Literature / The Otherworld

"Other parents warn their kids not to talk to strangers. I had to warn mine not to eat them."

— Jeremy Danvers, Stolen

For tropes associated with other worlds, see Otherworld Tropes. For the anime fan fiction series, see The Otherworld Series. For the 1985 live action series, see Otherworld.

The Otherworld is an Urban Fantasy series by Kelley Armstrong, also marketed under the title Women of the Otherworld. It's based on the idea that supernatural creatures exist, but hide behind the Masquerade from humans. Each novel is narrated by one of a rotating cast of supernatural women. The plots of each novel typically include action, mystery, and romance in equal proportions. While the novels can be read alone, or in order of each narrator, minor jokes and plot details only make sense to those who have read the earlier novels.

There are thirteen books in the series, which is on indefinite hiatus. The author also writes a Lighter and Softer Young Adult series set in the same universe, called Darkest Powers, which is still continuing.

The supernatural races include clairvoyants, druids, half-demons, necromancers, shamans, sorcerers, vampires, vodoun priests, werewolves, and witches.

There are four books narrated by Elena Michaels, werewolf; two books narrated by Paige Winterbourne, witch; one book narrated by Eve Levine, witch/half-demon/ghost/angel; one book narrated by Jaime Vegas, necromancer; one book narrated by Hope Adams, half-demon; three books narrated by Savannah Levine, witch; and one book narrated by multiple people. In addition, there are many short stories and novellas in anthologies or on the author's website.

A television adaption, Bitten, was commissioned by the Canadian channel Space. Internationally, it airs on Syfy in the United States.

Now has a Character Sheet that needs love.

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Books in the series:

• Bitten (2001)
• Stolen (2003)
• Dime Store Magic (2004)
• Industrial Magic (2004)
• Haunted (2005)
• Broken (2006)
• No Humans Involved (2007)
• Personal Demon (2008)
• Living with the Dead (2008)
• Men of the Otherworld anthology (2009)
• Frostbitten (2009)
• Tales of the Otherworld anthology (2010)
• Waking the Witch (2010)
• Spellbound (2011)
• Thirteen (2012)
• Otherworld Nights anthology (2014)
• Otherworld Secrets anthology (2015)
• Otherworld Chills anthology (2016)
• Led Astray anthology (2015); also contains short fiction from Darkest Powers and other works by Armstrong

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This series provides examples of:

