Heartless by Jocelyn Fox (epub)

Heartless by Jocelyn Fox (epub)

In the hidden magical Secondworld, the cauldron is about to boil over with intrigue. Mage bounty hunter Athena enthusiastically slaps her hex cuffs on handsome homicide suspect Kellan Mordigan, only to become the hunted as a necromancer who literally stole Kellan’s heart looks to finish the job and smash the patriarchy while she’s at it.

Athena Ellison, a powerful young mage who spurns her family’s old-money expectations to become a bounty hunter, has a geomancer’s talent for finding things—but sometimes the things that find her first have teeth and a thirst for magical blood. She’s the first to find Kellan Mordigan, a mage who’s the main suspect in a triple homicide; and as a bonus, the Morgans and the Ellisons have been feuding for about a century. But right after Athena tracks Mordigan to a coffee shop and arrests him, they’re attacked by a group of revenants, and even Athena’s supernatural fighting skills barely get them out alive.

As much as Athena wants to believe the worst of Mordigan, both the evidence and his actions chip away at her conviction of his guilt, and she’s drawn into the quest to prove his innocence. Athena will need to defeat a necromancer who stole Mordigan’s heart from his chest and made a literal deal with the devil, although Athena wonders if she’s so different from this necromancer who wants to wrest control from the old men of the International Coven Council.

She quickly learns a solo bounty hunter, no matter how powerful, is no match for the zealous mages who are willing to drown the Second world in blood—or worse, expose its existence—in order to grasp power. Amid monsters and mayhem and with Mordigan in tow, Athena retreats back to Ellison House, where she learns that while her knives are sharp and her magic is peerless, the strongest weapons in her arsenal in the battle for the soul of the magical world are her family and friends.