Bourbon Street Shadows Series by Heidi McLaughlin – Read Books Online Free Ebooks good best novels to read

Bourbon Street Shadows Series by Heidi McLaughlin – Read Books Online Free Ebooks good best novels to read http://www.ilovenovels.com Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:20:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 http://www.ilovenovels.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/favicon.png Bourbon Street Shadows Series by Heidi McLaughlin – Read Books Online Free Ebooks good best novels to read http://www.ilovenovels.com 32 32 Relic in the Rue (Bourbon Street Shadows #2) Read Online Heidi McLaughlin http://www.ilovenovels.com/relic-in-the-rue-bourbon-street-shadows-2-read-online-heidi-mclaughlin Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:20:41 +0000 http://www.ilovenovels.com/relic-in-the-rue-bourbon-street-shadows-2-read-online-heidi-mclaughlin Genre: Alpha Male Authors: Heidi McLaughlin Series: Bourbon Street Shadows Series by Heidi McLaughlin
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Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)

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A relic that rewrites truth.
An existential threat.
And a love that might not be real at all.

Bastien Durand, once an angel and now the most relentless supernatural investigator in New Orleans, thought the last crisis was behind him. But when a cursed grimoire surfaces at Rousseau Auction House—and a shadowy informant threatens the woman he loves—he’s dragged into a new game with stakes that are anything but routine.

The grimoire was bait. The real prize is an artifact known only in whispers—the Shadowglass Mirror, a relic said to reflect a soul’s truest nature . . . and the ability to bend it to someone else’s will.

The one orchestrating this? Gideon Virelli—a manipulative scholar who knows far too much about Bastien and Delphine’s connection, and her hidden power. Gideon doesn’t just want the relic—he wants Bastien to question everything he spent centuries protecting, including the tether that binds him to Delphine, the choices that built their love, and the very nature of the magic they were never meant to share.

To protect Delphine, Bastien must walk the knife’s edge between duty and doubt.
Because some mirrors don’t just show you who you are—
They show you the lie you’ve been living all along

*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************

Prologue

Bastien watched Delphine’s taillights disappear down Chartres Street, her car swallowed by the October darkness and the oak canopy that turned the Garden District into a tunnel of shadow and shifting lamplight. She’d said “tomorrow” before closing the door—easy and certain, as though the word carried no weight at all. Tomorrow meant dinner at Jacques-Imo’s, meant conversation that didn’t require careful editing, meant the cautious optimism of two people who’d just survived something impossible together and were ready to see what came next.

The Veil breach was sealed. The amateur practitioner would wake in a hospital with nothing worse than confusion and a healthy respect for forces beyond their understanding. The Quarter’s wards held steady. For the first time in months, Bastien felt something dangerously close to hope.

His phone buzzed as he reached his car.

Unknown number. Text message. No words, just an image: a photograph of a grimoire under glass, its spine bearing symbols he recognized even in the grainy phone screen resolution. Laveau family marks. Genuine ones, not the tourist-trap reproductions that cluttered every voodoo shop on Bourbon Street.

A second text followed immediately.

Unknown Number: Café Du Monde. 11 PM. Come alone, or I send this to someone who’ll try to use it.

Bastien checked his watch. 10:17 PM. Forty-three minutes to cross the city, find parking, and walk into whatever trap this was.

He got into the car.

Café Du Monde at eleven on a Thursday night was neither empty nor crowded—just the scattered aftermath of a tourist day winding down, a few die-hard beignet addicts, and the staff who’d seen everything and registered nothing. Bastien chose a table near the back where he could watch for someone coming from all angles, ordered coffee he wouldn’t drink, and waited.

She arrived at 11:03.

The woman was perhaps sixty, silver hair pulled back in a style that suggested old Creole families and the kind of confidence that came from never needing to prove anything. Charcoal wool coat despite the October warmth. Leather gloves. Shoes that made no sound on the tile floor. She crossed the courtyard with the fluid precision of someone accustomed to being watched but not approached.

She sat across from him without asking. Set a cream-colored envelope on the metal table between them. The paper was thick, expensive, sealed with dark wax that caught the overhead lights and threw them back wrong.