• Adoptive Peer Parent: Paige adopts 13-year-old Savannah when she's 23 or so. This works out surprisingly well, as Paige is close enough in age to remember pulling exactly the same crap Savannah pulls and thus treats her with a light rein.
• Affably Evil: Karl Marsten is a genuinely charming, polite jewel thief and a sincerely gracious host even to his enemies, who he wines and dines in hopes of them taking the hint and leaving before he has to kill them. His charm and affability even carry over into his eventual Heel–Face Turn.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Hope is attracted to both Karl Marsten and Jasper Haig.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Paige was treated as a dangerous malcontent by the rest of her Coven, even before they cast her out. In context, though, it was more a case of "Fire her before she quits".
• All There in the Manual: The author's webpage includes an "Otherworld Bible" with details about demonology not yet seen in the series.
• Aloof Ally: Elena throughout Bitten. Just because she's helping the Pack doesn't mean she wants anything to do with them, although she changes her mind and rejoins in the end.
• And I Must Scream:
  • People in hell dimensions can be ripped apart, but can't die. Eve sees a man in such a situation.
  • Martha is an incredibly powerful clairvoyant, known as a seer, but has no arms, legs, or eyes, must wear a diaper, is fed through a tube, and can't make a sound louder than a mewl. Not only this, but her mind is fully functional and she's spent her whole life locked up in a bomb shelter with two other seers, neither of whom are exactly...all the way there. If she's not completely insane from at least boredom by now, I'll be surprised.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: In Personal Demon the main character, who is an empathic half-demon, whose mentor is a werewolf and is currently working for a sorcerer doesn't believe in goblins. Note however that the race of the guy who she says looks and acts like a goblin would if they existed is never specified. He might be another type of half-demon of which there are many.
• Asmodeus: Asmoedus goes by the alias of Asmondai here. Asmondai is a powerful demon lord and one of the rulers of hell. He is also the father to protagonist Adam Vasic. His main power is control over fire which is passed down to his offspring.
• Ax-Crazy: Multiple examples.
  • Malcolm Danvers. In Karl Marsten's teenage years, Malcolm chased after him and then tore his father apart because they were "mutts". Malcolm also murdered Jeremy's mother and great-grandmother so he could have sole custody of his son.
  • Thomas LeBlanc from Bitten is a psychotic murderer who preys on women and takes great delight in hunting, raping and killing them. Thomas is such a raging psycho that he outright goes against the orders of his boss just to kill Elena.
  • Jasper "Jaz" and Jason "Sonny" Haig murder their entire gang and two of Lucas's older brothers and attempt to murder him and Paige as well, leaving the fourth brother, Carlos, to take the fall. This is more a case of them being horribly indoctrinated by their mother, who was a paranoid schizophrenic and had delusions that the Cabals would come after her sons; she had good reason to worry, as the Cabals are notorious for doing anything to get their hands on rare supernatural types like Jaz and Sonny, but still.
  • Adele Morissey from Living With The Dead. Born into a clairvoyant cult called the "kumpania", she doesn't care who she has to stab in the back to get out. She manipulates her fifteen-year-old fiance into helping her, which eventually leads to his suicide. She secretly drugs another woman which leads directly to her being gang raped. She rapes her fiance's mentally handicapped older brother so that she can use the baby as a bargaining chip. And she freely murders several people, including one for accidentally taking a picture of her and another for getting in her way as she tried to flee the police.
  • Travis Tesler in Frostbitten is a sadistic rapist and killer who has crossed the line as a "mutt" werewolf. He doesn't just kill people but eats them afterwards: with an attractive woman, the sequence is rape, kill, eat.
• Baby Factory: How most werewolves view women, or at least those of Malcolm's generation. The Tesler brothers take it a stage further and view them as a nice snack afterwards.
• Berserk Button:
  • Cassandra hates it when people say she's dead, even though she's a vampire.
  • Threatening Elena, Jeremy, or Logan and Katie is a surefire way to have Clay after your blood as well.
  • Putting Hope in danger is a berserk button for Karl. Sonny found this out the hard way in Personal Demon.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Not an actual wish, but in Waking the Witch Savannah thinks that she'd willingly give up her powers if it meant Paula regained custody of her granddaughter, Kayla. Unfortunately for her, someone was listening.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • Unlike other half demons who get some cool power like telekinesis, Hope Adams has the power to sense chaos, meaning she can sense chaotic thoughts or have visions of chaotic events but has no super powers to protect herself when she gets into a sticky situation.
  • To a lesser extent, Jaime tends to end up as the Butt-Monkey as well because her abilities are useless in combat. Also, necromancers usually go insane as they grow older.
  • Clairvoyants, too. Their visions eventually drive them insane, and though they can spy on a subject using their remote viewing, they can't remote view other clairvoyants and their power is usually weak, lasting seconds at the most. Seers arguably have the worst of the lot. They are incredibly powerful clairvoyants, but they're all deformed, and two of the three known seers were also mentally handicapped. The one who wasn't, well...
• Big Eater: All of the werewolves have a crazy metabolism and have an extra large appetite as a result of this. Elena struggles with this because a slender young woman tends to draw attention to herself if she starts overeating, far more than the male wolves.

• Brought Down to Normal: Savannah in Waking The Witch.
• Bullying a Dragon: The witches' treatment of Paige and Savannah, despite them both being stronger than many of them put together, and nowhere near as afraid to use their powers at high levels.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Paige and Lucas both have this.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Eve learned dark magic so that she would be able to stand up to her enemies, making her and Paige rather similar.
• Deadpan Snarker: Elena and Clayton both fit this. Xavier however takes the cake.
  • Lucas has a lot of this too, most notably whenever Paige acts impulsively.
• Demonic Possession: In No Humans Involved a demon takes control of a human; when the demon disappears, the host has no idea what happened to him. In the final novel Thirteen, the veil between worlds becomes much thinner, making it easy for demon lords to possess others.
• DVD Bonus Content: The author's website has additional short stories and novellas set in the universe that provide background or additional adventures for many of the series characters.
• Domino Revelation: From witches to werewolves, they all get introduced.

