Team Krista #1: DEATH AND THE GLASSMAKER'S DAUGHTER

Title: DEATH AND THE GLASSMAKER’S DAUGHTER

Genre: YA historical fantasy

Word count: 67,000

Query:

As the son of Death, Moriarty was raised believing in the beauty of ending a life. Then he takes over his father’s work and finds that ripping souls from mortal bodies is nothing like the stories that populated his childhood. It’s violent and bloody, and with imperialism, labor strikes, and people's revolutions leaving corpses around the world, Moriarty can’t find anything to love in his new work.

Until he meets his next victim: Rocsanne Vetrario, the bold, bohemian daughter of Venetian glaziers. Instead of ending her life, Moriarty accidentally saves it, thus kindling a friendship that tumbles into love amid the canals of 1890s Venice.

But their summer together shatters when Moriarty learns that Rocsanne’s stepmother Lavinia is on a crusade to recover the lost secrets of Venetian glass and its power to bestow immortality. When Lavinia discovers her daughter’s romance with the soul collector himself, she threatens to kill Rocsanne unless Moriarty helps her retrieve a piece of the legendary glass. 

Surrendering the glass will give Lavinia control over Moriarty and his work, but if Rocsanne dies, he’ll lose her forever to the afterlife. With Lavinia holding Rocsanne hostage on the cemetery island of San Michele, Moriarty has to choose between his own freedom and the only girl who ever loved Death.

First page:

The first thing he noticed was the rain.

Moriarty had never felt rain before. It didn’t rain in the Greylands, nor did the brushed-black sky wink with tiny pinpricks of light, like jewels floating in a glassy lake. Even the sky itself was new--there was no sky in the Greylands.

But the rain was the first and most marvelous thing--the way it felt against his skin, each drop unexpected and ephemeral. 

Yes, Moriarty decided. I like the rain best.

Hector hadn’t told him about the rain. But Hector had hardly told him anything about the humans, or mortality, or the work he’d be doing, the work that used to be Hector’s. Though they had never discussed it, Moriarty had always known that someday, Hector would grow weary of soul collecting, and the work would pass to him. Father to son.

He had not expected it to be this sudden.

Moriarty looked down at his hands. In each, he clutched one of Hector’s two parting gifts, the only tools of his trade. The first was a heavy brass compass with a blank face and a black hand, shivering but steady as it pointed him ahead into the night. Pressing the face once had brought him to mortality, and twice would take him back to the Greylands when he was finished. The second was a colorless glass amulet streaked with red, which Hector had promised would keep him invisible to all humans but the one he sought.