Half City

The first installment in the Harker Academy series is set in Astera, a modern American city built around the Chasm, an enormous crevasse that serves as the oldest and largest sealed gateway to the underworld. Deviants, creatures born from hell, walk among unsuspecting mortals, and lymantrians, beings with nonhuman abilities, live in secret alongside them. Among the lymantrians are hunters, equipped to track and kill deviants.

Viv Abbot is a 21-year-old leading a double life. By day she works at the Windsor museum for the curator Fiona, who is married to Viv's older sister Nora. By night she hunts deviants with two antique silver daggers. Viv is an aeon, a near-extinct hunter subspecies that senses deviants through a full-body vibration and carries a compulsive craving for the kill. Her father, David, trained her from childhood but warned her never to reveal what she is: Other lymantrians hunted aeons to virtual extinction centuries ago. David was killed by Brood demons, a savage cabal serving the High Thane, king of all deviants, when Viv was 10. Her mother, Beatrice Abbot, now the district attorney, turned grief into ambition, and Viv has spent years chasing her approval, even dating James Pine, the older brother of her best friend Penny Pine, to please Beatrice.

After killing a demon on the subway, Viv is approached by Reid Graveheart, a reformed ex-Brood demon and instructor at Harker Academy for Deviant Defense, a hidden college for hunters accessible through a gateway inside the Windsor. Reid gives Viv a coin to enter the school. Skeptical but intrigued after finding a locket among her father's belongings inscribed "Harker Bound, Fall 1992," Viv passes through the gateway and arrives at a sprawling gothic campus.

At orientation, Viv meets the people who become central to her Harker life: Peter Roydon, an earnest first year; his intense cousin Kitty Briggs; Viv's fearless roommate Sophia Valentine; and Elliot Thompson, a warm-hearted hunter from a military family. In the campus rotunda, Viv spots a photograph of her father as a young lacrosse champion, confirming he attended Harker and kept it secret. She later discovers he enrolled under a different surname, David Cadell, suggesting he was hiding from someone.

In Combat Training, Reid excludes Viv from his elite Field Training class for fighting with her heart instead of her head. Trouble arrives when wraiths, faceless undead creatures, infiltrate the first-year dormitory. Sophia saves Viv with salt-dipped crossbow bolts, and Reid destroys the remaining attackers. In the chaos, Kitty vanishes, leaving a farewell letter that Peter finds suspicious: The handwriting seems wrong, and the vocabulary is uncharacteristic. The school dismisses her departure as voluntary.

Weeks later, a spell reanimates hundreds of corpses from the campus cemetery during a lacrosse game, killing two students. Dean Edgar Driscoll, a trusted warlock, destroys the spell's origin object. Afterward, Viv's daggers glow white-hot. Peter identifies them as part of a matched set of three ancient blades linked by magic: The reaction means the third, the Aeon's Dagger, has been destroyed. The armory log shows it was checked out under Kitty's name the night of the attack, days after she supposedly left, and only a professor's key could have opened the case.

Viv reveals her aeon identity to her friends. Using Reid's key card, which Viv pickpockets after a werewolf fight in the coliseum, they access the school archives and discover that the melted dagger alloy is an ingredient in a syrabraxa, the most powerful form of dark magic. A syrabraxa requires a turned witch, one transformed by dark magic, to cast and uses a living host to carry the spell; whoever kills the host absorbs its power but is driven mad. The remaining ingredients include an asphodel, a rare flower from a hidden campus garden; the conjuring witch's eye; and aeon's blood. Someone at Harker is collecting everything needed.

When a second student, Lyra Roth, is violently abducted from her dorm, the investigation accelerates. Viv and Reid find the hidden asphodel garden in the campus planetarium with several flowers stolen. Beside the planter lies a baggie stamped with the logo of Fever Dream, an infamous Astera nightclub. Both Kitty and Lyra had the same stamp on their wrists.

Viv breaks up with James on Halloween and grows closer to Reid, who shares his painful history: an abusive father and brother, years in the Brood he regrets, and the murder of the woman he loved by his own brother. Dean Driscoll found Reid at his lowest and gave him purpose at Harker. Viv and Reid kiss for the first time.

Viv brings her suspicions to Driscoll, who confirms that the Elders, the lymantrian governing council, have forbidden him from investigating Fever Dream's owner, the White Stag. Driscoll orders Viv to stay away. She goes anyway with Sophia and Penny. Inside, Viv discovers the White Stag is Deacon Graveheart, Reid's brother, whom Reid claimed was dead. Reid saves Viv from Deacon, whose genuine confusion about the missing students convinces Viv he is uninvolved. The fallout is severe: Penny discovers Viv has been lying, Viv pushes Reid away, and Fiona fires Viv for missing the Windsor exhibit opening.

Reconciliation comes through crisis. The Brood, led by the hooded High Thane, breaks into the Windsor to steal a gnostic censer, a ritual vessel that can ward off spells cast on demons. During the fight, Fiona reveals she is Professor Lisette, a dichotomous shifter—a lymantrian capable of existing in two distinct forms, one mortal and one hunter—who secretly orchestrated Viv's recruitment to Harker. Viv and Reid fight the Brood together and confess their feelings. Reid tells Viv he realized he was falling in love with her the night they fought a strzyga, a monstrous humanoid deviant, together during a hunt.

The central mystery resolves when Fiona reveals that David carved the number 26 into his palm before he died. Viv recognizes it as Edgar Driscoll's jersey number in the lacrosse photograph: her father's dying message identifying his killer. Driscoll turned to the Brood out of jealousy toward David and orchestrated everything, from the wraith attack covering Kitty's kidnapping to the zombie spell covering the dagger's theft. Kitty and Lyra were taken as test subjects for the syrabraxa but did not survive. David changed his name and hid Viv because Driscoll was hunting aeons to serve as hosts for the syrabraxa, and David drowned himself rather than let the Brood take his blood.

Driscoll's forces kidnap Penny to lure Viv to the docks. Viv trades herself for Penny but is captured. Driscoll and Finn, the High Thane's son, force the syrabraxa into her spine, and she survives, becoming the spell's host. Finn reveals the endgame: kill Viv to absorb the power, use the censer to stave off madness, and break the Chasm open to release all deviants. Reid arrives and fights the Brood so Viv can escape. She confronts Driscoll as he moves to kill Penny and faces a wrenching choice: He alone can remove the syrabraxa, and the removal could strip her hunter abilities, freeing her from her bloodlust. She kills him anyway, choosing duty over liberation. With his last breath, Driscoll tries to warn Viv about Reid but dies before finishing.

Viv gets Penny to safety but is left critically injured, carrying the syrabraxa, with Reid still fighting the Brood. She cannot return to Harker, where she does not know who to trust, and cannot go to loved ones without endangering them. Recognizing Fever Dream as neutral ground, Viv drags herself to the nightclub and begs Deacon for help, showing him the glowing wound on her back. The novel ends as Deacon hurls her inside and slams the doors shut behind them.