Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From I, in the Shadows by Tori Bovalino

Maybe this is possession; maybe this is truly what it is to be haunted…

By Tori Bovalino

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Published on December 11, 2025

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Cyrano de Bergerac meets Beetlejuice meets Bottoms in this bewitching, passionate tale of the unlikely alliance between a ghost and the girl who moves into a haunted house.

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from I, in the Shadows, a young adult horror novel by Tori Bovalino, out from Page Street YA on January 13, 2026.

“The exorcism didn’t work,” I say into the phone, held not-so-securely between my cheek and shoulder as I fumble with my key with one hand and try not to drop the stack of library books teetering in the other. The stack is a mix of things: books on ghosts and ESP, a Bible, a Quran, a Torah, and a beat-up library copy of The Grapes of Wrath.

I’m covering my bases here. And to be clear: The Steinbeck is for English class, not exorcisms. I don’t think this is a problem I can solve with breast milk.

Finding the house key is a problem, but it’s a problem of my own making. My key ring is cluttered with keys to our old house (which probably no longer work): one to my best friend Andie’s house (definitely works, but is approximately eighty miles away); my car key (works, accessible, rarely used); Dad’s office (works, stolen); and Bee’s bakery (works, also stolen).

On the other end of the line, Reece snorts. “I told you it wouldn’t,” they say. I hear a rustle of pages—they’re probably studying. I’m probably interrupting. The last thing they probably want to talk about is ghosts.

“You’re the one who told me to handle it myself,” I grumble.

“Bro, have you ever seen me do an exorcism?”

I drop my keys, groan, and kneel to retrieve them, tipping over the stack of books in the process. At this point, I think it’s brave of me that I don’t curl up on the front porch and give up. It’s one of those days.

“Oh,” Reece says, ignorant to my suffering. “How was the Stats test?”

“NOPE!” I gather up my books, my keys, and finally find the right one. The door creaks ominously as it opens, but that’s not much of an omen when I already know the place is haunted. And possibly cursed.

The sound would tip off Bee and Dad that I’m home, but neither of them are here. If they were, I would not be talking about exorcisms so openly. I would also, unfortunately for all involved, be answering way more questions about the Stats test.

“But the ghost,” I say, redirecting with all my might as I drop my backpack and leave the stack of books on the table in the hall.

“Do you know of anything else that will help? That will work?”

“Not an exorcism.”

“Thanks. Genius advice.”

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I, in the Shadows

Tori Bovalino

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I, in the Shadows

Tori Bovalino

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Reece is quiet for a moment. Usually, they’re the one who… well, does anything about ghosts. We can both see them. We’ve both always been able to see them. But I prefer to ignore them, whereas Reece has always taken a more hands-on approach.

Unfortunately, due to proximity, there’s no avoiding this particular ghost—and if he does degrade in the way ghosts do, it could lead to a dangerous situation for me if I leave him alone. It’s one of those moments where I feel Reece’s absence keenly.

My sibling has a much stronger understanding of ghosts than I do, and also a much better moral code. Even after… well, my entire life, I’m not sure if I’ve mastered the compass points just yet.

I hang my keys on the strip of hooks by the door and make my way to the kitchen, the wooden floorboards creaking with every step. The house itself is really not that old. Our last place was an early nineteenth-century farmhouse. This house is bright, airy, and open-concept downstairs with big rooms and good closets upstairs. It’s everything Bee and Dad always wanted. 

We’ve only been here for about a month, so I’m in that weird phase in which everything about it is pseudo-familiar: the creaking of the floors in every room, worst on the stairs; the scratching of the trees against the windows at night; the far-off whistle of the trains as they pass through, headed for Ohio or across Pennsylvania.

Oh, yeah. And the fucking ghost.

He’s not here as I pull down a box of cereal, hop up on the counter, and eat it dry by the handful, as Reece still sighs and mutters on the line.

The ghost tends to prefer my bedroom (it’s very inconvenient for both of us), which leads me to believe that it was once his bedroom.

(You don’t have to tell me I’m a genius. When it comes to ghostbusting, I am a top student.)

(I can’t say the same for real school.)

But, back to the bedroom thing. To be clear, he’s not a creeper ghost, from what I can tell. He doesn’t watch me change, or leer, or do anything else that one would suspect of a semi-visible teenage boy now sharing a bedroom with a fully visible teenage girl. Who knows. Maybe he’s queer too. Maybe he likes running. Maybe he also is kind of bad at school. Maybe, if we were living in the same timeline, any of those things would be in the center of our little Venn diagram.

Maybe, we would even be friends.

Finally, Reece sighs. “I wouldn’t usually recommend this,” they say, their tone taking on a hint of the dubiousness, “but have you tried talking to him?”

Now, it’s my turn to snort. Unfortunately, I do it around a mouthful of dry Cheerios, which leads to a lot of coughing and sputtering, which lessens the effect when I say, “Isn’t that breaking, like, Reece Tarpin’s Rule Number One of Ghost Management?”

“Drew—” Reece starts.

“Maybe Rule One is ‘do not bang a ghost,’” I speculate, this time with less choking on Cheerios.

“Drew—”

“Or ‘no kissing ghosts?’ But I’m pretty sure you broke that one with—”

“ANDREA PENELOPE TARPIN,” Reece shouts. “DO YOU WANT MY HELP OR NOT?”

I press my lips together. Stop swinging my feet. Set the cereal box down. “…Yes.”

Reece sighs, and I can just imagine them pinching the bridge of their nose, eyes closed, trying to tamp down the frustration. I cause this expression a lot, so the image of it comes easily—along with that fierce ache of missing them. Reece is a freshman in college at Boston University, and they moved at the end of the summer, a couple of weeks before Dad and Bee and me relocated here. I’m still not used to the emptiness of my life without Reece’s constant presence—and Reece’s constant willingness to step in and take the lead on anything ghostly.

But let’s get one thing straight: I am not asking for Reece’s help because I’m afraid of this ghost, okay? Fear has nothing to do with it. I just don’t like him, and I don’t want him in my room, and I am a growing girl, and I should be allowed my space and privacy.

Plus, he’s very judgmental, which I can tell because he makes weird faces at me at night when I’m doing my ab routine. I find it very disruptive.

And when Reece is in charge, they just… usually go away on their own. Or with gentle convincing from light rituals. They are not usually this persistent.

Enter: Reece.

“I’m video-calling you,” Reece says, resigned. “Switch over.”

I pull the phone from my face and accept the video request. Reece’s face floats up, too close for a moment, their nose and septum piercing and top lip swimming on my screen before they back up. I scan over their freckles and shorn red hair—the shock of copper is the only thing we share between us that Dad does not also have—before focusing in on their brown eyes, still a bit tired.

“Take me to the ghost.”

“You won’t be able to—”

“Just do it, mmkay? You’re the one who wanted my help.”

I sigh, but I take Reece with me upstairs. I also nearly die on the way when I trip over my backpack, discarded on the first step, and I am annoyed to find that, for a brief moment, I understand why Dad is always getting on my case to hang it up or put it in my room.

It’s the worst kind of self-betrayal to find that I agree with my parents’ nagging, even for a second.

Reece doesn’t say anything until we’re in my room with the door shut behind us. Then, they shout, scaring me out of my skin:

“HEY GHOSTIE. IT’S DREW’S BIG SIBLING. SQUARE UP.”

“Reece,” I say, aghast.

But something in it works. My eyes snap to a corner, where the bed is pushed against the wall: For the barest moment, the air shimmers, and then the boy appears.

He’s sitting on the bed, back against the wall, one knee tented, arm thrown over it. He died wearing jeans and a short-sleeved top with three buttons at the throat, all open. He’s white, I think, with dark hair and brown eyes and a beaky nose keeping up his glasses. He looks a little nerdy but also kind of nice—not the sort of kid you’d think of dying at seventeen or eighteen or whatever age he was when he kicked it.

He also looks mega bored. I would probably feel the same, if I were dead for an indeterminate amount of time and unable to communicate with the living.

I turn the phone around. I’m not sure if Reece can see him over the video call, but it doesn’t much matter. Reece is good at playing things off, and they know the ghost is there. If I can see it, of course it’s there.

