Search Worlds Without End

It began ages past in fabled Atlantis, when a mad, power-hungry queen forged a key to a door never meant to be opened by mortal man--its inception would hasten her own death and the extinction of her vainglorious race. For millennia the key lay forgotten beneath the waves, lost amid the ruins of what had been the most beautiful city on Earth. But however jealously the sea hoards its secrets, sooner or later it yields them up. Now, in present-day Yorkshire, that time has come. And for young Fernanda Capel, life will never be the same again...

After surviving an amazing, terrifying summer twelve years ago, Fern makes a fateful decision: to deny the mystical powers that pulse through her family's past. Yearning for a simple, quiet life, she decides to marry a man twenty years her senior, a man who insists they wed at the Capels' summer house in Yarrowdale, a place swelling with mood, marvel, and magic. For when Fern returns there with her best friend, Gaynor, ancient, sinister forces reawaken.

Yet Fern has had enough: Enough of running from her fate, enough of hiding from her Gift. As she turns to face her destiny, the real world falls away, and Fern is once again swept into another land, removed from Time, void of comfort. It will take all her skill and daring to fight her way back to the present and save the people she loves from the ever-growing danger that threatens to destroy them. And to her utmost surprise, the key to survival is a dragon with the capacity to rule the world... but who will relinquish it all to one man.

It is a fearsome world of witches, dragons, and goblins, where a gnarled tree bears fruit of human heads. Fern Capel believes she has left it all behind. But now that world is seeping into modern day England: The witch-queen Morgus, who had imprisoned Fern in the ghostly Otherworld, has returned from countless years of exile beneath the gruesome Eternal Tree. Stalking the twenty-first century in her Prada stilettos, Morgus has the mindset of the Dark Ages and vows to rule the ancient kingdom of Logrez, now modern Britain.

Most of all, Morgus wants revenge on Fern Capel. Rejuvenated through sorcery, neither charm nor weapon can harm the witch-queen. She has planted a cutting from the Eternal Tree in the real world and awaits with impatience the ripening of its terrifying bounty. When Fern learns that her enemy cannot be defeated through conventional means, she turns to her best friend, Gaynor, her brother, Will, her old mentor, Ragginbone, and Maldo, the goblin-queen. Together, they track Morgus through London's high-society parties and seedy, sinister contacts, until they finally draw a magic circle in a Soho basement. Fern Capel knows that survival is not enough: This time she must win. But she does not yet understand how high a price she will have to pay.