Sometimes even wizardry may not be enough...

For the first time ever, friends and wizardly partners Nita and Kit seem to be having trouble communicating. They argue over a spell to clean up the pollution in New York's Jones Inlet, and from that point on, they can't connect on anything. Is it adolescence that's tearing them apart or something more profound?

Nita breaks away from Kit to work on her own for a while -- and then is jolted by a terrible and unexpected blow as her mother falls ill and is rushed into the hospital.

What's even more horrifying for Nita than the mere fact of her mother's illness is the possibility that nothing -- not surgery, not even wizardry -- will be able to keep her mom alive.

But Nita refuses to let her mother go down without a fight. Soon she's on a mission to seek her mom's cure: a journey that takes her across universes, and out of them, to the only place where she can learn the skills that may help her save her mother's life. What she doesn't foresee is the terrible way in which this journey will once again bring her face-to-face with the Lone Power, the source of all death in the universe.

That Power has been Nita's worst enemy since she first started her practice of wizardry. Now, though, the Lone One and the bargain It offers her may be her mother's only hope....