I have been sitting on this for months and it isfinally time. Auras & Embers Book 3 has a title, and it has a cover.
The book is called Ward Breaker.
The cover was created by Rebecacovers.
What it is about
Here is the blurb:
Three Mythical children have been taken in Savannah. Gideon Bean is theonly one who can see how it was done.
They were stolen from some of the best-protected homes in the city. Nodoor forced, no ward broken, and not a single alarm sounded. The Conclave’s owninvestigators found nothing.
Weeks before his agent training is even due to begin, Gideon is calledin early. Dacey Menet – the bennu shifter who burst into his life in a blaze offire – is already on the case, and the dinner date they’ve been promising eachother since Millhaven is going to have to wait. Again.
Then Gideon finds what no one else can – a hair-thin seam in the wardacross a child’s window, unpicked thread by thread and sealed shut again. Hehas never felt magic like it. Neither has Vena Merker, and she has been readingauras since before he was born.
How do you track someone who leaves no trail?
Rosalind Brenner has given the Conclave one week to bring her grandsonhome, or she’ll burn the city to its foundations. Every Mythical bloodline inSavannah is calling for blood. And someone is after Dacey. Gideon doesn’t knowif it has anything to do with the case. He only knows he can’t lose her.
Gideon came to Savannah to find three missing children. What he finds isa war that has been brewing for generations.
The title
A ward, in the world of Auras & Embers, is a standing spell laid over a place, most often a home, and it is the backbone of how magical families keep themselves safe. Wards are built in layers, each doing a different job. The outermost is usually a turn-back or misdirection ward, a soft pressure that whispers “nothing here, keep moving” to anyone who wanders too close. Inside that sits a boundary ward, a physical barrier that will not let the uninvited cross, and beneath it an alarm ward that sounds the moment anything touches it.
The strongest families stack more on top; the Conclave’s headquarters behind the Old Powder Magazine runs seven layers deep. Wards are tied to the caster’s magic and bloodline, so they take on its character: a sorcerer family’s ward reads to Gideon as a cool blue-white lattice that seals over the roof like a shell, while a pyromancer family’s ward is rings of living flame that will burn an intruder to ash. They are keyed to the people who belong there, opened and closed by a touch and a murmured word or a flick of the fingers, and they must be fed and renewed over time, sometimes across generations.
A ward cannot be crossed quietly. Break it and the house knows. Get past it and you leave a mark that an auramancer can read. Which is why the seam Gideon finds in the Marchetti window, unpicked thread by thread and stitched back together without ever setting off the alarm, is something no one on the Conclave’s registry should be able to do.
Meet a few new faces
Gideon steps off the plane into a whole new cast, and I want to introduce two of them before you meet them in the book.
Thane is the Conclave driver who picks Gideon up on the tarmac. Immaculate black suit, chauffeur’s cap held politely in both hands, scarred knuckles, and an aura that hits Gideon like a sledgehammer: hot and dense and animal, earth and hide and musk. Thane is a minotaur. In the old Greek story the minotaur is a monster at the center of a maze. Mine is eight feet tall in his true form, unfailingly courteous, and the single most reassuring person you could have standing beside you when things go wrong. I adore him.
Marguerite Kedros is the Director of the Savannah Conclave. She is a dryad, but not the kind who lives in a European forest. Her hair is the gray-green of Spanish moss, her skin has the fine grain of bark, she goes barefoot on the marble, and her magic is specifically of this place, of the marshes and the cordgrass and the live oaks and the long hot summers. Her aura rolls outward in slow rings like a tree that has been growing in the same ground for centuries.
A taste of Chapter One
The book opens at a Fourth of July party in Gideon’s mother’s new backyard, with charcoal smoke and sweet tea and a pastor with two burgers on his plate, andGideon trying very hard not to check his phone every thirty seconds waiting for Dacey to arrive. It is one of the calmest chapters in the book. Enjoy it. It does not last.
Out of habit, Gideon let his auramancer senses drift across his mother’s backyard.
Most of the guests were completely human, without a trace of magic on them. Mrs. Henderson, over at the dessert table trying to press a second scoop of banana pudding on somebody who was clearly already full, was about as magical as a brick.
But a few of the church members pinged differently.
