Fantasy. Fiction. HTML:"A gut-punching novel, consistently taut and bleak," and one of Amazon's 20 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2016 (Publishers Weekly).

Unknown to humanity, dangerous visitors from another world arrive in the cold of winter. Disguised as humans, the Nafikh move in secret, hungry for tastes of this existence. Their fickle, often-violent needs must be accommodated at all times, and the price of keeping them satisfied is paid most heavily by servs.

Created by the Nafikh to attend their every whim, servs are physically indistinguishable from humans but for the painful, white-hot energy that both animates and enslaves them. Destined to live in pain and bondage, servs dwell in a bleak underworld where life is brutal and short.

Lucy, a serv who arrived as a baby, was adopted by humans in a twist of fate. For years she has walked a tightrope, balancing the horrors of her secret serv existence and the ordinary life she desperately longs to maintain.

But when Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death of a fellow serv, the worlds she's tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police and betrayed by her own kind, she must prove her innocence before everything she values is utterly destroyedâ??in this novel of "high-caliber, often engrossing literary sci-fi (Kirkus Reviews