The Calamities

Mourning Mayne is the heir to a fortune and a power structure he has never wanted. His family belongs to the fiends, people who are half human and half demon, hidden in the modern world and able to work dark magic because they buy human souls. The Maynes rank among the oldest and most influential of these families.

Mourning is feckless, and he has long balked at what the family stands for: cruelty, domination and exploitation. Something darker runs beneath that too. His estranged father, Hadrian Mayne, a formidable man, now orders him to come back and take his place.

Mourning must choose between accepting the inheritance and building a life on his own terms, a choice that could bend the course of the wider world. Along the way he meets Key, who sells human souls on the black market, and Quinn, an artist who may know the dark truth about what has happened to the fiends.

Each of the three has fought the shadows in their own nature, and each has done it alone. This is a contemporary dark fantasy that sets occult magic against bitter family drama, and it opens The Fiends series. The question it turns on is whether the three can find a way out together.