He frowned, his focus sharpening. There were two women near the potato salad that he vaguely recognized from the times his mother had dragged him to Sunday services, and both of them carried faint magical signatures. The auras weren’t strong. More like a residue, the kind of thing you might pick up from handling enchanted objects or spending time around magical beings. He’d noticed similar traces on Gregory Thorne back in Millhaven, where years of proximity to his witch wife had left a magical watermark on the man. These felt the same. Secondary and absorbed, not innate.
He filed it away and moved on. His mom’s church members were tight-knit. If even one of them had some magical heritage, trace signatures could spread through hugs and bible studies over months and years.
The Fourth of July party had filled the yard while he had been inside changing his shirt for the third time. He’d finally landed on a polo that his mother always said brought out the blue in his eyes. Whether that was true or not, it no longer mattered. He had run out of time, and it was the only option that didn’t make him look underdressed or like he was going to apply for a bank loan.
Charcoal smoke and grilling meat hung in the warm air. Red, white, and blue streamers were tied along the fence posts, and a portable speaker on the patio table played country music. Half the neighborhood had turned out, along with a contingent from his mother’s church, and to his mother’s obvious delight, their small backyard was packed.
After years of cramped apartments and thin walls, seeing his mom in a real house – even if it was a rental – still hit him with a swell of pride so fierce it ached. She’d always dreamed of a house with a white picket fence and a garden she could tend. The thought pulled Gideon’s gaze over to the couple of raised beds that held a mix of vegetables and bright, cheerful flowers.
His mom’s laugh cut through the noise of the party, and he turned to find her over by the dessert table with Mrs. Henderson. They hadn’t even finished unpacking their U-Haul before Mrs. Henderson had adopted his mom. They acted like they’d been best friends for thirty years, not thirty days.
His mom looked happier and more relaxed than he’d seen her in years. She deserved this. All of it.
He was trying not to check his phone every thirty seconds, waiting for Dacey’s arrival, when Pastor Simon ambled over, a paper plate sagging under the weight of two burgers and a mountain of coleslaw, a sweating cup of sweet tea in his other hand. He was a big man. Someone had told Gideon the pastor had played college football, and he could believe it. Simon was built like someone who’d been athletic decades ago but had since made peace with gravity. His thick glasses sat slightly crooked on his nose, and his congenial smile was the kind that got people to volunteer for the cleanup committee.
“Gideon!” Simon bumped him with a friendly elbow, hands too full for anything else. A sharp little snap of static electricity between them made Gideon flinch and shake out his arm.
“Sorry, Gid. I zap everybody. I can’t wait until we finish raising the funds to replace the carpet in the fellowship hall. I shuffle across that thing, and I could jump-start a truck.” He chuckled at his own joke, taking a sip of his drink. “I’m glad to see you. It’s felt like years since we last got to really talk. I was worried that you would find something better to do than spend the Fourth with us old folks.”
Gideon pretended not to notice the passive-aggressive commentary. “Wouldn’t miss it, Pastor.”
His senses brushed against the pastor. A faint magical quality clung to the man, not strong, but layered. Like hearing several radio stations at once, all turned down to a murmur. He caught threads of heat, threads of something metallic, and wisps of other things he couldn’t begin to untangle. None of it was distinct enough to identify. A cocktail of faint residues, muddled together into background noise.
He’d read in one of Vena’s books that deeply devout people, those who’d spent decades in intense prayer and spiritual practice, sometimes developed a faint aura. The text called it a faith-based resonance. It was a fringe theory, but it had some historical data to back it up, and it made sense to Gideon, since Simon had been preaching in this community for as long as he could remember. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Pastor Simon spent his entire life surrounded by people, counseling them through their best and worst moments. He was bound to cross paths with Mythical people. Gideon could only imagine how many hands the man shook each week. Residue had a way of accumulating.
Either way, he made a mental note to ask Vena about it.
“How’s that new job treating you?” Simon asked, taking another sip of his tea. “Your mother tells me you’re doing very well. She’s proud of you, you know. We all are.”
“It’s going great, actually. I like the work.” Gideon felt a small flush of genuine pleasure. The version of his job that his mother and Simon knew about was at a crematorium, which, while not exactly glamorous, was steady employment that paid well, and that counted for a lot in his mom’s book. To his mom, honest work and a strong work ethic were about the highest virtues a person could have.