“They said you’d know why,” she said. Her voice carried traces of French Quarter aristocracy, words reduced to essential syllables.

“And who would they be?”

“Someone who understands what Charlotte Lacroix left unfinished.” She pushed the envelope toward him. “Someone who knows what Delphine doesn’t know about herself. Yet.”

The locket against his sternum went cold.

Bastien took the envelope. The paper was cold—colder than October air should make it, cold enough that his fingers registered alarm. “What does he want?”

“What Charlotte left incomplete.” The woman stood, already turning away. “You have one week to find it. After that, we force the issue—and Delphine remembers everything at once. All three lifetimes. At the same time.” She glanced back over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Her mind won’t survive it. But you already know that.”

She walked toward the river where the darkness took her.

Bastien broke the seal.

The wax cracked clean. Inside, three items arranged with surgical precision.

First, an invitation to the Rousseau Auction House. Exclusive viewing, seven nights from tonight. Rare occult manuscripts and relics of historical significance. The kind of event that drew collectors who knew better than to ask about provenance.

Second, the photograph from the text message. The grimoire under glass, with the Laveau family marks clear on the spine. But that wasn’t what made his breath catch. In the background of the shot, deliberately included, was another object: a hand mirror, its frame worked in silver that seemed to move in the photograph’s grain.

Third, a note. Four sentences written in ink that shimmered with iridescence.

Charlotte built a network of mirrors to track her soul across death. She died before completing the anchor. You know where she hid the final piece. Bring me the Shadowglass Mirror, or I’ll wake every memory Delphine carries and break her mind doing it.

The ink caught light that didn’t exist in the evening around him, held it, released it in patterns that made his vision blur if he looked too long. Mirror-forged ink. Pigment infused with reflection magic, a technique so rare that fewer than a dozen practitioners worldwide could manage it.

Someone understood Charlotte’s work. Understood what the mirror network was designed to do. And they were using that knowledge to leverage him through the one thing guaranteed to make him comply—the threat of harm to Delphine’s fragile, still-integrating consciousness.

He read the note again. The words didn’t change.

Bring me the Shadowglass Mirror, or I’ll wake every memory Delphine carries and break her mind doing it.

Bastien folded the items back into the envelope. Left cash on the table. The coffee sat untouched, growing cold in the October air while tourists laughed at nearby tables and the city continued its nightly routines, oblivious to the threat that had just been delivered in the space between dinner and midnight.

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Curse in the Quarter (Bourbon Street Shadows #1) Read Online Heidi McLaughlin http://www.ilovenovels.com/curse-in-the-quarter-bourbon-street-shadows-1-read-online-heidi-mclaughlin Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:04:27 +0000 http://www.ilovenovels.com/curse-in-the-quarter-bourbon-street-shadows-1-read-online-heidi-mclaughlin Genre: Alpha Male, Contemporary, Fantasy/Sci-fi, Paranormal Authors: Heidi McLaughlin Series: Bourbon Street Shadows Series by Heidi McLaughlin
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Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 105939 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)

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A cursed man. A haunted city. A love that defies lifetimes.

When fallen angel Bastien Durand walks the rain-soaked streets of New Orleans, he carries more than just the weight of his past—he carries the memory of a love that has haunted him for over a century. Working as a supernatural investigator in the French Quarter, he's learned to live with ghosts, both literal and otherwise.

But when ancient magic begins stirring in the shadows and familiar melodies drift through the night air, Bastien realizes his greatest torment may also be his salvation. A brilliant librarian with eyes he's never forgotten holds the key to secrets that span lifetimes, though she has no memory of the souls she's carried before.

As supernatural factions clash and the veil between worlds grows thin, Bastien must navigate treacherous magic, old enemies, and the devastating possibility that some curses are stronger than death itself. In a city where the past never truly dies, he'll discover that love—and loss—can echo across centuries.

But awakening the truth may cost him everything he's fought to protect.

A moody, slow-burn paranormal mystery set in a New Orleans where demons, witches, and fae itself walk unseen among the living.

