Marjorie M. Liu – författare

During the day, Maxine''s tattoos are her armour and she is invincible. At night they peel from her skin to take on forms of their own, leaving her human and vulnerable, and revealing themselves to be demons sleeping beneath her skin. But these demons are the best friends and bodyguards a woman could have. And Maxine needs bodyguards. She is the last in a line of women with power in their blood, trained to keep the world safe from malignant beings who would do us harm. But ten thousand years after its creation, the prison dimension that kept the worst of these from us is failing, and all the Wardens save Maxine are dead. She must bear the burden of her bloodline and join the last wild hunt against the enemy.

Nomad born and bred, demon hunter Maxine Kiss has always relied upon herself to fight the darkness that surrounds her, and the predators - human, zombie and otherwise - who threaten the earth. But one man has managed to get through the isolation she uses to protect herself: Grant, the last of his kind. With music he is able to control any living creature . . . including demons. And now his life is in danger. Haunted by the past, and determined to change the future, Maxine soon understands that to save Grant, she has only one choice - to lose control, and release her own powers of darkness.

Maxine finds herself covered in blood and crouched beside Jack''s dead body, with no memory of what happened. Grief-stricken, Maxine isn''t sure what to believe - or who to blame. Then an Avatar bounty hunter comes through the veil into our world, investigating a death of his own. Completely ruthless and subservient to those who bred him, his mission is to find Jack - dead or alive. Racing to stop the hunter, Maxine must also deal with the blood on her hands. But the answers she uncovers will be devastating - and the earth''s salvation won''t wait.

View our feature on Marjorie Liu’s Darkness Calls.

The X-Men find themselves robbed of their powers and trapped in strange new bodies in this novel by the Eisner Award–winning comic book author. When Jean Grey wakes up in a strange room, she feels weak, disoriented, and . . . different. Not only are her telepathic and telekinetic powers gone, but her body is not her own. Cyclops, Wolverine, Rogue, and Nightcrawler also find themselves imprisoned in foreign, utterly human bodies. Who has abducted them? And how did they perform this strange transformation? As the X-Men learn to navigate the world anew, they uncover a devious plan that threatens all of mutantkind . . .