists through the bayous on his old pirogue, telling half-true ghost stories about the spirits that lingered in the swamp. Eve’s upbringing was steeped in stories, music, and a quiet reverence for the city’s unseen forces.

But tragedy struck when Eve was only sixteen. Her mother died suddenly—heart failure, the doctors said, though Mama Odette swore it was something else, something darker. Grief swallowed the family whole, and her father, unable to bear the weight of loss, took to drinking more than working. Eve, with no siblings to lean on, took refuge in the only things she knew: music and magic.

She spent her young adult years sneaking into jazz bars under the guise of running errands, listening to the soul-stirring sound of trumpets and saxophones. She learned how to read tarot cards from her grandmother, who taught her that the cards didn’t predict the future, only revealed what was already written in the soul. But Eve was skeptical—she wanted proof, something tangible.

By the time she was twenty, she was singing in small venues across the Quarter, her voice a haunting echo of her mother’s. But she wanted more. She wanted to leave New Orleans, to carve a name for herself outside the city that both loved and caged her. Yet, no matter how far she dreamed, something always pulled her back—Mama Odette’s whispered warnings about the city’s hold, the unshakable feeling that her mother’s death was no mere coincidence, and the secrets buried deep in the Boudreaux bloodline.

Now, at twenty-eight, Eve finds herself s