Under the leadership of Dr. Rose Psychic (and her body-sharing husband, Dr. Occult), Zatanna and her fellow students--including Davit Sargon, June "Enchantress" Moone, and brooding bad boy Sebastian Faust--begin to learn the secrets of harnessing and directing their powers. But these introductory lessons may not be enough to save them from the deadly force known as the Malevolence, whose triumph in the not-too-distant future Dr. Psychic has already foreseen. For Zatanna, however, this dark prophecy is overshadowed by more immediate concerns--among them, the obsessive attentions of the queen-bee Thriae Society, the cold-blooded calculations of Mr. E, and what really happened when she first manifested her backwards-speaking magic and sent her father to lleH!