The Orphans

Originally published as Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, The Orphans is the first of three special edition serials with new cover art featuring scenes from the book. Enjoy the story in a new format and collect them all! Welcome to Belle Haven where the paranormal is normal and being human is a liability. Kai Lonergan is struggling through math class when he gets a new charge to cross over. It's just another day for a reaper until he sees the name. November Lonergan. Before he can question how he's supposed to cross over a soul who's been dead for years, his twin sister, Tristin, screams. No big deal, that's what banshees do. Except, Tristin lost her scream the day November died. Mace is a mercenary monster who hunts other monsters, so when he's hired to trail one ordinary girl, it seems like overkill. Until Mace witnesses her powers firsthand and he realizes there's nothing ordinary about Ember Denning. He finds himself unnaturally drawn to her, which might be a problem since he just threatened to kill her. Ember Denning prefers the dead. She spends her days skipping school in the cemetery and her nights working at a funeral home to avoid her alcoholic father. But that won't be a problem anymore. He's dead, and Ember is about to learn her life until now has just been a series of carefully crafted lies and her real life...well, it's a lot stranger than she'd ever imagined. Reapers, witches, shifters, and fae all converge in a town in the middle of the Florida panhandle where Ember must learn a hard to swallow, terrifying truth. She's not a human, but a supernatural ticking time-bomb, and figuring out how to disarm her means reconnecting with people she can't remember, trusting a family she never knew existed, and accepting that the only person who can save her is the beautiful boy who just tried to kill her.