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Dedication

For my daughters, Anastasia and Helen

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m greatly indebted to my editor at Ace Books, Anne Sowards, for her excellent editorial guidance and her great kindness and patience during all those times I needed reassurance, which was far too often. I would also like to thank my agent, Jack Byrne of Sternig and Byrne Literary Agency, for his wonderful advice and unfaltering support. I’m grateful to Annette Fiore and Kristen del Rosario, the designers, and Chad Michael Ward, the artist, for the fantastic cover and design; to Megan Gerrity, the production editor, and her staff for making this book possible; and to Maggie Kao, Ace’s publicist, for all of her hard work.

I’m most grateful to Charles Coleman Finlay, Ellen Key Harris-Braun, and Jenni Smith-Gaynor of Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror for believing in my work before anybody else did. I thank Deanna Hoak for answering my endless questions. And a big thank-you to everyone who has read and commented on the draft of this work: Hannah Wolf Bowen, Jeff Stanley, Nora Fleischer, Lawrence Payne, Mark Jones, Del Whetter, Steve Orr, A. Wheat, Betty Foreman, Catherine Emery, Elizabeth Hull, Susan Curnow, Richard C. Rogers, Aaron Brown, David Emanuel, Jodi Meadows, Christiana Ellis, Kyri Freeman, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Davis, and especially Charlene L. Amsden.

Finally I would like to apologize to the city of Atlanta, whose beautiful architecture I’ve treated so badly in the name of artistic license.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

I SAT AT A TABLE IN MY SHADOWY KITCHEN, STARING down a bottle of Boone’s Farm Hard Lemonade, when a magic fluctuation hit. My wards shivered and died, leaving my home stripped of its defenses. The TV flared into life, unnaturally loud in the empty house.

I raised my eyebrow at the bottle and bet it that another urgent bulletin was on.

The bottle lost.

“Urgent bulletin!” Margaret Chang announced. “The Attorney General advises all citizens that any attempt at summoning or other activities resulting in the appearance of a supernaturally powerful being can be hazardous to yourself and to other citizens.”

“No shit,” I told the bottle.

“Local police have been authorized to subdue any such activities with all due force.”