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JUNE 4
JULY 9
My plan was simple and…mostly ordinary. Finish my PhD. Teach Celtic mythology in a tiny college town. Stop hearing the thoughts and feelings of every person I happened to meet.
As a wayward seer just coming into her powers, I couldn’t avoid the last one.
But the first two were just within my reach when sorcerer-particle physicist Jonathan Lynch appeared one chilly winter morning along two other shocks:
The death of my grandmother, the most powerful seer in a generation;
And the mysterious box she protected, which just might have belonged to Pandora.
Suddenly I was tangled in a secret that had been unraveling for years, and my unruly talents and complicated inheritance were at the heart of it all.
Ordinary life would have to wait.
The extraordinary was coming for me after all.
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A hot debut series in the tradition of Deborah Harkness, Diana Gabaldon, and Anne Rice weaves magic, scholarship, and romance for readers who crave a little adventure.
We went by many names, depending on who was speaking. Fortunetellers. Soothsayers. Clairvoyants. Witches. Bean sídhe, Gran said first in her native Irish. Then in English: banshee. Or seer.
One of the four primary fey beings that shared this world with common folk, seers had the ability to see into people’s private thoughts, dreams, histories, and sometimes their futures. Thoughts, like anything else, contain energy, and people molted them like feathers. Memories, emotions, even immanent actions—they all imprinted on bodies, even objects and settings they encounter. And we could sense them all.
Or at least, I was supposed to, though I had never really been able to manage much more than chaos. At times my visions were muted and (very) occasionally nonexistent. On others, all it potentially took was a brush of a shoulder for me to know a person’s deepest thoughts, down parka or not. And usually it was not anything I really wanted to know.
People, I had learned from a young age, were rarely the same on the inside as the outside. Most of their thoughts were innocuous, but every now and then I would sense something more disturbing: plotted affairs, murderous rage, hideous bigotry. Dread and sorrow that hurt like I was experiencing them. Ecstasy so intense that I felt like I was the one flying to the stars. Obsession. Envy. Hate.
Barriers seemed to help, which was why I never went without gloves or wore anything less revealing than long sleeves and pants. But even that was no guarantee. It was enough to send anyone crazy (and had—seers made up a significant portion of people in the early asylum system). I was eleven when Gran caught me banging the side of my head, in the bathroom trying to expel a vision of my mother crooning Marvin Gaye like I had gotten water down one ear. I was manifesting, she said. And so, the world was suddenly full of emotional and historical landmines that only lessened on nights like this, when physical elements like the snow distanced me from the constant deluge.
By the time I reached my building off Cleveland Circle, there was a bounce in my step. Even the ancient brass door didn’t whine when I
opened it.
“Hello,” I said as I spied the box leaning against the wall just under the tarnished row of brass mailboxes. “What have we here?”