The thing is, I did want to solve this on my own. All our lives, Reece has been the one who cared more about ghosts (see: when the going gets tough, I get avoiding) and knew how to deal with them. And when they lived with us, it was easy to let that be their thing, to let every little issue fall under Reece’s remit. But Reece is in Massachusetts, and I doubt they’ll be coming back—in the last few weeks, I’ve watched them talk about home less and less as they’ve made new friends and gotten used to Boston.

I can’t even blame them. The world is a bit shit right now— I’m proud they’re finding what space they can, carving safety and protection into it.

Either way, I thought that working through the ghost issue would make us closer. Bridge that gap that’s been building between us since Reece left. But they told me to figure it out, and I—well. I reached for the exorcism when I probably shouldn’t have.

But in my defense, it’s actually very creepy to share space with a ghost. They don’t really knock when they want to come in— right now, the ghost and I can’t communicate at all, which means he spends his sentient hours staring at me from the corner like I kicked his puppy.

Reece is good at making them go away, solving their problems and cutting their ties to the mortal world before sending them peacefully into the afterlife. Fixing the mess before wellmannered ghosts degrade into angry husks. I am patently not, and that’s what’s getting me into trouble. And yes, maybe I did go straight for an exorcism on purpose—because if I failed, I knew that Reece would have no choice but to help me. Selfish? Possibly.

I just… I really miss them. This might be a shitty bonding experience, but it’s better than nothing.

“Ready to do this, Dree?” Reece asks me.

I press my lips together, glaring at the ghost so he doesn’t get any ideas. Reece is the only one who calls me Dree (and the only one who is allowed)—a shortening for Andrea, which annoys me. Everyone else calls me Drew, because my best friend, another Andrea, took Andie first.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I grumble.

The ghost cocks an eyebrow. He doesn’t look pleased, either, but that might have something to do with the failed exorcism that happened last time I saw him.

Yeah, I doubt he’s forgiven me for that yet.

“Look,” I say, trying to soften my voice a bit. “I’m sorry about… the whole holy water thing. I am just trying to help you move on, okay?”

He frowns, unconvinced.

“Just do it,” Reece mutters on the line.

I stick out a hand. If he comes forward, touches me, then I can bring him back into corporeality. Meld my spirit to his, even temporarily. And I’ll be able to hear him properly, to know what he wants.

Reece is really good at it. They can listen to a ghost, figure out what they want, and get them moving on in record speed. It would never take my sibling three weeks to deal with a ghost.

But I hate the squidginess of it, the vulnerability. Reece taught me how to do this when I was ten, and I’ve only done it a couple of times since then.

When you open yourself to a ghost, you always take a bit of them, too—and I hate knowing those deaths, feeling the shattered fractals of their memories, and not being able to put them down. Not being able to forget them, when the ghosts do move on.

Sure, they don’t become husks, the angry remnants of a soul left behind. But I keep the other half of memories no one else will ever share: the sweet bite of an apple in springtime eighty years ago, and the first kiss with someone’s wife, and the feeling of dirt in my hand as someone buried their mother, and the taste of blood in my mouth as someone wrecked a car. It’s all there, still mine, even though they were never really my memories to begin with.

He regards the hand, then looks up at me. I know his name— when I moved in, small town that this is, everyone was stepping over themselves to tell me about the dead kid who lived here before—but I don’t want to think it now, when he could be in my brain soon.

“It will help,” I say. “I’ll stop trying to get rid of you.”

He tilts his head, a question there. He stopped trying to talk to me after the first week, when it was clear I couldn’t hear.

That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped talking at him. Small things— announcing my presence when I come in, or reminding him that I can’t hear him, or apologizing for failing at exorcisms.

“And if she can’t,” Reece says, “I might be able to.”

He looks doubtful, but he shifts forward. Gets off the bed. He doesn’t need to walk, one foot in front of the other, but he does. He could just float, or appear wherever he needs to go, but I learned early on that he’s not very good at being a ghost.

“I won’t hurt you,” I say.

He rolls his eyes. Takes my hand. I take a deep breath, reaching for not just his hand, but the shadow of his soul still here on this mortal plane.

It’s like surfacing from underwater, bringing him back into being. Like tasting every second of his seventeen years, two months, twenty-two days, eight hours, seventeen minutes, and eight seconds on my tongue, all those vague reminders of who he is hitting all at once—and I can’t hold back his name anymore.

“You can’t hurt me,” the ghost of Liam Orville says. “I’m already dead.”

Excerpted from I, in the Shadows, copyright © 2025 by Tori Bovalino.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>I, in the Shadows</i> by Tori Bovalino appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Romantasy

Read an Excerpt From Silver & Blood by Jessie Mihalik

When a vicious beast begins attacking her fellow villagers, Riela reluctantly agrees to enter the forbidden forest and kill the monster…

By Jessie Mihalik

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Published on December 10, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Silver & Blood, a sexy new romantasy novel by Jessie Mihalik, out from Avon on January 27, 2026.

Chapter 1

After a full day of walking without any sign of the monster, the forest’s faux twilight had deepened into true darkness. The magical light I’d summoned did little to pierce the shadows, and being alone in the woods at night reminded me of so many of the fairy tales my father had read to me.

Except I wasn’t a plucky princess or a brave knight, and if I got in over my head, a hero wasn’t going to show up and rescue me. But I also wasn’t on a quest to defeat a godlike mage or take down a dragon— I hoped— so perhaps I’d succeed all on my own.

And in truth, the stories where the princesses rescued themselves were my favorites anyway.

I was just starting to think about finding a safe place to rest for the night when the forest fell still and quiet around me. Even the droning insects stopped singing, leaving the woods draped in a hushed watchfulness that hinted at danger.

I fed more magic into my light, then carefully drew my new dagger and fanned out my power, searching for the threat. The bright pool of silver magic I’d been tracking was still there, but now there was a much closer smudge of scarlet slowly stalking me.

I’d been ignoring the smaller smudges of magic because they’d been ignoring me. I’d assumed they were prey rather than predators, but perhaps more than one monster haunted this part of the forest. That would be just my luck.

A low, snarling growl vibrated through the trees, and I tensed for a fight. My knees trembled with nerves, but I spun to face the scarlet magic just as the smudge split in two.

Bitter fear coated my tongue. One monster would’ve been difficult. Two were impossible.

The first scarlet smudge circled to my right while the other remained in place. The beasts were trying to flank me. I turned with circling magic, but the glow of my light refused to pierce the clawing shadows.

The dagger shook in my hand, and the smooth leather hilt felt dangerously slick. The sword would give me better reach, but it was heavy and clumsy. I was better off with a weapon I could wield, however poorly, than one I couldn’t.

In order to survive, I needed to do as much damage as I could as quickly as possible.

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Silver & Blood

Jessie Mihalik

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Silver & Blood

Jessie Mihalik

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Then the first beast glided into view, and I silently laughed at my hubris. The monster was taller than my shoulders, with glowing red eyes and a body composed of tightly woven sanguine vines. Thorns sprouted from its form like fur, their sharp tips glistening with poison.

A creature like this had never appeared in any of the books I’d read, and I had no idea how to safely defeat it. Even if my dagger could cut through the vines, I’d be torn to shreds by the thorns.

I’d never used my magic offensively, but desperation was the best teacher, so I firmed my stance and tried to remember how it had felt when I’d diverted the flood to save the village.

Mostly I remembered the pain. I’d hoped not to repeat that experience.

My magic glowed stormy blue in my mind’s eye, and despite my intense desire for it to become a shield or a weapon or anything, it remained inert and uncooperative. Only the magical light floating above my head proved I had any power at all.

I clutched the dagger’s hilt until the leather bit into my palm. I was going to have to fight without magic.

Before I could decide on the best approach, the monster lunged with a sound like wind rustling through leaves. And it was fast— so fast. I darted sideways and my pack nearly overbalanced me, but I swung the dagger with fear-powered strength. The tip caught a vine on the beast’s side, spilling thick red sap and the scent of roses.

The creature roared and spun with unnatural swiftness. I had no time to dodge. Brutal jaws clamped down on my left shoulder, and I shrieked in agony as I repeatedly plunged the dagger into the monster’s neck. Vines broke and thorns pierced my skin. Fiery heat streaked up my right arm.

