J. M. Miro

1883. Agrigento, Sicily.  With the orsine destroyed, Cairndale lies in ruins, and Marlowe has vanished. His only chance of rescue lies in a fabled second orsine - long-hidden, thought lost - which might not even exist.

But when a body is discovered in the shadow of Cairndale, Charlie and the Talents realize there is even more at stake than they'd feared. For a new drughr has arisen, ferocious, horned, seemingly able to move in their world at will - and it is not alone. A malevolent figure, known only as the Abbess, desires the dust for her own ends. And deep in the world of the dead, a terrible evil stirs - an evil which the corrupted dust just might hold the secret to reviving, or destroying forever.

Book 2 in the Talents series.

1882. North of Edinburgh, on the edge of an isolated loch, lies an institution of crumbling stone, where a strange doctor collects orphans with unusual abilities.

In London, two children with such powers are hunted by a figure of darkness - a man made of smoke. Charlie Ovid discovers a gift for healing himself through a brutal upbringing in Mississippi, while Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight, glows with a strange bluish light.

When two grizzled detectives are recruited to escort them north to safety, they are confronted by a sinister, dangerous force that threatens to upend the world as they know it. What follows is a journey from the gaslit streets of London to the lochs of Scotland, where other gifted children - the Talents - have been gathered at Cairndale Institute, and the realms of the dead and the living collide.