• Fantastic Racism:
  • Witches and sorcerers hate each other. There are historically valid reasons for this, but it's probably time to get over it.
  • Pack wolves and mutts have this for each other. Depending on the era and the Pack Alpha, it varies between the civilized Pack preventing the mutts from killing humans for fun or the bully Pack murdering mutts for fun.
  • A particularly unpleasant example involving Malcolm Danvers. He dislikes and is disdainful of his son Jeremy not only for his un-werewolf-like bookishness and disinterest in fighting, but also because Jeremy's mother was Japanese and a rare type of supernatural race which Malcolm deemed strange and unnatural.
  • In general the different races seem uncomfortable around werewolves and vampires, since they're less human-like and more prone to feasting on humans.
• Fantastic Romance: Werewolves don't consciously choose who they take as a lifemate; the inner wolf does, and the werewolf just has to go along. On the other hand, the werewolf's non-wolf partner has a choice; at one point it's made clear that while Karl is driven to near-Mate or Die madness by being away from Hope, he'll go away if she tells him to.

• Forbidden Fruit: Used as part of an obfuscation by Paige's coven. They don't forbid the Menarche Rite, but they disapprove of it and make it clear that any witch who wants to do it for her daughter isn't getting any help from the coven. The second layer of defense, though, is that the Rite that the Coven witches know is a nerfed version of the full-power rite. The objective of this is to keep the local witches weak, and thus encourage everyone to keep their heads down.

• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Indicative of Demonic Possession, with the color indicating which level of demon is doing the possessing. When Karl is possessed by Lucifer, Savannah describes his eyes as "shimmering iridescent, with points of a thousand colors" rather than a single color.
• The Grovel: In Haunted, Kristof issues Eve an ultimatum: stop trying to communicate with the living or he'll leave her, because he can't be with someone who's slowly destroying herself like that. He catches her red-handed and sadly walks away. Later Eve realizes she's thrown away the one good thing in her life in pursuit of an unreachable goal. She goes to him with a simple yet sincere, "I fucked up."
• Half-Human Hybrid: Half-demons.
• Hand of Glory: In Dime Store Magic, Kristof Nast tries to get custody of Savannah and plants a Hand of Glory on Paige's property to pressure her into giving in to him. When Savannah wants to use the Hand to sneak out of the house, Cortez says that the claims of turning a person invisible are just a myth and that all that it can do is prevent sleeping people from waking (and weakly at that).
• Heal It with Blood: Bathing in large quantities of blood allows vampires to gain immortality and become resistant to any injury. Similar experiments using the blood of children was used by Gilles de Rais to turn himself into an immortal.
• Heroic Bastard: Lucas and Savannah are illegitimate children of Cabal higher-ups. Their fathers love them, but the rest of their relatives...not so much.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • Lizzie Borden is revealed in the book Haunted to have been possessed by the evil chaos demon known as the Nix when she was killing her father and stepmother. In the novel, Lizzie herself also appears to act as an information guide about the Nix that the heroine Eve Levine is trying to capture and imprison.
  • The 16th century noblewoman and Serial Killer Elizabeth Báthory was a prolific vampire who murdered hundreds of people in order to gain immortality before the story began.
  • Gilles de Rais is depicted as a vicious Serial Killer and Mad Scientist who desires to take over the world.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Karl and Hope. He's tall, reasonably muscular, and a werewolf, also making him an example of Stronger Than They Look. She's around 5' (1.5m) tall, and he's able to easily pick her up and carry her around.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: In Stolen, Elena and other supernaturals are kidnapped to be experimented on. The major funder of this project is a millionaire video game designer who likes to hunt them when they've outlived their usefulness.

