Aster Ward has a simple job.
Keep the animals calm.
Lock the gates.
Ignore the way the ground sometimes hums beneath his feet.
People see him as just another night guard at London Zoo. Quiet. Broad-shouldered. A little unsettling if you catch him in the wrong light. But, he walks the perimeter, listening to the subtle language of cages and shadows, keeping the balance in a place where wild things sleep uneasily behind glass and steel.
He has spent centuries pretending to be ordinary.
He is not.
When Mara Quinn – sharp-tongued investigator and one of the few people who treats him like a man instead of a myth – sends a message that simply reads Something’s wrong, the fragile equilibrium shatters. Beneath Regent’s Park, something ancient is stirring. Tunnels are shifting. Shadows are bending the wrong way. And the city of London is beginning to remember a geometry it was never meant to hold.
Because Aster isn’t just a guard.
And somewhere under the streets, a labyrinth is waking – one that was built to contain him.
To save Mara, Aster must descend into the underworld of a modern city layered over ancient stone, face an institution that files monsters instead of fighting them, and decide whether he is still a prisoner of the maze… or the only thing that can master it.
In a London where myth presses against concrete and history refuses to stay buried, the real question isn’t whether monsters exist.
It’s whether they can choose to be human.
Coming soon on Kindle and paperback.
Asterward.com 