The Last Libation

Synopsis

In the rain-slicked streets of modern London, seventeen-year-old Mara Voss has always been unusually good at finding lost things — keys, cats, people who didn't want to be found. She chalks it up to instinct, until the night a weeping woman made entirely of river-fog collapses on her doorstep and whispers a name into her ear: Keeper. Mara soon learns she is the final inheritor of a vanishing priesthood, bound in blood to a pantheon of old gods who have dwindled to shadows — a war-goddess selling antiques in Portobello Road, a trickster deity driving a night-bus that goes nowhere on any map, a once-great oracle reduced to reading receipts in a charity shop. They are fading, forgotten, their power leaching away as the last of their worshippers die. Then the sacred flame at the heart of their hidden sanctuary — a crumbling temple folded impossibly between a Peckham laundrette and a Vietnamese restaurant — is stolen. Without it, the gods will dissolve entirely by the next new moon. Mara is tasked with recovering the flame, armed with nothing but a brass oil lamp, a temperamental crow who may or may not be a god himself, and a street-map that rewrites itself whenever she isn't looking. Her search draws her through the underside of London: a black market where memories are sold by the gram, a flooded underground station where something old and enormous breathes in the dark, and a midnight gathering of new gods — viral, electric, hungry — who consumed the flame to fuel their own rising. Mara must choose between restoring a dying world or burning it clean, and discovers that faith, even stubborn and unglamorous faith, is its own kind of power.