Lucena in the House of Madgrin

Lucena Clarian Ashmoor has never hatched a feathered serpent from an egg. She has never befriended a sombulus—a monster that looks like a giant spider, eats darkness, and likes reading books. She has never ridden a magic horse. She has spent all her life with relatives who would prefer she were elsewhere, and so sent her away to the nastiest school imaginable. There she has been bullied, and told so many times that she was dumb and fat and useless that she almost came to believe it. She has never been popular, and never done anything remotely heroic.

All this changes the night a vampire attacks her school and Lucena is tumbled into a world wider, darker, more magical and more mysterious than any she could have imagined. Here she will find the forgotten egg, meet the shade-eating spider, ride the black mare with coal-fire eyes, fight vampires, dance with fairies, and find—in time—that she might be a hero after all.