Once every century, the immortal griffin Princess Equinox selects six mortals from among the six civilized peoples-humans, dogs, cats, hawks, crows, and eagles-to become the Champions of Andeer. The Champions' sole duty? To accompany the princess to the ruined temple of Andeer's former Goddess Queen, Equinox's cousin Koyannaset, and cast the spell that keeps the mad sphinx locked away in limbo so she can't destroy the world. But Larissa Noon, the young human sorceress leading the current group of Champions, has made some discoveries while researching the banishment spell. And if she chooses...

You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your neighbors. For a full quarter of his life, twenty-year-old Gus Lancer has been a resident patient at Haven Space, a sanatorium and rehab clinic once isolated in the chaparral of southern California but now surrounded by the suburban sprawl of inland Orange County. The peculiar degenerative condition shredding his nervous system has paralyzed him from the waist down and robbed him of all but the most strangled attempts at human speech, but he has recently discovered that he can apparently understand and communicate with the various animals...