The Fourth

For millions of years the Barrier separating Earth and the Abyss has remained strong and prevented an army of demons--the Exiled--from breaking free. Imprisoned for rebelling against their Ethereal brothers, the Exiled have waited in frozen silence until the Awakening--the arrival of the Fourth.

Fifteen-year-old Brittan Landauer frightens the adults around her. Her telekinetic powers have grown stronger and with fiery red hair and jade eyes, she looks like a stranger to her own parents. They send her to the isolated Mount Carmella School for Girls.

At Mount Carmella, Brittan meets three other gifted students. Temperamental Selene has raven-black hair, emerald eyes, and starts fires with her mind. Chestnut-haired Annïs, the peacekeeper, manipulates people’s thoughts. Kriket, the youngest has baby-blonde hair, mint-green eyes, and communicates with animals and studies the healing arts of Wicca.

The girls begin their magical training under Professor Naomi English’s guidance. She bonds with Brittan and finds her loyalties torn between the girls and the Trustees, three aging women who struggle to maintain the Barrier. The Trustees expect the girls—their powers undeveloped and their connection still fragile—to stop the evil clawing its way from the Abyss.

As friendships grow and falter, a power struggle develops between Brittan and Selene. Their rivalry intensifies when Brittan falls for Selene’s ex-boyfriend Hunter who, the Trustees discover, inherited powers from his Ethereal mother. Believing the Prophesies forbid the existence of a half-Ethereal, the Trustees order Hunter’s death, but Brittan instead protects him and abandons her friends.

The Fourth is the first book of The Carmella Chronicles. In this volume, the war between good and evil begins, and Brittan’s choices to save Hunter and to run away leave her powers and the world’s future vulnerable to the black-hearted fiends that grow stronger in the darkness.