Three hundred years ago, a bloodline was bound to hold a door shut in Salem. Three hundred miles apart, two of its last descendants are about to find out the door never fully closed — and neither did the bond between them.
Her husband is out mending timber before dawn. The lilacs he found in the dead of February are still on the vanity. Then the fire in the hearth turns black, and moves like something is alive inside it.
"None of them could name it. To them, it was just Darkness — a frantic, shifting emptiness that refused to be captured."
What the Becketts and the Reeds bind that winter will hold for three hundred years. It is not the kind of binding that stays finished.
She grew up in an ancient kitchen that hummed with ancestral magic, bound to a silver amulet that ran warm her whole life and cold only when the dark took her parents. He grew up drowning in sensory static and corporate data, anchoring his sanity to numbers and a dead silver watch frozen at 4:44.
Bound by a 300-year-old blood debt and an electric silver Thread, they didn't ask to reawaken Salem's ancient war — but when the entity beneath the town demands its rent, they will either finish the weave together or be torn apart.
The story runs from a meet-cute that mirrors a wedding vow three hundred years old, through a Haunted Happenings October that turns into a siege, to an epilogue dated 4/4/04 — because some things are worth choosing on purpose, twice.
She feels everything — other people's grief, other people's fear — before she ever gets around to her own. It's a gift the women in her family have carried for generations, and a habit of saying "I'm fine" that's older than the gift is.
He left Salem, changed his name, and built a life out of things he could measure. None of it explains why a two-hundred-year-old ache in his chest gets sharper every mile he puts between himself and a woman he's never officially met.
"The amulet screamed against her sternum, a white-hot brand fusing itself to her skin, and something in Carlie finally answered it back."— The One in the Shadows
Every Salem story needs a house that's seen too much. This one used to be an inn. Now it's a bed and breakfast with good coffee, a suite named for the meetinghouse that used to stand nearby — and floorboards that seal themselves shut when something outside starts testing the walls.
The One in the Shadows is a complete standalone novel — Book One in a planned series set in Salem, Massachusetts. Hardcover edition coming soon.