The creature shook its head, ripping deeper into my shoulder, and finally, finally, my magic spiked. The beast’s jaws unclamped on a pained whimper, and it lurched back. I stumbled after it. My left shoulder was an inferno matched only by the burning in my right arm, but I drove the dagger toward the beast’s head with grim resolve.

It darted away and my dagger met only air.

I cursed every fucking saint in existence, but especially Stas, the saint of chaos, fire, and poison. I didn’t even believe in the saints— or the sovereigns, for that matter— but my father had, and there was familiar comfort in cursing or thanking them as needed.

Mostly cursing. And this beast seemed custom-made for Stas himself. I could barely feel the sticky, sap-covered hilt in my right hand, and the ground was starting to tilt— or I was. I needed to kill both monsters, and quickly, or I was going to fail.

I refused to fail.

Silver magic pulsed nearby, like moonlight on rippling water, and a low, husky sound curled up my spine, somewhere between a chuckle and a growl. It was a sound no human throat could produce, and it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The monster next to me turned to face the greater threat, and I used its distraction to drive my dagger deep into its side. I jerked the blade toward me and more vines snapped.

The beast snarled and spun, taking my dagger with it. I snarled back, and tried to draw my sword, but my right arm refused to move far enough for the blade to clear the sheath. Moving my left arm was agony itself, but I jerked the sword free, then nearly dropped it.

Spots danced in my vision, and the sword’s hilt was slick with my own blood, but at least I still had a weapon. I silently thanked the blacksmith for her kindness.

The beast staggered and fell, its sides heaving, and thick, red sap leaked from the wounds I’d made. One down, but there was at least one more beast lurking somewhere in the trees, and I was fading fast.

I hobbled toward the felled creature. Before I could close the distance and retrieve my dagger, a dark-haired man with a long, gleaming sword appeared between us. I jerked in surprise. Where had he come from? His moonlight aura marked him as a mage, but rather than magic, he used raw strength to bring his sword down on the beast with a forceful, two-handed swing.

A wrenching sound like breaking wood cracked through the air, then the vine beast disintegrated into dust. My dagger dropped to the leaf-covered ground, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the mage.

A mage, and a proper one from the look of his armor. Had another village somehow raised the funds to hire a mercenary to kill the beast? Mages were rare, and those few who had avoided the king’s summons commanded an incredible premium.

My spirits lifted. Maybe I would survive this after all, and I could limp home and report our victory— assuming the fire climbing my arm was survivable and I didn’t bleed to death before I arrived.

A furious snarl vibrated from the trees on our left and another vine beast leapt into the light. It assessed us with uncanny intelligence, then it lunged at me, correctly judging me to be the easier target.

Scorching agony lit up my arms as I struggled to lift my sword. The beast cleared half the distance between us in a heartbeat, and I wasn’t going to be fast enough.

The mage, however, was.

I didn’t know how he’d closed the distance so quickly, but I was suddenly staring at his back. His heavy sword swung through the air with effortless ease, and no matter what the monster tried, it couldn’t get past him.

The mage drove the beast back, and once they were nearly to the edge of the light, the mercenary brought his sword down on the creature with spectacular strength. Wood cracked and the monster split apart like a log on a chopping block.

I stared in stunned disbelief for a moment before the beast disintegrated into dust.

I kept staring, but the scene didn’t change, and now I was alone with an armed mage who had just chopped a dense vine beast into pieces. He turned toward me, and my magical light cast harsh shadows over his handsome face and silver eyes.

That couldn’t be right. I blinked, trying to get my vision to clear, but it didn’t seem to help. It was all I could do to remain on my feet.

Behind him, a wolflike black shadow slunk from the trees, and I raised my sword with a burning, unsteady grip. The wolf’s eyes flashed in the light, and its gaze pinned me in place as a low growl rumbled from its chest. This new monster was the size of a horse, with fur as dark as the shadows surrounding us.

So much for making it home.

The mage didn’t sheathe his weapon, nor did he turn to face the new threat. He watched me with a quiet stillness that sent shivers down my spine.

The wolf circled to the left, forcing me to choose between tracking it or tracking the mage. I chose the wolf, but pivoting stole the last of my balance. I planted the sword tip in the ground and used it as a cane while I wavered in place, then when that didn’t help, I closed my eyes and locked my knees until the world stabilized.

The fire in my arm had reached my chest, and breathing became my new priority. The mage would have to deal with the wolf without my help.

When I looked up again, the mercenary was standing directly in front of me. I yelped and tried to jump away, but my body refused to obey. I tilted backward like a felled tree. The man wrapped firm fingers around my right arm and hauled me back upright.

Dark eyebrows rose over guarded silver eyes. “Your energy would be better spent healing yourself.” He frowned as his gaze raked over my scratched and aching hand. “How many thorns pierced you?”

“Don’t know how to heal,” I admitted, my voice rough. Breathing was definitely getting more difficult. “Don’t know how many thorns, either.” I laughed softly. “Too many, judging by the fire.” I stared at his glimmering eyes. “And the hallucinations. You’re much too pretty to be real— just like a fairy tale. Too bad this one is a tragedy.”

Surprise crossed his face before he wiped it away. “I assure you I am real. I— ”

“You should leave,” I said, interrupting him. If he was real, then I didn’t have time to be polite. “You killed this monster, but the forest is dangerous.”

“I know.”

There was something in his voice I couldn’t quite place, so I just nodded. “Good.” I turned to look for the wolf, but the man still held my arm. I tugged on it and hissed when agony seared through me, hotter than the fire in my veins.

My knees went weak, and I fell against the mage’s leather-clad chest. I tried to right myself, because his armor was really nice and I was pretty sure I was bleeding on it, but my body was at its limit.

“I’m from Kilish,” I mumbled. “Tell them the monster is dead, and so is Riela. Do me a favor and make me sound heroic enough for them to choke on their guilt.” I huffed out a bitter laugh that turned into a deep, racking cough. Once I’d caught my breath, as much as I could, I added, “You can have my sword and dagger as payment. I’m not going to be around much longer, so I won’t need them, and the blacksmith will understand.”

The man sighed with quiet resignation, then moonlight magic rushed through me like a cool breeze, soothing the worst of my pain. “You’re not going to die.”

“I’m pretty sure I am,” I disagreed. “If the poison doesn’t get me, the wolf will.”

Something chuffed in the dark, and I struggled to lift my head. I could no longer feel the sword hilt in my hand, and although the mage’s power had soothed some of the pain, it hadn’t given me back the strength the poison had stolen.

“Sleep,” the man commanded as his magic curled around me. Then, very quietly, he added, “You’re safe.”

I fought to stay awake, to question him about monsters and magic and why his eyes glowed like silver, but heavy lethargy crashed through me and dragged me softly into moonlit dreams.

Adapted from Silver & Blood by Jessie Mihalik, published by Avon Books. Copyright © 2025 by Jessie Mihalik. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollinsPublishers.

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Excerpts dark academia

Read an Excerpt From We Who Have No Gods by Liza Anderson

In a world of witches, a human woman must hunt or be hunted…

By Liza Anderson

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Published on December 9, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from We Who Have No Gods, a new dark academia fantasy by Liza Anderson, out from Ballantine Books on January 27, 2026.

I

That man, there, was looking at her funny. Having worked in this restaurant for the better part of a decade, Vic Wood knew the weight of men’s eyes on her back well. Most of the

time she hardly noticed the touch of a curious glance between her shoulder blades.

This was something else.

A mousy man of about sixty sat alone at the bar. To the untrained eye, he looked profoundly normal. Dashes of gray streaked his brown hair, and he wore a crisp button-down under a suit the color of drab carpeting. But pallid tweed spoke as loudly as any other clothing. He was rich. The outfit—dull and perfectly tailored—was the kind of plain pricey the wealthy deployed to avoid undue attention from the masses. Where the nouveau had not yet learned the dangers of flaunting their luck, old money hid itself well. Best to fit in and keep your head attached to your shoulders. Vic clocked him on sight.

A useful skill, when tips paid the rent. Isolating the haves from the have-nots.