• Hybrid Power: A witch or sorcerer who's got ancestry from some other supernatural entity tends to be a more powerful spellcaster than one who's got a human for their other parent, even if they can't access any other supernatural abilities from that side of their lineage.
  • Eve, a ghost/dark witch/half-demon. She eventually becomes an angel as well.
  • Jeremy, half werewolf and half Kogitsune.
  • Savannah, half-witch, half-sorcerer.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Elena keeps telling herself this throughout Bitten, because she hasn't really accepted that she prefers being a werewolf and living with the pack.
• I Just Want to Be Special:
  • In Stolen, Sondra Bauer injects herself with Elena's saliva to turn herself into a werewolf. Unfortunately, she didn't listen to Elena's warnings at all and flies into an Unstoppable Rage, during which she murders one of her friends. Naturally, she blames it all on Elena.
  • Despite being a half-demon, Hope has no useful abilities to protect herself when in danger. She asks Karl to bite her so that she won't have to rely on him for protection all the time, but he refuses.
• I'm Okay!: Savannah does this toward the end of Waking The Witch.
• Infernal Fugitives: Eve Levine is an angel whose job is to capture the evil souls of the damned who've escaped from hell or purgatory and to drag them back for eternal punishment.
• Interrogating the Dead: The ability to do this is what makes the police officer Finn so good at catching crooks.
• Interspecies Romance: pretty much everyone with a romantic interest but Elena and Clay has one, really.
  • Paige/Lucas: Witch/Sorcerer
  • Eve/Kristof: Witch & Aspicio Half-Demon/Sorcerer
  • Jaime/Jeremy: Necromancer/Werewolf
  • Hope/Karl: Chaos Half-Demon/Werewolf
  • Savannah/Adam: Witch & Sorcerer/Exustio Half-Demon
• Is That What He Told You?: Turns out the Menarche Rite Paige was taught was a Nerfed version of the real thing.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Elena. She has quite the violent temper, and can be selfish and cruel. But she has moments when she shows genuine caring towards others, notably the Pack.
• Light Is Not Good: The Coven witches, who only use white magic, aren't evil per se, but most turn out to be backstabbing hypocrites. Black Magician Girls Paige, Eve and Savannah are much more sympathetic than they are.
• Lighter and Softer: The author's Darkest Powers subseries counts, but barely. The sex scenes become kissing scenes, and killing the bad guy becomes knocking the bad guy unconscious.
• Magikarp Power: In Dime Store Magic, it is revealed that the seemingly useless secondary spells are the key to learning powerful tertiary spells.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: a specialty of Clay and Elena's.
• Mama Bear: Both Paige and Eve are this for Savannah.
• Masquerade:
  • All supernatural races have to hide themselves or face dire consequences. In Stolen, we see some humans capturing supernaturals to study them and to play with their abilities.
  • Paige's coven goes so far as intentionally keeping their magical powers as weak as possible to aid in keeping their heads down (and forcing their members to do the same). Paige and Savannah are exiled for making too much noise.
• May–December Romance: The only pairing in the series where the male is not at least a decade older than the female is Lucas/Paige, who are only two years apart. Karl is twenty-three years older than Hope, but since he's a werewolf, he ages slowly and doesn't look older than his mid-thirties. This causes some confusion for Robyn in Living With The Dead when another werewolf continually refers to him as "the old man".
• Menstrual Menace: A witch's mother should perform a particular ceremony after her first menstruation, to ensure the witch's power throughout her life. However, Paige's coven uses a fake version to limit the power of its members.

