Books

Everyone knows that monsters are real.

Venice, 1865: Sixteen-year-old Ayanda Draculesti doesn’t remember her early life—all she knows is that she was found as a small child, wandering the streets of Venice with an intricate medallion and a mangled left arm. She knows that she’s an Unnatural, an alchemical being created with strange abilities. She knows that if anyone finds out, she’ll die at the hands of an angry mob.

But Ayanda is unique even among Unnaturals–even though she’s alive, she has the powers of a vampire. She has the strength and speed to battle them, and most importantly, the will. She won’t let another child die.

Ayanda isn’t the only young Unnatural in Venice. Ghostly Yurei is in hiding, fleeing the captors determined to turn him into an assassin. Jette Jekyll and Belle Frankenstein are on the run from alchemists who want them dead and dissected. Their paths and Ayanda’s collide when a brutal enemy surfaces that threatens them all: one of the Greater Dead, a vampire that slithers through Venice murdering everyone she encounters.

This vampire isn’t on the hunt. She has plans, more sinister and dangerous than anyone can imagine.

Ayanda is determined to stop this Dead creature before she kills again. Yurei, Jette and Belle aren’t. Why should they risk their lives to save people who see them as monsters? All they’ve ever known is hate and fear. They owe the world nothing.

But Ayanda can’t defeat a Dead creature alone.

Venice, 1865:

Everyone knows the tale of Poveglia. The lonely island has been haunted since the time of the Red Death, the vampire plague that swept across the Continent in centuries past. Five hundred years ago the island became a mass grave, the pyre of thousands upon thousands of half-transformed victims. No Venetian will sail within sight of it. It’s said that Poveglia’s very soil is made of ash.

But sixteen-year-old Unnatural Ayanda Draculesti doesn’t believe in curses or ghosts. She’s learned well enough that the dead don’t return as spirits, they return with fangs.

It’s been a fortnight since she, Yurei, Jette and Belle battled the fiend in the Doge’s Palace and stopped her army from ravaging Venice. But their scars have hardly begun to fade when a new menace emerges from the cursed island, new creatures as mysterious as they are vicious.

Creatures that rob Ayanda of her vampiric powers. That leave Yurei at the mercy of a hideous ghost from his past. That invade Jette’s soul and tear it in two. That force Belle to discover their secrets alone. That threaten to rip Venice and its people to bloody rags.

Creatures that aren’t vampires.

For, as Ayanda and her new family learn, the Dead aren’t the only monsters lurking in the dark.

Description to come.