When her mother died eight years ago, Vic had taken the first job she found that would hire a sixteen-year-old lying about her age. She spent two years waiting tables in a shitty restaurant for half-decent pay. Hands up her skirt and dirty jokes were part of the game, and Vic learned to play along. She got tough and hoped that one day her and her brother’s survival wouldn’t depend on her ability to smile when she wanted to scream.

Once they moved to Austin, she upgraded to Le Curieux Gastropub, an upscale fusion joint that sold lifestyle as much as food. The restaurant hired for hot, young, and cooler-than-you, so Vic looked the part. She left her curly black hair loose around her face and learned to ignore it when it fell in her eyes. When a new makeup style came into vogue, Vic practiced in front of a mirror until she could apply it without thinking. She amassed an all-black wardrobe fit for the uniform requirements but interesting enough to push the envelope a little.

Vic rose through the ranks quickly. It didn’t hurt that most of the staff worked on a temporary basis. College kids crammed service jobs into the gaps between semesters. Vic enjoyed the descriptions of campus life they brought with them, even if she felt a twinge of jealousy at their adventures.

In all her years of waiting tables, hundreds of men had sat at that bar, and hundreds of eyes had watched her from across it. None of them had felt quite like this.

Henry would have called her paranoid. That was a favorite word of his to describe her. Suspicious, cynical, always looking for the worst and usually finding it. The man at the bar was just a man at the bar, her brother would have said.

As if Vic didn’t have good reason to be wary of strangers.

This man was too clean, too pressed, too pale. Muted, like a photo printed without enough ink. His eyes, as nondescript as the rest of him, followed Vic with too sharp a precision—as though she were a specimen ripe for dissection.

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We Who Have No Gods

Liza Anderson

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We Who Have No Gods

Liza Anderson

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The familiar warning sounded in the back of her brain.

She approached him, her spine pin-straight, and slid a rag across the bar to give her hands something to do.

“Can I get you something to eat?” Vic spread her service smile wide, and an expression flashed across the stranger’s face as fast as an animal darting in front of a headlight. Recognition, she would have sworn, if it had appeared on any other face.

Was this the man she’d been waiting for? Had the time finally come?

“I am not staying.”

He had an odd voice, Vic thought. Accented in a way that avoided accent, as if he had taken great pains to excise any hint of identity from his speech.

“You let me know if you change your mind,” Vic replied. The hair on her neck stood on end, and she turned to leave.

A clammy hand slipped around her wrist and gripped tight. Vic tamped down the urge to wrench her arm from his grip. Eyeing the damp cloth hanging in Vic’s hand, he pulled away, his lip turned up in disgust. Her skin echoed the wet pressure of his palm. She shivered.

His eyes clung to hers, and Vic couldn’t look away.

“On second thought…” He slapped the counter like he meant to kill an insect. “Is there anything you recommend?”

Vic couldn’t move. Why couldn’t she move?

“Everything’s good here,” Vic heard her voice answer. “I’m partial to the ragout.”

The stranger hummed a noncommittal note and kept his snakelike gaze on hers.

“Have you worked here for a long time?”

“Since I was eighteen.” The words fell from her tongue without hesitation.

“Will you stay here?”

Vic tried to break eye contact. She didn’t like the questions, the artificial calm in his voice. She didn’t like that she couldn’t stop her words from spilling out.

“Will you continue to work in this restaurant?” the stranger repeated, an edge to his tone.

“I don’t have any reason to leave.”

A bead of sweat swelled on the stranger’s forehead. Glistening in the amber light of the bar, it rolled into his eyebrow and hung there, a dewdrop on the end of a rotten leaf.

“You did not go to university, did you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Vic tried to shake her head, but her muscles were locked. She wanted to tell the stranger to go to hell and take his prying questions with him. She wanted to scream in his face to leave her alone.

But memories floated to the surface, and Vic could not send them away.

“I couldn’t go to college,” she said, her voice weak and quiet. “I had to take care of my brother.”

“Why?”

“I’m the only person who can.”

It had been eight years since Vic last saw her mother. Eight years, ten months, sixteen days, and about half an hour, to be precise. Meredith Wood had thrown a rushed “remember to feed your brother!” over her shoulder and slipped out the front door of their apartment for the last time. She worked the late shift at a nearby hospital, and her lifelong disinterest in punctuality left her practiced at hasty goodbyes. After three days of watching the door, Vic called the hospital.

Fifteen minutes later, she hung up on an increasingly concerned hospital administrator, who explained in a deep Southern drawl that they had no record of a Meredith Wood. She was very sorry, dear, but she couldn’t find that name anywhere.

Not a full day had passed before Henry, only ten years old and small for his age, sidled into the living room, chewing on his lip. He’d spilled their mother’s secret, and Vic’s life had fallen apart. Men were coming for Henry, people he said could do things Vic couldn’t. Witches, he’d said. Mom called them witches.

“But surely you want more than this?” The stranger gestured to the space around them, though his eyes remained locked on hers.

No, Vic wanted to say. She was happy, she’d swear.

For the last eight years, Vic had done just as her mother had asked. Henry is special, her mother had told her again and again. Take care of him.

Vic had been taking care of Henry even before their mother vanished. When Meredith dragged them across the country, lying about working long hours at whatever hospital needed the staffing that month, Vic had made him dinner and helped with his homework and made sure his clothes were clean. She’d stayed up with him when he was sick and walked him home from school every afternoon.

Vic had done well. Henry would graduate high school in a few months. He was safe and happy and no strange men had come to take him away from her.

And that was enough for Vic.

The stranger’s lip twisted, his skin sallow in the light. “You’re nothing like your mother, are you?”

No, Vic thought instantly. She was not. Where Meredith beamed bright and lively, Vic was combative and cold. Where Meredith had taken up as much space as possible, Vic had folded herself to fit in the cracks her mother left behind.

But he shouldn’t know that. He shouldn’t know any of that.

“How do you know my—”

He cut off eye contact, and Vic dropped against the bar like a puppet with its strings cut. A nearby couple looked at her in alarm, but Vic righted herself quickly, backing away in confusion.

“Are you okay?” one of her co-workers whispered as Vic passed. “It looked like you fell.”

Vic couldn’t get her bearings. She’d been wrung out, hung to dry, and left behind.

“Nothing happened.” Vic wiped sweat from her neck.

Something had passed between her and the stranger who knew her mother. Looking at him had twisted her up inside. Only seconds later, and the memories were already drifting away. Vic couldn’t recall exactly what he’d said or how she’d felt, but she retained the slimy feeling in her gut.

All her planning. Hiding, avoiding new people, keeping her life as small as possible. All of it had worked for a time. But it was over now. Vic could see that clear as day. Just as Henry had warned when he had been a frightened child, looking up at her like she could fix it.

They had come at last.

She cast a glance backward. The stranger rose from his seat. Reaching into his coat pocket, he extracted a thin leather wallet and removed a single bill. He folded it with care, running a blunt fingernail along the crease as if he had all the time in the world. He leaned forward to ease the bill under his half-empty wineglass, and Vic caught sight of a carmine stain against his crisp white sleeve. His cuff had come undone, revealing a thin strip of skin and markings more intricate and alien than any writing Vic knew. A circle, letters in an alphabet she didn’t recognize. Bloodied marks only just beginning to scab.

They were carved into his skin.

Vic bolted.

Excerpted from We Who Have No Gods  by Liza Anderson. Copyright © 2026 by Liza Anderson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From A War of Wyverns by S.F. Williamson

Language is the greatest weapon in a war between humans and dragons—and one translator has the power to change the world.

By S.F. Williamson

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Published on December 4, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A War of Wyverns, the sequel to by S.F. Williamson’s YA fantasy A Language of Dragons—publishing with HarperCollins on January 6, 2026.

The sky is dark and full of dragons.

I hurry through the streets of London, my umbrella tilted at an angle not to shield my face from the rain but to hide it. There are almost as many Guardians of Peace on the ground as there are Bulgarian Bolgoriths in the sky. A small mound of rubble blocks my path, left over from one of last week’s attacks. It could have been caused by rebel bombs or by the army of Queen Ignacia, Britannia’s dragon queen. Both groups are locked in their own individual battles with the Prime Minister. But judging by the stone pillar knocked clean off its base by what could only be the swipe of a tail, I’d guess the latter.