• More Despicable Minion: Balaam is the demon lord who set the plot of the final novels in motion to rule the world but is affable, calm, and seems to honestly care for his daughter and granddaughter. Gilles De Rais /Giles Reyes who serves as The Heavy who he sent to set the plot in motion in contrast is a sadistic and smug psycho who gleefuly assists him.
  • In the first novel, Daniel Santos, the leader of the mutt uprising, is clearly insane and mentioned to have killed many people, but has his own plans and is willing to stop the killing when he believes he is close to achieving them. Karl Marsten, the other mutt considered as dangerous as him, simply wants territory. Thomas Leblanc, who they recruit to help overthrow the Pack and see as subservient to them, is a serial killer who targets women who only joined because he enjoys killing, and is willing to turn on them after they've won because he doesn't want to stop the murders. Victor Olson, another criminal they turn into a werewolf in exchange for his help, is a pedophile who raped five small girls and killed the last one. Justified in this case, as only truly despicable people would help with a scheme like that.
• Necromancer: Jaime Vegas. She subverts most common necromancer traits by being vivacious, outgoing, and more than a little silly at times.
• Never Found the Body: Contrary to what everyone believed, Malcolm wasn't killed and buried by an anonymous mutt.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Expisco half-demons, such as Hope, thrive on chaos.
• No Periods, Period: Averted. A major plot thread in Dime Store Magic involves Savannah getting her first period, which marks a huge gain in spellcasting power for witches.
• No Social Skills: Clayton Danvers, first and only child werewolf, plays with this. He starts out barely surviving on his own before fellow werewolf Jeremy rescues him and teaches him how to pass in human society, but by the time of the series he also has a genius-level IQ (and the doctorate in anthropology to prove it. . . at the bottom of his sock drawer) and knows how to blend in with humans. He just genuinely doesn't see the point 90% of the time, and typically only does so for Elena's sake. As he puts it, he absolutely has social skills, he just chooses not to use them.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Giles Reyes presents himself as a messiah figure who will help supernaturals come out into the light and take over the world, which he claims is rightfully theirs. In reality, all Giles really wants is to rule the planet and couldn't care less about the well being of supernaturals, even willing to test out a deadly virus on his own men and killing and experimenting on supernaturals en masse in his bid for world power.
• Oblivious to Love: Savannah has been in love with Adam since the age of twelve, which was obvious to everyone including Adam, and they have a Like Brother and Sister relationship. When Savannah turned sixteen and got better at hiding it (from Adam, at least), this trope kicked in.
  • Jaime with Jeremy for four years. Jeremy catches on and reciprocates...eventually. Jaime even detours into Eating the Eye Candy sometimes as well.
• One-Gender Race:
  • Witches bear only daughters while sorcerers only sire sons. They can use each other's magic, but not as well as the proper users can. Witch magic generally relies on incantations or healing brews, while sorcerer magic uses gestures. The only way to have a male witch or female sorcerer is for a witch and a sorcerer to have a child together; the child will be both, like Savannah.
  • Werewolves are always male, and the gene passes from father to son. Elena is the only known female werewolf to survive a bitten Change. Potentially averted by Katie Danvers, a female werewolf born to Clayton and Elena. Only time will tell if she develops the abilities.
• Our Angels Are Different: Most Angels are separate beings but a few of them are ascended human beings.
• Our Demons Are Different: Low ranking cacodemons thrive on chaos, and like to take on human form to father children. Half-demons inherit the main power of their fathers. Elemental control, teleportation, telekinesis and telepathy are common, as are enhancements of regular human abilities, such as strength, sight and hearing. This power manifests itself sometime between the ages of twelve and twenty. In Hope Adams' case she inherits the taste for chaos.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Ghosts reside in multiple versions of the afterlife. Most supernaturals end up in the same afterlife together.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires can go out in the sun, have super fast healing, and must kill once a year to preserve their long lives. Vampires are not immortal per se, merely long lived. As they age the tend to get more and more disconnected from other people.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Werewolves can turn into pure wolves at will, but the process is painful. They must Change about once a week, becoming more irritable and restless the longer they put it off, until finally their bodies take over and they Change involuntarily. Control over their Change is a matter of teaching, practice, and willpower. All but one of the werewolves are male, and they pass the gene down to their sons (daughters need not apply). A hereditary werewolf will not have his first Change until late adolescence. Werewolves can be made by an infected bite or by injection with werewolf saliva, but most are hereditary because very few bitten werewolves survive the transition. Frostbitten also introduces a second completely separate type of werewolf in a Lost World type scenario, in Alaska.
• Our Witches Are Different: Witches are a female One-Gender Race which are in contrast and often conflict with the all-male sorcerers. Witches live in covens and only gain their full spellcasting potential via a ritual after they begin to menstruate. They only have until the witch's next period to perform the rite, or they'll be forever locked into a lower power level.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Necromancers have the ability to bring people back from the dead, although the zombies have to deal with the state their body is in. Zombies appear to remember who and what they are, and the one time they are used is to scare a bunch of humans and try to frame Paige as the cause, especially as Paige is already suspected to be the person behind the zombie's death.
  • It's also shown in Spellbound that demons can inhabit humans and animals who have died.
• Painful Transformation: Werewolf transformations are described as agony.
• Parental Abandonment: Almost too many to list. Elena's parents were killed in a car accident when she was five. The full demon fathers of half-demons are never around, though in Haunted, it's implied that Balaam, Eve's father, keeps tabs on her. Supposedly he "speaks very highly of [her]".
• Parental Favoritism: Lucas is, by far, Benicio Cortez's favorite son. As a result of this and of Lucas's mother being Benicio's mistress, Lucas's half-brothers and Benicio's wife hate Lucas and have repeatedly tried to kill him.
  • Thomas Nast is no better, favoring Kristof and later his grandson Sean. His son Josef is shown to be more than a little bitter about being second fiddle not only to his dead brother but even to his nephew, and Bryce is beginning to resent being in Sean's shadow by the time they're adults.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: The Otherworld is a dark place with many horrific villains who do their evil deeds just because they like it. Hence the heroes will punish said villains often by killing them in ironic and brutal ways to fit their crimes with an example being Tyrone Winsloe who had supernaturals hunted down for fun. Elena and Clay force him to run his own hunting course and maul him to death in the same way he killed his victims.
• Plucky Girl: Most of the female characters fit, but especially Paige. She will not stop, no matter what she is put through.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: In No Humans Involved, some humans find a way to access magic. They do this by sacrificing children and cremating their organs, so that their ashes can be used in spells. As if that wasn't bad enough, it turns out the magic is charged by the children's souls.
• Power Perversion Potential:
  • In Dime Store Magic, Paige seduces Lucas by using spells to turn on the radio, light candles, caress him with wind, and most notably, uses a modified fireball spell that apparently made her warm fingers particularly stimulating.
  • In Personal Demon Karl arouses Hope (who gets a high off chaotic emotions and adrenaline) by calling up memories of risky or chaotic situations and letting her feel his adrenaline rush.
  • Adam is an Exustio fire half-demon and when he gets turned on, he can heat things up with his partner...literally. This only seems to happen between him and Savannah.
• Pregnant Badass: Elena in Broken. While being mostly full-term pregnant with twins.
  • Hope to a somewhat lesser extent in Spellbound and Thirteen.
• Prove I Am Not Bluffing: The first time Clay killed a mutt, he went to great lengths to make certain people will think twice before challenging the Pack in the future.
• Relationship Upgrade: Often when a couple sleeps together for the first time, with the exception of Hope and Karl. Theirs occurs after they work things out, sleep together for the second (and third and...) time, and start officially dating.
  • Jaime and Jeremy in No Humans Involved.
  • Savannah and Adam in Thirteen.
• Resurrected Murderer: In life, Andrei Duchev was a Repulsive Ringmaster who mutiliated innocent people into horrible abominations who were in horrfic pain. His crimes were so severe that his victims were granted a Mercy Kill and he was branded one of the worst serial killers ever before his execution. Andrei was sent to a prison in purgatory where he feigned that he had reformed of evil. They released him so he could hunt the demonic serial killer known as the Nix. Instead it backfired and Andrei now as malevolent spirit became her serial killer buddy in raking up new atrocities in undeath.
• Sarcastic Devotee: Clay and Elena towards each other. They're in love, but neither lets the other get away with anything without at least one snarky comment.

