"My love, my girl, my Trina..."
Glims - terrifying entities left behind when a person dies, the embodiment of their vicious anger or their soul crushing grief... Gaunts - the thin, invisible area that surrounds a Glim, a caustic nightmare pool of negative, corrosive nastiness that eats away at the skin of the world... Gifts - the skills and abilities one is born with, our talents, our sword and shield against the terrors of the world. All us got troubles, all us got strengths. All us got Gifts. Attuned are those rare people whose lives are - whether they want them to be or not - caught up in the struggle to rid the world of Glims and Gaunts. The Attuned are Gifted. They can see and hear what you cannot. They can read the thoughts of those the Glims sift, they can feel the ripples of hate and fear of those who pass through a Gaunt. Ms. Trina Evangeline Bailey is such an Attuned. Born in 1915, orphaned that same year by a hurricane, Trina's life has always been plagued by hoodoo shadows and the tense, bitter and simmering animosity that hangs in the air of New Orleans during the Jim Crow South. Gifts tells the story of Lincoln Bright's bitter enemy and one-time mentor, the woman who taught him the things he had not known about Glims and Gaunts. This is the story of her youth, her awakening desire and darkness and this too is the tale of her long-standing struggle with the Hermetics, the apocalyptic cult that seeks to aid the tearing a whole in the skin of the world... This is Trina's tale... of her struggle to accept her place in the middle of nightmares, to tend the garden of her first and only love, the losses she suffers, the small victories she gains and the embracing of her Gifts - and for good or ill, the secrets she has kept that may save or damn us all.