“This could be the opportunity you’re waiting for. Not my house, but this moment in your life. The wave break of childhood to self-aware woman releases a tremendous amount of power. That power is best channeled.”Awkward know-it-all Tabitha Slate was born and raised in Seattle. Her life consists of Friday night fights with her family for the remote control, her crappy minimum wage job, and convincing her sisters that collecting action figures doesn’t disqualify her from being Black or a girl.Then Tabitha blunders into the Wardein, those sworn to police the supernatural hybrids and legendary creatures of the city. She reluctantly abandons her dreams of being the popular girl on her new campus, to adopt a position of power in a hidden world with a dangerous learning curve.When a physicist that uses Seattle’s population for monstrous experiments wants Tabitha as the next subject, Tabitha has to accept the darkness she’s capable of, or lose everything.

“She clutched the wrought iron bars of the fence, and bathed her face in the sharp metallic steam that rose between her curled fingers. The house beyond the gate wavered in and out of focus. She flicked her tongue against her top lip and savored the damp. This place was exactly as she remembered it.”Tabitha Slate used to worry about her grades or being the only Black girl in her engineering classes. Then she bumbled into the Wardein: the guardians who protect Seattle from its supernatural human hybrid and cryptid citizens hiding in plain sight. She joined them and swore an oath to perform her duty, even if it meant her life. But Tabitha has lost one of the best friends she ever made, and she blames the leader of the Wardein. What’s left of Tabitha’s family is unraveling, an evil djinn with a score to settle is targeting her and her housemates, but Tabitha is on her own. The Wardein are busy with the biggest threat they’ve ever faced: Someone is trying to breach the Trench, the only barrier between the Puget Sound and a voracious horror nearly as old as the sea. Tabitha’s world is in pieces. Divided between loyalty and duty, she’s afraid she will choose the wrong person to protect, the wrong family to abandon, and the wrong person to love.

“I made that for you. It’s everything you need to know about us. Isn’t he beautiful? He won’t be any trouble. Please swear to me that you’ll keep him safe. He needs a protector and I’m not good enough. They all want to take him from me.”Midwife Ursalynn Wade is attending the most dangerous delivery of her career. The perfect couple her sixteen-year-old patient did not select as adoptive parents are not taking no for an answer, and now Howard Memorial Hospital is under siege.Ursalynn is the only witness to the first birth of its kind in over a thousand years. More than one kind of family wants this baby. When her patient begs her to keep the extraordinary child safe from the sinister forces of the Magdalenes, Ursalynn must do the unthinkable. She must turn her back on everything she’s worked hard for, and go on the run.