Ratgirl Blues (Tales of the Secret City)
About
THE TALES OF THE SECRET CITY continue in this thrilling standalone adventure.
This is a New York rotten to its magical core, the ley-lines beneath the asphalt writhe like electric serpents. This is the Secret City, where gargoyles roost on fire escapes, were-rats work the night shift at hex-diners, and sorcery and circuitry sing the same siren song. Navigating these garish canyons is Nova Swann, a renegade urban druid and veil-walker who is part ghost, part spell-slinger, and all attitude.
Her life of cynical solitude shatters when a cryptic message lures her into an impossible heist: to breach the impenetrable guild-fortress of Babylon. What she finds within is no treasure, but an ancient, dreaming consciousness—a god in the wires known as the Sleeper. The encounter leaves her forever changed, with a primordial entity nesting in her neurons and an apocalyptic destiny she never asked for.
Now, Nova is the unwilling key in a war for the soul of reality itself. A series of cosmic horrors, each more terrifying than the last, are awakening to reclaim the world. From the Silk Mother, who spins webs to catch souls instead of flies, to the Soul Carver, a mystical serial killer building a new god from harvested magic, to the Hoarfrost, a curse that freezes victims into perfect, beautiful ice sculptures. Even her own dark reflection, a shadow-self, begins committing atrocities in her name.
As the very fabric of the Weave begins to unravel, Nova realizes these aren’t isolated monsters. They are instruments of a far greater power: the Demiurge, the Architect of Absolute Law, a cosmic entity that sees consciousness as a flaw to be corrected. It has decided that the universe’s experiment with free will is over, and Nova, the ultimate agent of chaos, is the final variable that must be erased.
The Architect has decreed that chaos must be contained and consciousness itself is a flaw in the cosmic design. But it never accounted for Nova—the wild card in a deck stacked against humanity, the ghost in the machine who refuses to follow the script. To save everything, she must embrace the very chaos the universe wants to erase and prove that some equations can only be solved by breaking them.
A high-octane fusion of urban fantasy, mythic cyberpunk, and cosmic horror,
RATGIRL BLUES plunges readers into a fever-dream reality woven from hallucinatory prose. Fans of mind-bending, reality-shattering stakes will be captivated by Nova’s savage and unapologetic voice as she battles gods and glitches alike. This is a story for those who like their magic raw, their stakes apocalyptic, and their heroes fighting not just to save the world, but to preserve its right to be chaotic, unpredictable, and gloriously alive.