Above the ground, power is also about allegiances. A magician can drain his friends' strength to strengthen him, and place them between him and danger. The one with the most friends stands to win the territory.

Jesse Fox left his Eastern college education behind to wander west, after his sister suffered a mental breakdown - an event she insisted was a supernatural assault. Now Jesse's been summoned to Tombstone by his friend the physician (and magician) Chow Lung. Lung insists that Jesse has magical talent, but if Jesse believed that he'd have to accept that the thing that destroyed his sister's mind lives in his own as well.

Jesse meets the tubercular Doc Holliday, whose inner magic is as suppressed as his own, but whose power is enough to attract the sinister attention of Wyatt Earp, who means to use Holliday to put himself and his family in positions of power in Arizona. And Jesse also meets Mildred Benjamin, a young Jewish widow who makes her living first as a newspaper typesetter, then as a reporter, as she discovers her true nature - personal and supernatural - in the scrambling boomtown environment of Tombstone.

Then, when a failed stage holdup results in two dead, Tombstone explodes with speculation about who attempted it. The truth could destroy Wyatt Earp's plans for wealth and glory, and he'll do anything to bury it. Meanwhile, outlaw leader John Ringo wants the same turf as Earp.

Events (including fire, floods, Apaches, and rustlers, and a surprising Fourth of July) are building toward the shootout of which you may have heard. But you haven't heard the whole, secret story until you've read Emma Bull's unique take on an American legend, in which absolutely nothing is as it seems