The Void Union has fallen.Adrienne and her friends have gone into hiding as Geralt’s cult tightens its hold on the city. San Francisco’s paranormal community is in anarchy. Most disturbingly, magic’s instability worsens every day.As chaotic magic starts to rip the city apart, Adrienne seeks allies to help rebalance it. But an alliance requires trust, and trust is a scarce commodity in the … commodity in the paranormal world, especially when Geralt has offered large rewards for Adrienne’s capture. Betrayal lurks behind every smile.
Opposing the fledgling coalition is the cult’s vicious new enforcer, who will do anything to bring Adrienne down. Between his ruthless tactics and the treacherous diplomacy of paranormals, Adrienne’s heart begins to harden. She knows that to save the city, she must unite its magical inhabitants under her leadership. But that leadership might just twist her into someone she can’t recognize.
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The third book in this amazing series ups the ante in both intrigue and danger. Threats come from all sides for Adrienne, including and especially with new allies. With magic going haywire, the cult growing stronger, and alliances proving less than dependable, it’s no wonder Adrienne worries how she’ll succeed without compromising who she is. Things take a darker turn in this installment and the story had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. I’m dying to get to the finale!
You may think I’m about to just give away the whole story, but you should know by now that I don’t do that. What I’m going to do is give you reason to continue on from Enchantress Under Pressure to see where this little group goes from there. Just a taste of a tale.
Picking up where we left off in Enchantress Under Pressure, The Void is gone as an organization, Adrienne and her friends are all scared and hiding from all the forces trying to eliminate or capture them, Geralt’s cult is taking over San Francisco, and if all that isn’t enough, magic has gone truly bonkers.
When we left Adrienne she had taken all her friends and gone into hiding to regroup and recover. The epic fight with the Fleshwriters at Void headquarters, and the loss of the Void leader, Bane Harrow, had left them exhausted, heartsick and at a loss as to what to do next. Adrienne, however, is very aware that, of late, magic has become unstable and that something needs to be done before it destroys all in its path. To do that she needs a great deal more people than just her and her small group. But she needs to address the other issues confronting them all first. Like Sam having overdone her fleshwriting defense during the fight and basically frying her brain. Like Maribel chasing her down to kill her because she believes that Adrienne purposely destroyed her sanity and set her up as an enchantress (which she’s not) to be captured by Geralt. Like Geralt himself building an army to take over her city while convincing as many as possible that he has the only method to fix the unstable magic. Too many things are already going wrong and need to be addressed. But, the magic going haywire is paramount.
So while mounting patrols to keep them safe, and while trying to help Sam regain her sanity, Adrienne also works on a plan to fix the magic. A plan that may just kill her, but at least the rest of the paranormal community would be safe. A plan that will hopefully win Enchanters to her side, that will convince them that Geralt’s method will kill all the Voids and Enchanters leaving the Shifters and Elementals as his sycophants, while her plan will keep them alive while stabilizing the magic.
To do this, though, she needs more willing Enchanters. And good luck with that since Geralt either has them or has them so scared they’re afraid to join in. Between Adrienne, Desmond, Kendall, Sam, Pete and Veronica they must recruit as many as possible as quickly as possible because Geralt is not stopping for anything, and the magic is just getting worse.
In this volume of Arcane Artisans we follow our friends through their desperate attempts to stabilize magic and stop Geralt. There is so much strife, so much danger and so much sheer insanity that putting this book down for any reason becomes an impossible task. We are tossed into the world of desperate paranormals and faulty magic and thrown about like trees in a tornado, just hoping to find solid ground again sometime soon. While at the same time we are embedded in the horror and loss of war with nowhere to go but through, and where coming out the other side unscathed seems unlikely.
Once again, Amy Spahn (A.J. Spahn) has grabbed us with her flowing prose, her wonderful characters and her beautifully crafted world. And once again all we can do is grab hold of the Oh Sh*t bar and hope for the best. Once we’ve made it through this volume, we’ll once again be holding on, waiting with what little patience we can muster for Enchantress Under Fire. This is one author worth waiting for!