Cover

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the good people of Slidell, Louisiana for hosting me as I wrote a good portion of this book. Your eerily beautiful, Spanish-moss laden environment was the perfect inspiration.

As ever, thank you to Amanda Ronconi and Jonathan Davis for giving my characters a voice and for taking my extensive notes (read: bossiness) with such good grace. Thanks to Jaye Wells, who helped me come up with a better name for the series than, “That Audio Series I Can’t Seem to Come Up With a Good Name For.”

Thanks to www.spirit-animals.com for all of the information about llama spirit animals and their personality traits, and to a number of comic book fandom sites that helped me understand what the heck I was trying to express in terms of Dani’s talent.

Prologue

If she got any closer to the rift, there was a good chance her head would explode.

She’d fought through the waist-high ferns and gone far beyond the rock circle that marked the safe distance for humans to approach the rift that purportedly separated this world from the next. For that matter, she’d gone beyond the rock line that marked the safe distance for the magique, the population of shapeshifter, fairy folk, and assorted monsters that populated Mystic Bayou. She’d ventured farther than anyone had ever dared, forcing her feet to carry her into the vast sacred site surrounding what the locals called la faille, and she was feeling the effects of it. The air felt too thick and heavy to breathe and it had nothing to do with the stifling heat of Louisiana in August. Her skin prickled, like fire ants were crawling up and down her bare arms. Her ears popped with the fluctuations in air pressure as it pulsed with pure energy just a hundred feet away.

But still, she’d come this far, too far, to stop now.

She set her backpack of supplies at her feet and admired what looked like the aurora borealis, hovering too close to the surface of water rippling beneath it, a living vortex of shifting color. Others described it in banal terms, as “a haze” in the air that could barely be detected without binoculars. But she could see what they couldn’t, the mesmerizing dance of prismatic flashes in the air. Her eyes ached with the intensity of the light, but she forced herself to stare into it.

There was no known explanation for this mystical vortex. There were no ley lines, no atmospheric anomalies, no massacres on the site. The rift in the fabric of what kept their world separate from whatever lay beyond just was and nothing could be done about it.