The Tithe: A Dark Urban Fantasy Romance

by David Lawton

The pact is broken. The tithe is over. Something ancient is awake. Zara Cole is a street-level data runner who knows three things — keep her head down, trust no one, and never ask questions she doesn't want answered. But when she witnesses something in the neon-soaked back streets of the megacity that she was never supposed to see, the life she knew evaporates in an instant.

Kael Draveth is a Covenant hunter — lethal, disciplined, and bound by a blood oath older than the city itself. His orders are simple. Find the human woman who saw too much. Silence her.

He should have followed his orders.

Now they're running together through a world hidden beneath the one humans think they know — a world of ancient bloodlines, supernatural power, and a thousand-year conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the Covenant itself. The hunters aren't protecting humanity. They never were.

And the monster at the centre of it all? He's been waiting. For the tithe. For the blood. For her.

Dark. Steamy. Relentlessly gripping. The Tithe is the explosive first book in the Ember & Ash series — a dark urban fantasy romance set in a near-future megacity where ancient magic and science fiction collide, and where the line between hunter and hunted disappears when the wrong woman sees too much.

For fans of dark urban fantasy, slow-burn romance, and world-building that pulls you under and doesn't let go.

302 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 5, 2026

About the author

This is the disambiguation profile for otherwise unseparated authors publishing as David Lawton

For the historian, see: David A. Lawton