gives birth to his son, Jude, and secretly leaves him in the care of an orphanage. Lee is not the first to serve as "protector" of Bete Noire; she has had more than one predecessor. Lee has several superhuman abilities, including immense physical strength, the ability to leap large distances, and to project some type of mystical energy from her body, often from her eyes. Her invulnerability is tied to her level of concentration, and she can be harmed if extremely fatigued or distracted. She has also stated that she has a superhuman sense of direction. Since being cast down, she cannot touch Earth's soil, and so floats just above the ground when barefoot. Because of the nature of time in Bete Noire, Lee, who was not born in the city, ages more slowly than Bete Noire native-borns, but has yet experienced some aging between the first and second volumes of the series because she spends half her time outside the city. When in the city, she physically appears to be the equivalent of a twenty-five-year-old human woman, but outside the city, appears to be a woman in her late 40s. Doctor Juris The Magistrate and "manager" of Bete Noire, Juris answers to a mysterious group called the Hierarchy. He is Lee's prime antagonist throughout the first series and, strangely enough, her lover. He, like all other Magistrates, is a descendant of Cain. In the second series, twenty years after the events of the first, he is married to an Asian woman named Xia. He tries to pass on guardianship of Bete Noire to his son Jubal at the stroke of midnight on Jubal's eighteenth birthday, but when the ritual fails, he realizes that Jubal is not his firstborn son, which leads him to discover that he has a twenty-year-old son, Jude, by Lee. Jude soon tracks him down in Bete Noire, however, and he is able to pass his legacy to his son. When Juris tries to leave Bete Noire after this, he rapidly ages and dies. Jude Jude is Lee and Juris' son, and older half-brother to Jubal. He first appears as an infant (with tiny emerging wings on his back) at the end of the first series, when Lee leaves him at an orphanage shortly after his birth. As an infant, his wings are torn off by Malachi, disguised as a dog. Twenty years later, Jude is