“Good, good.” Simon nodded sagely, taking a bite of his burger. He chewed, swallowed, and fixed Gideon with the kind of searching look that always made him feel like he was fourteen again and had been caught skipping school. “You know, we’ve missed you at services. The younger boys could use someone like you around. An upstanding young man with a steady head on his shoulders.”
“Oh, that’s very kind—”
“Actually…” Simon cut off Gideon’s polite refusal, twisting around to scan the yard. “There he is. Caleb! Son, come here a second.”
A young man peeled away from a cluster of people gathered by the drink coolers. It took Gideon a moment to place him from the handful of Sundays his mother had managed to drag him to. He had seen him from a distance but had never been introduced. Caleb was a few years younger than Gideon, probably in his early twenties. He was lean and clean-cut, in a short-sleeve polo not terribly dissimilar from his. He had an open, unguarded face.
“Caleb Ross. Good to finally meet you officially.” His handshake was firm, and his eye contact was steady.
“Gideon. Good to meet you too.”
Simon clapped him on the shoulder, pride coming off the man in waves. “Caleb just about runs the youth group single-handedly these days. He leads the Wednesday Bible study, is an assistant coach for the boys’ baseball team, and drives the church van whenever my knees act up. He’s finishing up his engineering degree, too.”
There was absolutely nothing wrong with Caleb, but Gideon decided he didn’t like him anyway.
Simon looked between them, clearly delighted with himself. “Gideon, you two ought to know each other. I think you two would make a heck of a team with those boys.”
“I’d love that, honestly.” Caleb meant it, his whole face lighting up. “Pastor talks about you all the time. It’d be an honor.”
Gideon was hunting for a gentle way out of it when his mother arrived.
“Caleb, don’t you look handsome.” Stella pressed a fresh cup of sweet tea into the young man’s hands. She turned, one hand settling on Caleb’s arm, and her face was soft and shining in a way that put a quiet ache under Gideon’s ribs. “Have you two met? Oh, Caleb’s wonderful. Such a blessing to our congregation.”
“Just met him. Seems like a great guy,” Gideon said, and meant it, despite the sting.
Caleb ducked his head, turning a little pink at the praise, and lifted his sweet tea in a small salute. “I should go put a dent in the fried chicken.” He said it warm and easy, but his eyes came back to Gideon and stayed there. “It was nice to finally meet you, Gideon. And listen. We’ve got our big foster care fundraiser coming up. It’s the best thing we do all year, raising money for the kids in the system who’ve got nobody in their corner. You ought to come be a part of it. We can always use good people, and it’d show you what we’re really about. Think about it?”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, because it was easier than the truth.
Caleb thanked Stella for the tea and headed off toward the food, and Gideon watched his mother watch him go.
She looked at Caleb with such pride and admiration. She loved Gideon past all reason; he never doubted it. But he had zero interest in participating in the church that meant so much to her.
She could only ever be proud of the pieces of him she was allowed to see. He didn’t like having to hide so much of himself from his mom, but he knew she would never understand.
He let it sting while pretending like it didn’t.
“Caleb seems like a nice guy, Ma.”
“Oh, he’s just wonderful.” She patted Gideon’s arm, pleased, and drifted back toward the dessert table, already calling somebody else’s name.
Simon watched her go, then turned a hopeful look on Gideon, his original sales pitch still hanging between them.
Gideon managed not to wince. He’d been dodging this conversation for months. “I appreciate the invitation, Pastor. The night shift makes Sunday mornings tough, but I’ll try to come when I can.”
“All I can ask.” Simon gave him another warm smile and raised his plate in a mock toast. “Enjoy the party, son. Your mother outdid herself.”
Simon gave him a final warm smile and turned back toward the folding tables. The late-afternoon sun hit his glasses, sending a sharp, bright flash directly into Gideon’s face. He winced, blinking away the sun’s afterimage, and made a mental note to grab his sunglasses from his bedroom before—
The buzz of his phone from his back pocket interrupted his train of thought. Fumbling in his haste, Gideon yanked out his phone. On the screen was a message from Dacey: Just arrived.
When
Ward Breaker will be out this fall. I will have the exact date and preorder links for you very soon, and newsletter subscribers will get them first, along with weekly excerpts and character profiles in the run-up to release.
Thank you for waiting. I think this is the best book in the series, and I cannot wait for you to read it.