The Drowned Note

In New Orleans, some songs save lives. Others wake what should have stayed sleeping. Marcus Thibodeaux is a trumpet player scraping by on late-night gigs and day-job exhaustion—until the rain starts moving wrong. When an elder priestess named Mama Odette appears out of nowhere and calls him by his grandmother's name, Marcus is pulled into a truth his family buried for generations. His bloodline once held a covenant with Lake Pontchartrain—an ancient, hungry intelligence that protected the city's maroons, runaways, and musicians in exchange for music, memory, and ritual. But the covenant has been starving for decades. Now the lake is taking people in their sleep. And Marcus is the last Thibodeaux left who can stop it. As he trains under Mama Odette, Marcus learns songs that bend water, rhythms that stir the deep, and rituals that blur the line between ecstasy and annihilation. The dreams come nightly—pleasure, drowning, and a presence beneath the surface that knows him too well. The Twelve Nights are approaching, and with them, the binding that will either renew the covenant… or consume him whole. To save his city, Marcus must decide whether to face the thing calling him from the deep—or become its next drowned note. A lush, atmospheric blend of Southern Gothic horror, ancestral magic, and Black musical mythology, The Drowned Note is a haunting descent into legacy, desire, and the price of survival.