As I reach the Tube station, the first rays of sunlight stretch up over the gray buildings, bringing the capital’s night curfew to an end.

Rebellion happens in the shadows, after all.

I climb onto the Underground train, my fake class pass hanging around my neck.

I sit opposite an elderly man in a singed coat. He peers at me from beneath bright posters plastered above the carriage seats. Two women in military dress link arms in front of two buildings—I recognize the white stone of 10 Downing Street and the red brick of the Academy for Draconic Linguistics. They are encircled by a string of words in a looping, feminine font.

I bury my face in yesterday’s copy of The Pimlico Bulletin—a non-partisan newspaper—and am met with another slogan.

“The Truth for Every Class,” I mutter under my breath as I scan the headlines.

I open to the first page and see a black-and-white photo of a familiar manor house.

A lump rises in my throat as I toss the paper to the ground. Memories surge: a gunshot, blood beneath my fingernails, a face crowned with dead leaves. My hand reaches for the wooden swallow around my neck. If Atlas were here now, he’d mock the Prime Minister for thinking she can manipulate Europe’s fiercest dragons to extend her empire. For thinking that Britannia would bow to dragons who had massacred their own human population. If Atlas were here, he’d be slipping into the public houses and coming out with new recruits to the rebel cause, using nothing but his courage and his crooked smile. But he’s not here.

Because he’s dead.

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A War of Wyverns

S.F. Williamson

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S.F. Williamson

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All I can do now is continue what he started at Bletchley Park and help win the war for the Human-Dragon Coalition. Only a skilled linguist can obtain the secret weapon the rebels need.

And if languages can honor Atlas’s memory, then I’ll learn a hundred tongues and more.

The sun has risen as I reach Claridge House, the home of Rita Hollingsworth. She lives in Mayfair, only a few streets away from the Academy for Draconic Linguistics, which she founded at the age of thirty-five. I insert my key in the lock of the servants’ door. A thick, spiked tail trails down the wall above me. It belongs to Clementius, the Western Drake on the roof, one of the few British dragons who hasn’t fled the encroaching Bulgarian presence in London and who is secretly Hollingsworth’s rebel guard.

I head straight for the stairs, counting the yellow diamonds on the patterned carpet as I climb several floors. Hollingsworth insists I travel between my home and hers before the morning rush hour. If anyone were to recognize me, my cover as her visiting niece could be blown. The walls feature portraits of her extended family—pretty cousins and ancient uncles stare out into the quiet house. I hear a scullery maid lighting the fires and a creak from the top floor. I imagine the Chancellor of the Academy for Draconic Linguistics rising from her bed, her hair still in rollers.

The image is so ridiculous it makes me snort with laughter.

I open and close the office door softly. The room is vast, with high windows that overlook the street below. A large desk stands beneath a painting of a pair of Sand Dragons basking on a beach, the pearly moonlight captured in delicate brushstrokes. Beside it is an ornate mirror and for a moment I stare at my reflection. My thick hair is cut so short that it only just grazes my collarbone, and dark shadows lurk beneath my eyes, making my skin even paler than usual. I tread across the maroon rugs toward the door in the corner, past the desk littered with empty cigarette boxes and books about Bulgarian dragons, one opened to an index page with the words— blood, blue diamond, Bolgorith. Something catches my eye. A sketch in black pen, half hidden beneath the Remington typewriter.

It’s me.

And beneath it, a title.

Vivien Featherswallow, Draconic Translator

My fingers linger over the paper, but I don’t touch it, my mind not quite believing it’s real. The depiction is different than the government’s wanted posters of me, the ones Hollingsworth has collected and burned every day before they can be seen. My face is prettier, my eyes large and doe-like, whereas the wanted posters depict me with a long, lank braid and a frown. Neither sketch is quite right, each telling a story that is not quite true.

“For the Coalition newspapers,” says a voice.

I spin around. Hollingsworth is standing in the doorway, wearing a blue silk dress and a belt embroidered with silver dragons. She looks me up and down like she has done every morning for the last three months, taking in my man’s mackintosh and donated leather brogues, as if she expected me to arrive with a limb missing or my hair aflame. My decision to find my own accommodation rather than live here with her is not one Hollingsworth understands.

“Morning,” I say, my face growing hot as I realize she probably thinks I was snooping around her desk. “I’m supposed to be undercover. What do you want rebel newspapers printing a sketch of me for?”

She gives me a thin-lipped smile. “A rebellion must have a face, must it not? People need to know they’re in good hands.”

I raise my eyebrows in surprise. Me, the face of the rebellion? Has Hollingsworth forgotten that a mere few months ago, I was trying to translate a secret, ultrasonic dragon language called the Koinamens to win the war for Prime Minister Wyvernmire?

“We won’t publish it until you’re safely out of London,” she says, her voice as deep as treacle.

Safely out of London.

Does that mean she finally thinks I’m ready?

I stare at the words beneath the sketch again and let out a small sigh. Draconic Translator. The title is one I’ve waited for my entire life. It’s oddly satisfying to see who I am printed in black and white, to be given a distinct definition of myself, a neat box to fit into amid the chaos my life has become.

The door in the corner leads to my own workspace, an office within Hollingsworth’s that used to be a cupboard. I set my satchel down on my small, pokey desk. The four walls that box me in like a dracovol in a cage are plastered with research papers—maps of various islands, handwritten pronunciation guides, and lists of dietary habits. And tacked on top of them is a rudimentary drawing that Hollingsworth sketched in front of me. Three Bulgarian Bolgoriths, two black and one red.

General Goranov and his siblings.

Britannia has been in a three-way civil war between the human government, the rebels, and Queen Ignacia since last year. And now that the Prime Minister has allied with the Bulgarian Bolgoriths— betraying her promise of peace to Queen Ignacia—barely a day goes by without a rebel attack on London.

I know a Bolgorith, but she was born in Britannia. Chumana, the pink dragon who set fire to 10 Downing Street before following me to Bletchley Park.

“If we eliminate Goranov and his siblings,” Hollingsworth told me a few weeks ago, “the Bulgarian presence in Britannia will crumble.”

The servants and Hollingsworth’s secretary think I’m here after having jumped at the chance to spend the war working for Britannia’s beloved Chancellor instead of sewing shirts for the soldiers like other First Class girls. And it’s not exactly a lie. I am working for Hollingsworth. But my true reason for being here, my mission, isn’t to help Britannia fight the rebels. It’s to help the rebels fight Prime Minister Wyvernmire and her army of Bolgoriths.

It’s to learn the language of the Hebridean Wyverns.

I’ve met wyverns before, thanks to my parents’ work in dragon anthropology. But the Hebridean species is different. They’re small, two-legged dragons with a cultural heritage that rivals that of any human community. They can supposedly be found on the Isle of Canna in Scotland, although they haven’t been sighted in years. It’s my job to learn everything about them, from their traditions to their tongue, so that when the rebels find them—and Hollingsworth seems adamant that they will—then I will somehow be able to communicate with them.

And convince them to help the rebels win the war.

Of course, the minor detail of how these wyverns can make the Human-Dragon Coalition the victor in a three-way civil war has not yet been disclosed to me.

I sit down as London’s traffic screeches outside and reach for a scrap of paper on my desk. It’s a note from Hyacinth, Hollingsworth’s secretary—and another debutante working for the war effort to escape the dutiful drudgery of First Class girlhood.

She’s invited me several times already, ignoring my protests (“It’s after curfew”) and my excuses (“I can’t leave my roommate, she gets lonely”). Her insistence is mildly annoying and the invitation goes against every rule in the how-to-be-an-undercover-rebel book, but part of me is glad that Hyacinth wants me around. She’s been a good friend to me these past three months.

Of course I can’t attend the party. What if somebody recognizes me? The journal of Patrick Clawtail, Oxford Fellow of Celtic Languages and dragon enthusiast, lies open on the desk where I left it yesterday. Hollingsworth gave it to me when I started working for her, right after Marquis landed our plane on Eigg. I only spent a few days on the island that houses the Coalition Headquarters before Hollingsworth sent for me.

Leaving my cousin and my sister, Ursa, behind was almost as hard as losing Atlas.

The journal details Clawtail’s interactions with the Hebridean Wyverns over the course of four years, ending abruptly in June 1866 when he was executed by the government for “inciting unrest between humans and dragons.”

