Dr. Isobel Reed thought she had escaped the monsters of academia. She was wrong.

The pristine halls of Chatham University were supposed to be a sanctuary after the fires of Blackwood. But a new rot is taking root in the campus shadows. When highly ambitious female faculty members suddenly abandon their careers and exhibit a terrifying, hollowed-out serenity, Isobel’s hard-won peace is shattered.

She uncovers a resurrected 19th-century mystery cult led by the university’s ruthless Dean of Sciences. The cult has weaponized a feral, biological hallucinogenthe “nectar”designed to strip brilliant women of their ambition and turn them into a fiercely compliant hive-mind.

But how do you fight a monster that offers exhausted women the one thing they desperately crave: perfect, unbroken peace?