Ward Breaker

The third book in the Auras & Embers series, where an auramancer who can see the magic no one else can is about to find the one kind of magic that shouldn’t exist.

Synopsis

Three Mythical children have been taken in Savannah.

They were stolen from some of the best-protected homes in the city. No door forced. No ward broken. Not a single alarm sounded. The Conclave’s own investigators walked every room and came away with nothing.

Weeks before his agent training is even supposed to start, Gideon Bean is called in early. Dacey Menet – the bennu shifter who burst into his life in a blaze of fire – is already on the case, and the dinner date they’ve been promising each other since Millhaven is going to have to wait. Again.

Then Gideon sees what no one else can. A hair-thin seam in the ward across a child’s window, unpicked thread by thread and sealed shut again.

He has never felt magic like it. Neither has the woman who trained him.

Now Rosalind Brenner has given the Conclave one week to bring her grandson home, or she’ll burn the city to its foundations. Every Mythical bloodline in Savannah is calling for blood. Someone is after Dacey. And the trail Gideon is following leads somewhere the Conclave has never had to look.

How do you track someone who leaves no trail?

Perfect for fans of The Dresden Files, Rivers of London, and slow-burn urban fantasy where the monsters aren’t always the ones with claws.

What Makes This Book Special

• • Seeing What No One Else Can: Gideon Bean is an auramancer. He can’t throw fire or cast a spell, but he can see and feel magic the way other people see color, and in a city built on three hundred years of it, that makes him the only person who can read the scene of a crime that left no evidence at all.
  • Savannah, Squares to Salt Marsh: This is Savannah as it actually is, from the moss-hung squares of the historic district to the gated golf-course enclaves on Skidaway Island to the tidal creeks that fill and empty while the case unfolds. The Old Powder Magazine on Ogeechee Road is real. What’s hidden behind it is not.
  • The Rain Check: Gideon and Dacey finally admitted what they feel for each other at the end of Spirit Marked. Now they’re on their first case together, sleeping in the Conclave’s guest rooms, and trying to keep a dinner reservation in a city that is coming apart. Slow burn, finally catching.
  • The Conclave Team: Wiz, Santos, Quinn, MacGuire, and Leonhard are back, plus a dryad director, a minotaur chauffeur, and a transporter on loan from Orlando. Gideon isn’t the lone wolf. He’s the new guy on a team that has done this before, and that has never seen anything like this.
  • A Threat That Isn’t on the Registry: Every kind of magic the Conclave knows is catalogued somewhere. This one isn’t. Whoever is stealing children can walk through wards like morning mist and leaves nothing behind but a scar, and the people behind them have been preparing for this fight for a very long time.