It’s made of black leather and written in faded ink. Random clippings—a feather, a tuft of fur, and a green leaf that is still green but has long since lost any odor—are dispersed between daily entries, descriptions of the island, and recordings of the Hebridean Wyverns’ complex language, which Clawtail named Cànan-Channaigh—Scottish Gaelic for “language of Canna.” He coined an English word for their language, too: Cannair.

I have managed to grasp its basic grammatical rules, but Clawtail fills several pages with his attempts to convey the meaning of many complicated words, so many that I lose myself in them. It seems he eventually gave up on the task. The later pages of the journal are entirely dedicated to the wyverns’ culture and customs, with not a single reference to language.

It doesn’t give me much to work with.

Clawtail and his family were supposedly the last people to lay eyes on the wyverns before they retreated farther inland when the government came for the Clawtails, and while his journal begins with enthusiasm at being able to study the wyverns’ tongue, it ends with a hurried, unfinished entry.

A voice behind me says, “Tensions between humans and dragons in Britannia were on the verge of explosion when that was written.”

Hollingsworth has appeared silently in the doorway, her eyes on the journal.

“Clawtail had a history of campaigning for the recognition of Celtic languages such as Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Norn, and he began doing the same for dragon tongues,” she continues. “He sent his written recordings of Cannair to several universities by dracovol, thinking the wyvern protection would keep him and his family safe, but the government decided that his highlighting of individual heritages was intended to create division and therefore a threat to British unity. They executed him for treason on Canna just as the corrupt Peace Agreement was signed.”

I nod, trying to ignore the creeping feeling of annoyance. She’s already told me all this. Clawtail was the first person ever to study dragon tongues. He was an anomaly.

“You, with your uncanny ability to learn languages at an impressive speed, can learn Cannair. That’s why you are the face of the rebellion, Vivien. Because you will be the one to go to the wyverns and request an alliance. They are our only hope of winning this war.”

You’ve already told me that, too, I glower silently. And yet here I am, still in London, still ignorant as to why these wyverns are so important.

I cannot send you to the wyverns until the wyverns have been found, Hollingsworth tells me every time I ask why I can’t go to Canna now.

I can’t wait to be there, to rally the wyverns to the cause and to see Wyvernmire’s face as the rebels bring her and her Bulgarian Bolgoriths down. She’s the reason for the suffering of the Third Class, for the segregation of humans and dragons, for this war that has already killed hundreds.

She’s the reason Atlas is dead.

Hollingsworth hands me a sheet of paper.

It’s my latest translation for the Academy—I do a few each day just in case a wartime inspector ever asks to see Penelope Hollingsworth’s work. It’s a statement in Drageoir sent over from France, condemning Wyvernmire’s alliance with the Bulgarian dragons. Hollingsworth has taken a red pen to it, scratching out and underlining words.

“What’s wrong with it?” I say.

“Your translation is too literal, Vivien.” She pats her silver, corkscrew coils. “You can hardly expect it to be approved.”

“Too literal?” I stare at her corrections.

“But… you’ve changed the meaning,” I say. “You’ve mistranslated the statement.”

“I have interpreted it differently than you, which is a translator’s right.”

I scan her face for a trace of humor, any indication that she might be testing me.

“It’s a translator’s duty to translate in context, to give the words the meaning intended by the source language, or at least get as close to it as we can,” I tell her. “The Academy is obligated to translate and publish any communications that come in from foreign dragons—” “You forget the Academy is currently being run by Wyvernmire’s government,” Hollingsworth says sharply. “Her definition of duty is not the same as yours.”

I throw the paper down. “So you’re going to let this pass?”

“If I want to maintain my persona, I must,” Hollingsworth replies.

She walks back to her desk and sits down, her eyes lingering on the sketch of me. “Language is a weapon, Vivien. Wyvernmire is using it and you will, too, soon. In fact, it may be the last weapon the rebels have.”

“When are you going to send me to Canna?” I ask. “I’ve learned the wyvern tongue as best I can. Have the rebels found them yet?”

Hollingsworth takes a sip of her tea and grimaces.

“Cold,” she mutters.

She rifles through a stack of papers, ignoring my question. I feel my neck flush with anger. Has she forgotten what she told me when she brought me here? Your linguistic capabilities are the best chance the Coalition has.

I turn back to the journal. My years of studying, my languages, my translations have all been building up to this. To making contact with the Hebridean Wyverns and saving Britannia. Atlas believed that my languages are a way I’m called to love and Dad once told me that they would save me.

So what is Hollingsworth waiting for?

She expects me to work for the Coalition yet treats me like a child.

My eyes fall on Hyacinth’s note and I wonder if my black skirt and jumper would pass as party clothes.

If it’s a rebel Hollingsworth wants, a rebel she shall get.

Excerpted from A War of Wyverns, copyright © 2025 by S.F. Williamson.

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Excerpts fantasy

Read an Excerpt From Graceless Heart by Isabel Ibañez

She was never meant to be seen. Now she’s a weapon the world can’t ignore.

By Isabel Ibañez

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Published on December 3, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Graceless Heart by Isabel Ibañez, a historical and romantic fantasy out from Saturday Books on January 13, 2026.

Capitolo Due

The hour grew late, and the night became longer and darker as Ravenna laid her tools in a neat row on the scarred wooden table in her studio. The flat and claw chisels, the rasp, a file, her hammer—practically an extension of her palm—her favorite pumice stone, and a soft-bristled brush. Ravenna glanced at the single window that allowed spools of moonlight to gloss over the cramped space. She’d lined the sill with eggshells filled with cinnamon and cloves, painted stones, and snips of parchment with poetry, riddles, and fragments of stories written on them.

Offerings to keep the fae at bay.

Her mother was as superstitious as she was practical, and she’d raised Ravenna to be the same. Magic had no place in Volterra. Best to keep it out by any means possible. And stifle her own.

Ravenna turned back to her worktable. It was her favorite time to sculpt marble, during the midnight hours while all the world slept. She inhaled deeply, comforted by the familiar scents the storage building kept trapped within its stone walls: flour, vanilla, aged wine, canvas, and pine. Outside, the wind began its nightly howl as winter gave its final cry across the rolling hills of Volterra.

Ravenna tied a clean linen apron twice around her waist, lit another candle, and then eyed the bozzetto critically. It stood only a foot tall, but there was something about the figurine that seemed to overwhelm the quiet of her studio. For her subject, Ravenna had chosen Pluto, god of the underworld, and even without his face completed, the air around him swirled menacingly. The lushness of his clothing accentuated the broad width of his shoulders, and his strong hands were edged with blunt fingers capable of wielding the most dangerous of weapons.

Even without a face, he seemed threatening.

Finish me, topolina, or you’ll regret it, he seemed to say in a deadly hush.

Ravenna had never been called a little mouse before in all her life.

With a burst of annoyance she took the flat chisel and hammer and struck the marble. It gave way easily, the white stone as pure and sparkling as if it had come from the moon.

With expert strikes, she nibbled away at the stone, angling cheekbones, carving the fine line of his eyelids, trapping the shadows that made up the contours of his face. With the claw chisel, she scratched the long sweep of eyebrows into place, the arched curve both sardonic and stern. With every step, Ravenna worked to improve each strike: deepening the lines, softening his mouth, adding the wavy details of his shoulder-length hair.

It wasn’t until Ravenna finished that she’d realized what she’d done.

The face that stared back at her belonged to the man from the alley. Not the Capitano, but the one with the perfect face, coldly beautiful and aloof. Ravenna gaped at the statue, annoyed at herself. How could she have immortalized his face in a work that was meant to save her brother?

She shook her head, furious at herself.

The wind outside the studio gave a sudden howling protest, and the wooden door burst open with a sudden slam. She jumped at the sound, dust swirling off the worktable, covering her homespun dress in speckles of white and gray. She gaped at the whirlwind as if she were caught in snowstorm, but then the wind abruptly retreated, as if satisfied with the mess it had made. The wooden door swung shut.

Her mother would say it was an ill omen.

