"They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois - and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids." "Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala homecoming that will gather together the far-flung branches...

Cursed with immortality at the age of 9, but with a requirement that she stays in perpetual motion, Aubry flees Paris and embarks on a century-spanning, globe-trotting odyssey, seeking a cure and discovering a world beyond the boundaries of time and space.

"Refugee, criminal, and linguist Sean Wren is made an offer he knows he can't refuse: life in prison, 'voluntary' military service -- or salvaging data in a long-dead language from an abandoned ship filled with traps and monsters, just days before it's destroyed in a supernova... In the bowels of the derelict ship, surrounded by horrors and dead men, Sean slowly uncovers the truth of what happened on the ship, in its final days and the terrible secret...

"The accident came quickly. With no warning. In the dead of night, a precipitous plunge into a freezing river trapped everyone inside the bus. It was then that Army veteran John Reiffs life came to an end. Extinguished in the sudden rush of frigid water. There was no expectation of survival. None. Let alone waking up beneath blinding hospital lights. Struggling to move, or see, or even breathe. But the doctors assure him that everything is normal....