Cruel Illusions

Ava Perry has spent a decade preparing to kill the vampire who murdered her mother, a truth she has never shared with her younger brother Parker. Stuck in the foster system and running out of time before the siblings are separated, she stumbles into a hidden magic show where the illusions are impossible to explain.

The magicians backstage tell her the truth: their power is real, it runs in her blood too, and they will teach her to use it. The price is a competition, a test of showmanship and nerve in which the stakes are lethal and the line between illusion and reality keeps slipping.

Margie Fuston writes a standalone dark fantasy that treats magic as performance, fed by an audience's belief, and refuses to draw a clean moral line between the magicians and the vampires they have warred with for millennia.