Alternate Reality Fiction

Ten years ago, the Empath known as the Black Death battled the Legion of Heroes and laid waste to a continent. Infused with the blood of countless superhuman victims, he struck down the Legion one by one, until only its leader, Captain Dawn, remained. When the smoke finally cleared, the Black Death was vanquished—but at a terrible cost to both Captain Dawn and the world . . . Now, the students and staff of Morningstar Academy hope Matt Callaghan, who they believe is a clairvoyant, will lead them to a bright and glorious future.

The Black Death is dead. After hiding in plain sight for more than a decade under the guise of Captain Dawn, the most powerful empathic mimic who ever lived stepped out from the shadows once more to unleash terror and destruction upon the world. But in his moment of apparent triumph, when all hope seemed lost, the Black Death was defeated by Matt Callaghan and Jane Walker, now known to everyone as Matt the Human and Lady Dawn.

Matt Callaghan is alive—barely. Having escaped the destruction of the home he shared with Jane Walker after an attack by political assassins, he's back with the young superheroes of Morningstar Academy—and back in the center of a conspiracy that's unraveling the world around him. A cult still pursues him; governments still want his powerless human blood. Any hopes he once held of living a normal life seem dead and buried, and it's all Matt and Jane can do to try and ensure he doesn't end up the same way. But there's no time to rest or recover.

Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways—phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway—and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade.

Born into an alternative frontier America where life is hard, and folk magic is real, Alvin is gifted with power, but he must learn to use his gift wisely. Dark forces are arrayed against Alvin, and only a young girl with second sight can protect him.

From the author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, this piercing, genre-bending debut follows two families in alternative timelines of the Salvadoran civil war in a stunning exploration of displacement, the mechanisms of fate, the gravity of the past, and the endurance of love. Cambridge, USA...