The Last Communion

Description

Marcus Cole is fifteen, Black, and running out of time.

His grandmother Ruth is dying. His mother left nine years ago in a Nissan Sentra and never looked back. He lives in Carthage, Texas, population six thousand, where everybody knows your truck and nobody knows your business unless you let them. He runs cross-country because nobody expects you to talk when you’re running. He has a best friend who won’t shut up about bridges. He has a girl who sees right through him. And he has a prayer he throws into the dark every night, not asking for rescue, just asking for the strength to handle what’s coming.

Something catches that prayer.

Eli has been alive for four billion years. He is not a vampire, not exactly, though he feeds on human beings every twenty-eight days to survive. He is not God, though he’s the closest thing to one this world has ever seen. He carries the consciousness of every person he has ever consumed, over a million souls living out their happiest memories in rooms he built inside his mind. He has watched civilizations rise and fall. He has been a dinosaur, a shark, a single cell riding a mosquito through the dark. He has tried to die and failed. He paints landscapes of empty worlds because he has been alone for longer than loneliness has had a name.

He hears Marcus pray, and for the first time in centuries, he can’t walk away.

When an accident binds them by blood, Marcus begins to change. His senses blow open. He can hear people thinking. He can feel his grandmother’s cancer spreading cell by cell. He can sense the vitality of every living thing around him, and something inside him wants to take it. He is becoming what Eli is. And every other time this has happened in four billion years, Eli has had to kill the one he changed.

Every. Single. Time.

But Marcus is different. His mind is built for something Eli has never encountered. Something that humanity has been evolving toward for two hundred thousand years. Something that might change the equation between predator and protector, between god and monster, between alone and not alone.

If Eli can let it.

Set in the small-town heat of East Texas, The Last Communion is a story about a boy becoming a man while becoming something more than human. It is about the grandmother who built him strong enough to carry it. It is about what it costs to protect the people you love when the price is paid in blood, and what it means to answer a prayer when nobody taught you how.

It is about standing up and doing it anyway.

For readers who love Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Walter Mosley’s Blue Light, and the raw honesty of Jason Reynolds. For anyone who has ever thrown a prayer into the dark and hoped something was listening.

Something was.