Showing results by narrator "Alyssa Bresnaham" in All Categories

Stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on the morning of Thanksgiving to the clamour of guests packed into her apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she has been fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals to play Cleopatra, the most challenging role of her career. On an impulse, Mona leaves her family and heads out into the city to visit her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, the legendary director who has been forced out of the theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct.

Eight months ago, Rowena Downshire was a half-starved black market courier darting through the shadows of Corma's underside. Today, she's a (mostly) respectable clerk in the Alchemist's infamous apothecary shop, the Stone Scales, and certainly the last girl one would think qualified to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders a second time. Looks can be deceiving. When Anselm Meteron and the Alchemist receive an invitation to an old acquaintance's ball, they're expecting blackmail, graft, or veiled threats related to the plot to steal the secrets of the Creator's Grand Experiment.

Black market courier Rowena Downshire is just trying to pay her mother's freedom from debtor's prison when an urgent and unexpected delivery leads her face to face with a creature out of nightmares. Rowena escapes with her life, but the strange book she was ordered to deliver is stolen. The Alchemist knows things few men have lived to tell about, and when Rowena shows up on his doorstep, frightened and empty-handed, he knows better than to turn her away. What he discovers leads him to ask for help from the last man he wants to see—the former mercenary, Anselm Meteron.