The Serpent's Shadow

Maya Witherspoon had lived most of the first twenty-five years of her life in her native India. As the daughter of a prominent British physician and a Brahmin woman of the highest caste, she had known only luxury. Trained by her father in the medical arts since she was old enough to read, she graduated from the University of Delhi as a Doctor of Medicine by the age of twenty-two. Welcomed into her father's lucrative practice, she treated many of the wives and daughters of the British military personnel who made up a large percentage of their patients in the colonial India of 1909. But the science of medicine was not Maya's only heritage. For her mother was a sorceress - a former priestess of the mystical magics fueled by the powerful and fearsome pantheon of Indian gods. Though Maya felt the stirring of magic in her blood, her mother had repeatedly refused to train her. Yet Maya suspected that something far more sinister than the virulent disease had overcome her powerful mother. But it was Maya's father's death shortly thereafter which confirmed her darkest suspicions. For her father was killed by the bite of a krait, a tiny venomous snake. In the last hours of her mother's life, in the seeming delirium of her final fever, Surya had repeatedly warned Maya to beware the serpent's shadow. With the sudden loss of her father, Maya knew she must flee the land of her birth or face the same fate as her parents.--BOOK JACKET.