Ordinary Monsters (The Talents pt. 1)

England, 1882. In Victorian London, two children with mysterious powers are hunted by a figure of darkness - a man made of smoke.Charlie Ovid, despite surviving a brutal childhood in Mississippi, doesn't have a scar on him. His body heals itself, whether he wants it to or not. Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight car, shines with a strange bluish light. He can melt or mend flesh. When Alice Quicke, a jaded detective with her own troubled past, is recruited to escort them to safety, all three begin a journey into the nature of difference and belonging, and the shadowy edges of the monstrous.What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London, and the wooden theaters of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie estate outside Edinburgh where other children with gifts - like Komako, a witch-child and twister of dust, and Ribs, a girl who cloaks herself in invisibility - are forced to combat the forces that threaten their safety. There, the world of the dead and the