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Graceless Heart

Isabel Ibañez

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Isabel Ibañez

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Ravenna stepped away from the bozzetto and tilted her head. There was still something missing from the piece, an elusive something that would set her work above the rest of the competition. Her calm demeanor wobbled. She’d never presented her work before, other than to her own family. But now there would be an audience, critics evaluating her work. And she knew exactly what they would say.

She was an impostor.

Her creation was amateur, with no heart and soul.

She was a woman doing the noble work of a man.

Ravenna set her tools on the table, thrust her hands on her hips. She couldn’t control what the others thought, but she could control what she did now.

And that was to create something to save her brother.

“Ravenna!”

She half turned. Her littlest sister, Tereza, stepped shyly inside her studio, dragging her favorite blanket behind her, a ratty thing that had kept company with all the Maffei children.

“Amorina,” Ravenna said. “Little love, did you come here by yourself?”

Tereza walked to the tall wooden worktable and stood on tiptoe, clutching the edge to keep balance. “All by myself. Who is it?” she asked. Her dark brown hair was fitted in a braid that draped over a slender shoulder. At only five, Tereza exuded a calming presence, at odds with the rest of the family who spoke in loud and louder volumes. She tucked her index finger inside her mouth, a habit their mother had tried to curb.

“Pluto,” Ravenna said. “Do you know who he is?”

Tereza nodded once, her delicate features scrunching. “Not the hero.”

“Depends on who you ask,” Ravenna said with a wink. “I’ve always thought villains are misunderstood.”

Tereza pulled her finger out of her mouth with a small pop. “It’s not done.”

The corners of Ravenna’s lips deepened. “I agree. What’s missing, do you think?”

“Something shiny,” Tereza said, shrugging.

Ravenna pulled at her bottom lip with her teeth. Something shiny.

An idea flickered in her mind, one that terrified her even as it sunk deeper in her, a stone tossed into a river.

Tereza dropped down from her tiptoed position and turned back to the door. “Mamma says for you to come inside. That your eyes will suffer in the dark. That your work is done, and no one is asking for perfect. But she said to tell you it is perfect. I don’t know why. She hasn’t seen it.”

Ravenna tugged at her sister’s long braid. “And what else?”

“She doesn’t want you to go tomorrow.”

Her heart squeezed. “You’re a good little messenger.”

“She also said your breakfast is cold,” Tereza said seriously. “And that it serves you right. She says you are too thin and lonely.”

“Five more minutes,” Ravenna said, rolling her eyes. “Will you tell her?”

“Yes, but Mamma won’t like it,” Tereza said before slipping out the door.

Ravenna stared at the door, unseeing.

Her idea tugged at her.

She flicked her eyes to the long wooden shelves lining the storage walls, where she’d hidden a terrible secret. It was locked in a box, out of sight, but the air seemed to pulse around it. The hidden magic swirled around her. It whispered against her skin, coaxing her to come closer.

No one in Volterra knew she had a whisper of that magic living inside her.

From Graceless Heart by Isabel Ibañez. Copyright © 2026 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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Excerpts dark academia

Read an Excerpt From An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole

Warren University has stood amongst the ivy elite for centuries, built on the bones—and forbidden magic—of its most prized BIPOC students…

By Kamilah Cole

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Published on December 2, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from An Arcane Inheritance, a dark academia fantsy by Kamilah Cole, out from Poisoned Pen Press on December 30.

It rained for three more days before the sun got out on parole. From the moment Ellory tied her apron on to the moment she yawned back to her dorm, Powers That Bean filled with students who bought a single chocolate croissant and then parked at a table by an outlet for six hours to stay out of the rain. Others loitered by the doors and walls, pretending to be waiting for friends until the manager forced them out into the deluge. Mopping the floor became an exercise in frustration as new packs of customers tracked mud and grass inside, and though they grimaced and whispered, “Sorry,” when they saw the mess, not a single one left a tip.

Iced coffee sales remained steady. There was no weather that iced coffee didn’t improve.

After her shift, Ellory took a walk in the restored sunlight, her drink in hand. The soccer team had claimed Bancroft, which she knew only because Hudson Graves was among them. Ellory refused to do anything more physically strenuous than squeeze into a packed train car on the N during rush hour, so athletes were an alien breed to her. They ran the length of the field (why?) back and forth, again and again (why?), shouting insults and encouragement to one another:

“Pick up the pace, Mendoza!”

“Looking sharp, Novak!”

“Wilson, you’re falling behind!”

“Go! Go! Go! Go!”

No one jeered Hudson Graves, who was ahead of the pack of sweaty, grunting people by at least three yards. His long brown legs ate up the field with every stride, his moss-green jersey clinging to his muscled body. When she didn’t actually have to talk to him, Ellory could admit to herself that Hudson Graves had a certain allure. He was clearly in his element, and that confidence translated to his elegant gait and focused mien. If he was even panting, she couldn’t tell from here.

She needed to keep walking before he saw her and mistook her interest for something else. But she was rooted to the spot.

Luckily, Ellory wasn’t the only one who couldn’t take her eyes off him. On the other side of the field was a small crowd, also wearing jerseys, staring at Hudson like he was a two-for-one sale. Ellory had heard that the football and basketball teams were forever trying to recruit him, but this was the first time she’d actually seen their starving gazes in person. Maybe they meant it to be flattering, but it was dehumanizing, these covetous sentries longing for what they had been told repeatedly they could not have.

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An Arcane Inheritance

Kamilah Cole

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Kamilah Cole

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Ellory had been to Bancroft twice since she’d moved to campus. Tai liked to watch the soccer team play, especially in the humid summer days when the players would wrap their practice jerseys around their waists and let the sun turn their sweaty torsos gold and pink. But that was mostly because Tai’s partner, Cody, had decided to play for the men’s team. Cody waved when they saw Ellory, and Ellory waved back, admiring their new haircut: shaved on one side, flowing down to their chin in a wave of amber on the other. They were near the middle of the group, keeping pace but not showing off like Hudson Graves, even though, at well over six feet, they could have. Ellory knew a bit of what that was like—that innate fear of calling attention to herself in a place where it was safer to blend in.

“Hey, Morgan.”

Oh no.

“Hello, Graves,” she said evenly as he jogged toward her. “Keep a distance, please. I can smell you from here.”

Behind him, Cody slowed, their eyebrows two thick lines of concern. Even if she weren’t complaining to Tai all the time, Ellory’s war with Hudson was infamous enough that Cody was probably considering whether to intervene.

Hudson stopped a few feet away, close enough that she could see the perspiration collecting at his temples but far enough that at least four people could link arms between them. She couldn’t actually smell him, but she was sure he stank with the fetor of athleticism. His eyes were mockingbird black. His skin was golden brown in the caress of sunlight. His rose-pink lips held the raw ingredients of a smirk without quite finishing the recipe.

A bead of sweat traced the curve of his cheek, dripped onto his sloped shoulder, and disappeared into the fabric of his jersey. Ellory swallowed sharply.

Hudson tilted his head. “Did you hear there’s going to be a pop quiz in con. law tomorrow?”

“What?” Surprise yanked the words from her dry throat. “How would you even know about a pop quiz?”

“I talked to the TA, but it’s all over class.”

Ellory bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying something she’d regret. After the first day, she’d been afraid to talk to the rest of her classmates in case they were all members of Hudson’s fan club. Her classmates seemed equally content to never speak to her. Occasionally, she checked the student message boards where they submitted assignments, but there was no casual chatter on there. Just can I get an extension and when is this due again and does anyone have the notes on Gideon v. Wainwright?

“Why are you even telling me this?” she asked around a thoughtful sip of her iced vanilla latte. Today she’d tried the oat milk that everyone was going wild for; so far, she was unimpressed. “If I fail, you have another opportunity to gloat.”

Hudson snorted. “I don’t want to be better than you because I have information you don’t, Morgan. I want to be better than you because I’m obviously better than you.” He began to jog backward, and—annoyingly—he didn’t even trip. “Anyway, you have the information now. Study or don’t study. It’s up to you.”

Ellory hated that he was right, that their petty academic rivalry meant nothing if they weren’t on an even playing field. Hated that he knew that, believed that, which made her grudgingly respect him. She also hated the way his black shorts clung to his powerful thighs, and yes, she’d definitely been standing here for too long.

“Think fast, Graves!”