• Serial Killer:
  • Malcolm Danvers is one of the most sadistic werewolves in the series. Malcolm enjoys fighting and killing and is responsible for the deaths of many non-pack werewolves, including Karl's father. His abused son Jeremy had to cover for Malcolm's crimes for awhile, as if they came out to the rest of the pack it would lead to a deadly schism.
  • Thomas LeBlanc from Bitten is a remorseless murderer and rapist of women driven by extreme misogyny.
  • Edward Hagen is a vampire who starts to kill the children of the cabal members in retribution for his wife's death. Over the course of the novel, he kills them through various means such as gunshots, strangling and fatal beatings.
  • The Nix from Haunted is a monstrous demidemon which possesses women and helps them live out their murder fantasies, with a special love for murdering children.
  • Travis Tesler from Frostbitten is a sadistic mutt werewolf with a love for raping and killing women. Tesla's sadism and inability to refrain from killing for fun means him and his brother need to constantly move from area to area to avoid the authorities.
• Shapeshifter Baggage: Averted. Werewolves have the same body mass in either form and are explicitly described as very big wolves.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Clay, with regards to Elena. As he's a very wolf-like werewolf and she's his mate, it makes sense. She's also the only woman he's ever slept with.
• Small Girl, Big Gun: Hope Adams has the superpower of sensing chaos, but no combat abilities. She's also quite shor- uh, petite. Since her chaos detector invariably draws her into danger, she makes a point of carrying at least one gun with her, and she regularly practices with it.
• Soul-Cutting Blade: Angels use their Sword of Judgment to send souls of bad guys off to where they need to go. The Swords can only be used on evil people, though.
• Spot the Imposter:
  • Best not to try this one with Lucas; when Eve tries to impersonate Paige, inside of two minutes he's caught on and is threatening to break her neck if she doesn't tell him what she's done with his wife.
  • It's how Savannah realized Jessie was possessed by Leah O'Donnell: She remembered Leah's demonic tell and habit of calling her "kiddo".
• Stalker with a Crush: Jaz becomes something like this for Hope. When he's taken into Cabal custody at the end of "Personal Demon," he promises to come back for her; much to Karl's dismay, he's still obsessed with her a year later, having convinced himself that she loves him and is just confused. This is despite the fact that he tried to murder one of her friends in front of her. When he reappears in "Spellbound," he kisses Hope a few times and even threatens to kill her unborn child.

