Frog Jones

For a thousand years, I was a demon's slave. Two people saved me. Only one lived. Robert sacrificed irreplaceable alliances to bring me to this world. But the illegal magic that freed me triggered a huge outcry. Now the demon has followed me here-and he's fueling a massive war between mundane and magic that threatens to engulf the whole globe. Does my life really balance all the death that's followed? Can I find the strength to grow into a strong protector instead of prey? Will I be able to fight the demon and win? How can Robert and I save a world driven to hate everything we are?

Being a PI in the high-tech, magical city of Manzala requires more than street-smarts. Martin Aten makes do with a lifetime of experience in software engineering. Accompanied by the voice of his wife Jean and his memories of days gone by, he lives each life day-to-day, just scraping through. But every once in a while, a job comes along that's bigger than it looks. And when the city's most successful techno-dwarf hires Martin to recover a stolen, prized personal possession--the job already looks massive. From the dingy back-streets of Manzala to the planets beyond, this case is going to take Martin farther than any other case before. The hunt for a stolen item brings him new friends, new enemies, and--if he's very, very lucky--the chance to save Manzala from a danger it doesn't know is descending on it. Regardless, he knows he's not returning to Manzala the same man who left it.

High school graduation is an exciting time for anyone. But for Robert Lorents, who spent last fall pissing off a demon and upsetting the balance of power in an intricate, underground network of summoners, 'exciting' has taken on a whole different level. Now he's balancing senior projects with a demon-banishing side gig-and his mentor, Grace, can't even stir herself to help him out. She's off to Las Vegas and other places on "Grove Business" or some rubbish. Grace Moore, once a mere political pawn from Seattle's Grove of Summoners, has inherited command of Spokane's Grove - no doubt because no one else had been stupid enough to take the understaffed, underpowered, hot-button mess left after the massacre last fall. She finds herself swimming in political obligations without so much as a rubber floatie. And on top of that, her youngest-and most powerful-summoner isn't too happy that she keeps having to leave to drum up more support and resources for their little group from the other Groves. She has enough to deal with without his nonsense. Graduation is a time of beginnings. It's also a time of owning one's path and assuming new responsibilities, or accepting consequences of past actions. It's just usually those responsibilities don't involve banishing demons, fending off the police, or controlling world-wrecking power. Nobody ever promised you'd live past that beginning, though.

Grace Moore is a Seattle woman with a unique sense of fashion, an obsession for delicious and exotic food, and a highly illegal magical ability to change the reality around her. When the summoners in nearby Spokane are wiped out, her own Grove pulls her from a cushy research position and sends her as an understrength, token response to the attack. Robert Lorents is a foster kid living in Spokane. A teenage band nerd with his head wrapped around romantic fantasies and his heart firmly ensconced in his saxophone case, the sudden death of his one remaining biological relative launches him down a path to learn his own fantastic--if felonious--powers. These two are forced together by circumstance-- an unwilling mentor and an uncontrolled student-- to face a threat on their own that has already annihilated summoners far more powerful than they. To save reality as we know it, they must learn to work with one another, discover the true nature of their opponent, and, of course, avoid getting arrested for trying to save our existence.