Curse in the Quarter is the first book in the Bourbon Street Shadows series

*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************

Prologue

NEW ORLEANS, 1906

The gas lamps cast dancing shadows along Royal Street as Bastien walked beside Delia through the humid November night. Their footsteps echoed against cobblestones still damp from the afternoon rain, and the air carried the mingled scents of jasmine, coffee, and the Mississippi River that wound its way through the heart of the city like an ancient serpent.

“You’re unusually quiet tonight,” Delia observed, her gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm. “Even for my mysterious guardian.”

Bastien’s fingers tightened imperceptibly around the small velvet box in his coat pocket. Three months he’d carried it, waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect words. Tonight felt different—charged with possibility and the kind of hope that made even a fallen angel believe in second chances.

“Perhaps I’m simply enjoying the silence,” he replied, though his voice carried none of its usual steady confidence. “It’s not often we have the Quarter to ourselves.”

She laughed, the sound bright as cathedral bells. “Liar. You’re planning something. I can always tell when your mind is working through possibilities.” Her brown eyes sparkled with mischief in the lamplight. “You get this little crease right here.” She reached up with her free hand to touch the space between his brows.

The gesture was casual, intimate, born of months of such small familiarities. Yet it stopped him in his tracks. How could she know him so well when she didn’t know him at all? When the truth of what he was remained locked behind careful lies and half-spoken explanations?

“Delia.” Her name came out rougher than he intended.

“Yes?”

“What would you say if I told you there were things about me that might . . . surprise you?”

They had stopped beneath a wrought iron balcony draped with Spanish moss. The boarding house where she lived was still two blocks away, but Bastien found himself reluctant to continue. Once they reached her door, she would climb those narrow stairs to her small room, and he would walk alone through the empty streets as he had for decades before her.

“I would say that I already know you’re not entirely human,” she said simply.

The words hit him like cold water. His hand fell away from his pocket, and for a moment, the careful masks he wore threatened to slip entirely.

“Delia—”

“Oh, don’t look so stricken.” She stepped closer, her skirts rustling against the cobblestones. “Did you think I hadn’t noticed? The way you appear at precisely the moment I need you. How you seem to know things you shouldn’t know? How you never age, never change, while months pass around us?”

“Some truths are too dangerous,” he managed.

“And some truths,” she countered, “are the only things that make life worth living.”

Her hands found his face, drawing him down until their foreheads nearly touched. In the amber glow of the gas lamp, she looked like something from a Renaissance painting—all golden light and dark shadows, beautiful and ephemeral and utterly human.

“I don’t need to understand everything about you to know that I love you,” she whispered. “I’ve loved you since that first night when you found me lost in the fog near the cathedral. I loved you when you sat with me through my fever last winter, when you brought me books you claimed to have ‘found’ but I know you bought especially for me. I love the way you listen to my terrible piano playing as if it were opera, and how you always know exactly what to say when the world feels too large and too cruel.”

The ring box felt impossibly heavy in his pocket. This moment—this perfect, honest moment—was everything he’d dreamed of. All he had to do was speak.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he began.

But before he could continue, she had begun to hum.

The melody was simple, barely more than a handful of notes, but it wrapped around his heart like silk cord. She hummed it often while she worked, while she walked, while she sat reading by her window. It was uniquely hers—a little unconscious song that seemed to rise from some deep well of contentment.

“That tune,” he said, momentarily derailed. “Where did you learn it?”

“I don’t know.” She looked puzzled. “I’ve always known it, I think. My mother used to say I hummed it even as a baby.” Her expression grew thoughtful. “Strange. I never told you that before, did I?”

“No,” he said quietly. “You didn’t.”

But he would remember it forever. Every note, every gentle rise and fall of her voice. It would follow him through decades, through other cities and another life, an echo of this moment when everything seemed possible.

They resumed walking, her humming trailing behind them like a benediction. The boarding house came into view—a narrow three-story building squeezed between a bakery and a milliner’s shop. Mrs. Thibodeau kept respectable rooms for working women, and Delia’s was on the second floor, facing the courtyard.

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