The Captive

For months, an underground revolutionary group has been planning their biggest operation yet: kidnapping a 23-year-old heiress to draw attention to her parents' sprawling corporate empire. The Woolsaw Group, worth untold billions, is an anonymous and mostly hidden company that runs everything from military bases and mental hospitals to commuter trains, call centers, and prisons. The corporation maximizes profits with plutocratic zeal--and utter indifference to the harms it inflicts on ordinary people.

But the revolutionaries get a shock when they bundle Adeline Woolsaw into their van. She's not what they expected. For one thing, she's moments from giving birth. For another, she seems almost okay with being kidnapped--as long as it gets her and her baby out of the grip of her ruthless and immensely powerful parents.

The baby, everyone soon discovers, is far from a bundle of joy. It is capable of setting off deadly weather events and summoning plagues of vermin. And that's just the beginning. Because Adeline's parents arranged for her pregnancy as part of a dark bargain that links the child to an ancient evil of nearly limitless power. And the Woolsaws will use the full power of the security state, and their own dark and supernatural gifts, to destroy the activists, get the child back, and establish a new infernal kingdom on Earth.