The Quintessential World Of Darkness

Last year, "The Essential World of Darkness" introduced readers to Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, and Changeling. "The Quintessential World of Darkness" features more stories of the supernatural in a modern world that is a little too much like our own.

"One world. Five visions. Enter White Wolf Game Studio's World of Darkness through the eyes of six master storytellers"--Page 4 of cover

Ann Smith loves her handsome, dynamic boss, Jasha Wilder, but her daring plan to seduce him goes awry when she encounters a powerful wolf who-before her horrified eyes-changes into the man she adores. She soon discovers she can't escape her destiny, for she is the woman fated to break the curse that binds his soul.

Cursed by God, hunted by demons, desired by Cain and Abel... All in a day's work. For Evangeline Hollis, a long ago fling with a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks just became a disaster of biblical proportions. One night with a leather-clad man of mystery has led to a divine punishment: the Mark of Cain. Thrust into a world where sinners are drafted into service to kill demons, Eve's learning curve is short. A longtime agnostic, she begrudgingly maneuvers through a celestial bureaucracy where she is a valuable but ill-treated pawn. She's also become the latest point of contention in the oldest case of sibling rivalry in history... But she'll worry about all that later. Right now she's more concerned with learning to kill while staying alive. And saving the soul she'd never believed she had ... in S.J. Day's Eve of Darkness. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A 2016 Michael L. Printz Honoree "This is East Texas, and there's lines. Lines you cross, lines you don't cross. That clear?" New London, Texas. 1937. Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone. They know the signs that mark them. They know the people who enforce them. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive. Ashley Hope Pérez takes the facts of the 1937 New London school explosion—the worst school disaster in American history—as a backdrop for a riveting novel about segregation, love, family, and the forces that destroy people.

Once he lived a life of valor and principle—a life that ended in betrayal and defeat. James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, in life the embittered, martyred Cavalier, walks a different path in the Underworld. Embracing deceit and unbridled ambition as fervently as he once served God and England, Montrose has clawed his way up the Hierarchy to become a cynical lieutenant of the Deathlords of Stygia. Today, he's no one's idea of a hero—and a hero is what the Shadowlands needs. Because something truly evil is stirring. Something cunning and malign that threatens the living and dead alike. And Montrose is the only being with a prayer of stopping it. The Ebon Mask is the first volume in the shadowy, suspenseful Dark Kingdoms trilogy, based on the popular role-playing game Wraith: The Oblivion.

A CBC Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of 2020 In a book equal parts travelogue and pandemic guide, the journalist Ethan Lou examines the societal effects of COVID-19 and takes us on a mesmerizing journey around a world that will never be the same. Visiting Beijing in January 2020 to see his dying grandfather, the Canadian journalist Ethan Lou unknowingly walks into a state under siege. In his journey out of China and—unwittingly—into other hot zones in Asia and Europe, he finds himself witnessing the very earliest stages of a virus that will forever change the world as we know it. Lou argues that the coronavirus outbreak will have a far greater impact than SARS, for example, simply because China is now many more times integrated with the increasingly interconnected world. Over decades, globalization has crafted a world painfully sensitive and susceptible to shocks such as this pandemic. A crisis like it has thus been long overdue—and we have yet to see it unfold fully. In our integrated world, events that may previously be isolated now ripple farther and wider and in ways we do not expect and cannot foresee. We have not seen the worst, and if and when we outlast this pandemic, nothing will ever be the same. Decisions now—or indecisions—will shape and define the world for decades. These ideas are fleshed out through the virus's spawning and how it spread, the unprecedented measures to contain it and an examination of past pandemics and other crises and how they shaped the world--and an argument for why this one's different. Lou shows how drastically the virus has transformed the world and charts the greater and more radical shifts to come. His ideas and arguments are framed around his unintentionally tumultuous journey around the world, whose path the virus seemed to follow until he landed safely in quarantine in a small town in Germany, where he was able to take stock and start telling his story.