• Stress Vomit: In Living with the Dead, Hope throws up after a young clairvoyant jumps to his death in front of her and Karl nearly falls trying to catch him.
• Suicidal Pacifism: The elders in Paige's coven are so frightened of the idea that a member of the coven might use magic to hurt someone, they outlaw any spells that would be useful for self defense, even non-violent ones like one that magically keeps a door locked under the grounds that it could be used to imprison someone. It's implied that the only reason they're still alive is because the rest of the supernatural community considers them such a joke that they're completely ignored.
• Synthetic Plague: Giles Reyes creates a virus which turns humans into supernaturals but it comes at a devastating cost. The virus has a massive fatality rate as a side effect and if unleashed, would wipe out most of humanity.
• Tailor-Made Prison
  • Haunted: Particularly nasty serial killers are locked up in a sort of personal hell. With other serial killers for company.
  • Personal Demon: Jasper is locked up instead of being killed simply because he's a new and possibly unique type of supernatural.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Both Jeremy Danvers and Karl Marsten. Hope literally describes Karl that way during their first meeting, although he also qualifies as Tall, Dark, and Snarky.
• Thanatos Gambit: In Waking The Witch, Leah O'Donnell pulls a nasty one on Savannah: Leah sent all of Savannah's case notes to Chief Bruyn, along with some extra faked ones saying that Paula Thompson killed Ginny and Brandi (true) because she wanted sole custody of Kayla, Ginny's daughter and her granddaughter (not true).
• They Would Cut You Up: The second book of the series, Stolen, features a group of scientists, at least some of whom want to do just this, so they can find a way to share supernatural powers with the rest of humanity and "better them".
• Trauma Conga Line: In Dime Store Magic, things start out bad for Paige and get steadily worse. Being the Plucky Girl she is, though, she refuses to break.
• Unequal Rites: Between sorcerers and witches, to go with their Fantastic Racism. It's completely possible for them to learn each other's spells, but few do because witches tend to consider sorcerer magic to be destructive and evil, much like they consider sorcerers, and sorcerers tend to consider witch magic pacifistic and weak, much like their opinion of witches.
• Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born: Elena and Clay have twins, Katie and Logan Danvers, at the end of Broken.
• Urban Fantasy
• Voluntary Shapeshifter: Members of the Haig family can shift their facial features around to make them look like someone else, even impersonate other people.
  • The Change works this way for werewolves, though it's painful and unpleasant to look at as mentioned above.
• Wedding Episode: The short story "Wedding Bell Hell" details Paige and Lucas's wedding.

• Wicked Stepmother: Lucas's father's wife is excluded from any events Lucas might be attending after she tried to poison him at his graduation dinner. Though as he points out, it's hard to call her his "stepmother" since she's been married to his father since before his birth.
• Woman Were-Woes: Elena is the only female werewolf, due to having been bitten by Clay. Not only did this cause massive problems in her and Clay's romantic relationship, but makes her a target for "mutts," non-Pack werewolves who want to possess the only female werewolf in existence.
• Working with the Ex:
  • In Bitten, Elena has to work with the werewolf pack she used to be part of and runs into her ex-lover, Clay. After a lot of Belligerent Sexual Tension they get back together.
  • In Personal Demon, Hope works with her ex-lover, Karl, to honor a debt they owe to Benicio Cortez. They reconcile by the end of the novel and later get back together.
• Youkai: The Kitsune type. In the Men of the Otherworld anthology we discover that Jeremy's mother's race, the Kogitsune, were enslaved by the Kitsune.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Clay has this reaction twice in Ascension, mostly when Malcolm points out they're not that different. Considering that Malcolm was an Ax-Crazy psychopath who very happily murdered non-Pack werewolves, including Karl Marsten's father, simply because they exist, can you blame him?

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