Upcoming Projects

ESCAPE FROM SKYCHAPEL

In the year 4000, humanity has been driven to the skies by teleportation quakes. The seat of power is the floating city of Skychapel, where magic and technology are banned by the Sanctum. Its military arm are the genetically modified Templars, who subjugate witches and teckers with sacred geometry. Their greatest battle happens under the city, where a sentient super-fungus is infesting the sewers and breaking apart its foundation. Those who breathe its spores can almost hear it talking to them.

When a priest turns up murdered and an ancient relic goes missing, the Templar acolyte Zemuel turns his suspicion toward the Haunch, Skychapel’s black market hub for neurobots and undocumented refugees. For forty years, Griselda has paid Templars to stay away from her neighborhood, but the priest’s murder ends that fragile truce. Zemuel uncovers rumors of software that can predict the teleportation quakes. The program was designed by the bastard grandson of Griselda’s exiled rival. If Griselda tracks him down first, the boy and the program will be destroyed. Zemuel races to find him and the relic that was lost on his watch, the only way to earn knighthood and clear his name.

While he organizes a raid on the Haunch to press Griselda, rival witches move their own agenda into the neighborhood. Griselda is forced to question the loyalties of her chief lieutenant, and even her own husband. Will her paranoia push away allies or reveal traitors?

Meanwhile, the fungus stirs under Skychapel, losing its grip on the city’s crumbling bedrock. Zemuel discovers the link between it and the relic and questions whether the fungus is breaking or saving the city’s foundation.

SWAMPSHINE

Rat Kersey’s alchemy has left the island of Kure polluted. His patented method for bromine extraction gets halted after the flora and fauna of the swamp start to mutate. He squats in the flooded remains of his factory, brewing moonshine that brings literal spirits to life. His work catches the interest of the Locklears. Wanda is a remote viewer possessed with the ghost of Billy the Kid and all twenty-one of his victims; her monster-hunting husband Art makes taxidermies of his kills and displays them in a boardwalk museum. Wanda sees the drink as a way to scare the spare ghosts out of her head, and Art sees a potent business opportunity. He teams up with Rat to distribute the hooch through dry counties, concealing it in his hollowed-out taxidermies. When Wanda gives birth to a mismatched set of twins, they fall out of business. One child looks just like Art, but the other is a dead-ringer for Rat. While Art rages, Rat steals away with his bastard.

The boys Fisher and Lazarus are both raised without knowledge of the other. Fisher is forbidden from entering the swamp, but sneaks in to search for monsters. He runs into Lazarus and they strike up a risky friendship. When a speechless pair of conjoined twins wash ashore in a hurricane, everything changes. Fisher and Lazarus’s search for the girls’ origins incites the attention of Wanda’s oldest rival, bringing judgment for crimes from both sides of their divided family. The truth drives them apart from their parents and each other, leaving them with no one to trust but themselves.

THE VOIDHEART ENGINE

Rourke Maddox is a self-fashioned outcast who scrapes out a living with diamond-studded bezoars harvested from hellcrabs. He puts down his armored quarry with charmed bullets that fly by the tone of his voice, a dying brand of magic known as bullet-singing. His isolation is a product of necessity: there’s a sturdy bounty on his head set by his own estranged brother, the sky-pirate Calix.

When hellcrabs start migrating across the haunted wastes of the Squander, Rourke risks ectoplasm poisoning to pursue them. The Squander was ruined by the explosion of the voidheart engine, a device that converted ghosts into sustainable energy. Two hundred years later, the land remains plagued with radioactive ghost storms and mile-long leviathan roaches.

A lightning-wielding stormstress captures Rourke and takes him to a children’s home full of mediums. The home is funded by the marrow-mining magnate Cyclopedia. Cyclopedia tells Rourke that Calix has kidnapped one of her orphans, offering him a life-changing fee for the girl’s safe return. Rourke sets out with Mal and the mechanized ghost of Doctor Heap Tibbets, an expert on the voidheart engine. Rourke soon discerns that there’s more to their mission than rescuing the orphan; Sibyl can guide them to the remains of the voidheart engine. To reach that objective, Rourke will have to stare down hellcrab stampedes, ghost storms, covens of stormstresses, and—most harrowing of all—the sins that turned his own brother against him.