JOCASTA KING

Ilaeira is an Erinya, a Fury born and raised in the dark realm of mythic creatures that holds the gates of the Afterlife, deep beneath the forbidden and desolated human world. Bred to feel only disdain, anger, and fury, she survives by delivering human souls to the god Erebos in the Afterlife for money, careful to stay under the radar of her mother, the ruthless commander of the army who exiled her after a very public mistake and now waits for any excuse to kill her.When she botches the delivery of the soul of a man named Nestor, for whom Erebos has set an enormous price, Nestor proposes a dangerous bargain: he will keep her blunder a secret and pass quietly into the Afterlife if she smuggles him out of the underground realm to say goodbye to his girlfriend first. Knowing this mistake would mean execution, Ilaeira agrees and takes him to the human world Erebos claimed was a wasteland. Instead, she finds it lush, beautiful and crawling with creatures that should not exist there.Desperate to finish this quest before her mother discovers she is gone, Ilaeira is forced into an irritable alliance with an annoyingly charming Nestor, whose devotion to his mysterious girlfriend oscillates between near-obsession and eerie forgetfulness. Yet the longer they journey together, the more Ilaeira finds herself drawn to him, to the way he protects her despite being unable to touch her, to the questions he forces her to ask about her god's lies, and to the darkness he keeps hidden. When a creature threatens Nestor, Ilaeira kills her own kind to save him and in doing so realizes that she feels emotions she shouldn't be capable of for the very soul she is sworn to deliver to Erebos.But each step into the beautiful human world forces Ilaeira to doubt the god she has served all her life as she uncovers a conspiracy surrounding Nestor, which threatens the living and the dead. With her mother closing in, Ilaeira must choose between fulfilling her duty to ensure her own survival, or risking her life to save the soul she shouldn't be able to love from the god she once believed in.