FICTION

A girl discovers a book and becomes haunted by more than memory in her late grandfather's attic. The moment she touches it, the moment it burns her - it marks her.

She summons a man who is half-real. She summons a monster whose claws hooked into her heart before she took her first breath. She summons a shadow that makes her so desperate, so full of a horrible, aching grief and longing that it unravels her from her very bones. Whatever he is - man, monster, shadow - she understands innately that she belongs to him.

Ila thought she'd been abandoned in childhood - then she discovers through the loss of her last living relative that she was not abandoned at all. Ila thought she'd been untouchable when her first kiss and every encounter thereafter ended in catastrophe - then she discovers through surreal, sexual nightmares that she was always meant to be touched.

Idris - the man, the monster, the shadow - cannot take her where she belongs. Not yet. He can only guide her to find pieces of the puzzle that lead to him in the wake of a sickness that begins the moment he touches her. He is ancient, but not all knowing - he never knew that a fleeting touch would cascade and spell out Ila's doom. A demon is hollow without his flesh, but a demon's daughter will die without her mate.

An Arabic, symphonic metal band called Elk Garden vanished without a trace over twenty years ago.

Ila comes home from her third year in an out-of-state college after a car accident that nearly ended her life. Idris, ever her doting father, welcomes her home and encourages her to enroll in a local college. Both to continue her studies and so he can keep a watchful eye on her, since she did not walk away from the accident entirely unscathed.

Idris begins to get peculiar phone calls that have him working long evening hours at his accounting firm, despite being just weeks away from a late retirement at seventy-one. At the same time, Elk Garden makes a sudden, explosive comeback with its seven-foot-five, masked, anonymous southpaw violinist and front man, The Black Stag. As Ila grows closer with a musician named Ahmed over the band's encore twenty-five years in the making, tensions with her father rise at home over what kind of designs he has on her.

Idris can see right through his punk bullshit; Ila is too clouded by affection and a desire to live and thrive in the wake of her car accident to do the same. At their apex, a strange turn of events leads Ila to the backstage of an Elk Garden show. Right into the arms and heart of the mysterious, mythical, eerily familiar Black Stag...