He thought fast, twisting out of the way of the soccer ball that had been hurled at him. It zipped toward Ellory’s head, and she locked up like a deer in headlights, too surprised to move. Move, damn it. MOVE.

A blinding flash swallowed the world.

Her skin went hot and then cold and then hot again, and sound swung back in like a punch: The shouting team running across the field toward her. The distant babble of the Connecticut River indifferently flowing southward to the Long Island Sound. The wind rustling every leaf on the surrounding trees until they loosened and joined the rising piles on the quad. Hudson was in the same place, but everyone else stopped abruptly to murmur among themselves, their gazes on her feet. Ellory glanced down, expecting to see her ankle boots and a pile of shit between them.

Instead, she was standing in a circle of dead soil.

The path that looped around Bancroft Field was a dirt trail, dark brown and packed tight. Now it was the color of wet sand, dusty and cracked. Fissures spider-webbed out from beneath her feet and stretched toward the grass before stopping mere inches from touching the vibrant green. It was like a target of ruptures, and she was the bull’s-eye.

Between the field and the cracks, the soccer ball rested. She hadn’t even seen it drop.

“Are you all right, Ellory?” called Cody. Like everyone else, they stared at the soccer ball like it was possessed. “I thought—well, I’m glad it didn’t hit you.”

“Autumn winds,” Ellory heard herself say, and it was automatic, easy, like she’d said the words a thousand times before. Her hand wanted to fly to her throat, as if that would help her figure out whose script she was performing, but she still couldn’t move. Only her lips remembered how, her mind steady in the certainty that this wasn’t the first time she’d made these excuses. “Weird.”

One of the team members—Novak, perhaps—chuckled. “One time, I swear the wind yanked my backpack halfway across the quad while I was napping.”

“Oh, please,” said another. “You’re so fucking scrawny, you probably got dragged away from it.”

“Who are you calling scrawny?”

The two began to play wrestle, and whatever spell had fallen over them all was broken. Someone, the captain probably, shouted at everyone to get back to their drills. Cody fetched the ball with the kind of friendly wave that promised a full interrogation later. The team jogged away to launch into their next round of exercises, leaving Hudson and Ellory behind in a ringing silence.

There was a wrinkle between Hudson’s eyebrows, but even after he stopped staring at the ground, his gaze settled anywhere but on her. “I’m glad you’re all right, Morgan,” he said to a point over her shoulder. “Be careful when—just. Be careful.”

Then he was gone before she could question his sudden and unprecedented concern for her welfare. Ellory stepped gingerly from the center of the blast radius, half expecting the cracks in the dirt to follow her. Instead, they remained as a monument to where she’d once stood, a serrated circle of death.

This time, she wasn’t seeing things. Everyone else had seen it, too.

Ellory shuddered. What was going on?

The more distance she put between herself and that moment, the more her thoughts raced. She took a long sip of her watered-down latte in the fruitless hope of a brain freeze that would calm her mind.

For a moment, it had seemed like she had…

But that would be ridiculous. It was more likely that the wind had stopped that ball in its tracks. As for the path… she’d probably been too distracted to notice that dead patch. No one else had mentioned its sudden appearance, so maybe it had already been there. That was plausible. And plausible was better than the alternative. The alternative made it sound like she was hallucinating again, and Warren was the kind of place that would pull the Godwin Scholarship if she started claiming she could… what, stop a speeding soccer ball with her mind and crack the very earth itself in the process? Ridiculous.

But for a moment, it had seemed like…

No. Ridiculous.

Ellory threw her empty cup in the recycling bin, tossing her uneasiness out with it.

Excerpted from An Arcane Inheritance, copyright © 2025 by Kamilah Cole.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>An Arcane Inheritance</i> by Kamilah Cole appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts paranormal romance

Read an Excerpt From Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi

A journey of magic and fantasy, from the whispering creeks outside the city of Salvation to the very depths of Hell itself.

By Akwaeke Emezi

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Published on November 18, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi, a steamy paranormal romance set in the Black South, available now from Avon Books.

Oriakụ was about to snap out another order when someone melted out of the shadows on their right, startling them all. Bonbon squeaked, and Gali did a double take because she could have sworn there was nothing there—no door, no hallway—just pools of darkness splashed on the walls and floor. She looked up at the stranger, and her brain nearly short-circuited. Her migraine squeezed at her skull.

God, he was beautiful.

His skin was a pristine dark walnut that seemed to almost glow, and when he turned his head to glance at the guards, Gali saw the hooked jut of his nose in profile. The stranger lifted a hand to brush a shadow off his black shirt, and he had those damn piano hands that were always Gali’s weakness, with the long, articulated fingers and singing tendons right under the skin. Coarse dark curls fell into his face and around his ears, kissing the collar of his black shirt, and his mouth was unforgivably wide and lush. He wasn’t visibly armed, but there was something about him that seemed intrinsically wrong, like he wasn’t really supposed to be here, like he was one step sideways out of this reality. Gali knew that feeling quite well. Her entire family had that strangeness to them, but it was much louder in this man and much, much more dangerous. He was displaced and he wasn’t happy about it.

Gali knew she was staring, soaking him up with her eyes, but she didn’t care. Bonbon leaned in. “Who the hell is that?” she whispered. “He’s fucking delectable.”

Oriakụ glanced over at her friends. “This is Helel,” she said. “He’s the head of the artifact security team.”

The stranger’s eyes flicked in Gali’s direction, and her knees almost gave out. He had the longest lashes she’d ever seen, and his eyes were so dark they seemed black. Shards of gold splintered in his irises, shifting in the light, and she thought she saw a glimpse of violent power before it was shuttered away. Her skin skittered over her body. He really did seem illuminated from within, radiating a light that animated the dim hallway they stood in. It wasn’t something Gali could ask the others to confirm, because she would sound crazy and she was trying very hard not to be that, not in Salvation, not this far from the Kincaid house.

“Can I help you with anything, Ms. Onyearugbulem?” the stranger asked Oriakụ. “Have your companions been cleared for this wing?”

Gali exhaled as the rolling heat of his voice curled around them. He sounded like a herald—the kind who sang down falling civilizations, who stood mad on a mountain as children burned. That voice… it scorched like both magma and a cold that could sear flesh off the bone, iron bleached soft at an unfathomable temperature. It licked against her like a spell.

“They don’t need clearances,” Oriakụ snapped. “They’re with me.”

The stranger’s face didn’t change in the slightest, but a haze of contempt oozed out from him.

A faint smile curved Gali’s lips, and she couldn’t help herself. “You’d like us to get on out of here, wouldn’t you?” she said, amused.

She wanted him to hear her voice, to look at her. She was Galilee Kincaid, and he was some kind of creature, and she wasn’t afraid. Her head was splitting apart, but she felt reckless and close to laughter. Gali gave in to it—“normal” was going to have to hold on for a second.

The stranger’s gaze swung to her and he narrowed his eyes, angling his body slightly in Gali’s direction. The stinging ache inside her made a leap for her bones and clawed through her marrow as it bloomed into wanting. Gali cursed silently, biting down on her lip. No, no, no, not now! She didn’t want her worlds to overlap, not like this. Her foreboding yelled that something heavy hung behind those carved wooden doors, and the damn migraine in her head wouldn’t stop. Gali took a step backward, clenching her hands to will them dark. The stranger’s eyes tracked to her mouth, and far away in the Kincaid forest, Celestial Kincaid giggled, standing shin-deep in water.

Did you find a toy to play with, Galilee?

This was what Nana Darling had warned her about, this treacherous amplification of her wanting, and if Gali had any sense, she would run far and fast away from anyone who could set this cascade off within her. She’d done it once before, years ago, when a girl with silver eyes had visited the Kincaid house from another powerful family and touched Gali so tenderly that Gali had wept from the force of the ache inside her. She’d avoided the girl for the rest of her visit and Celestial had scolded her for it, but then again, Celestial had no problem living madly with overlapped worlds. Gali wasn’t like her cousin. Gali could be exactly like her cousin. Possibilities swung in front of her like falling blades as she looked into the stranger’s fractured eyes.

“I don’t want you here,” he confirmed, his voice clipped. “The artifact is not on exhibition—”

“The artifact,” Oriakụ interrupted, a beatific smile on her face, “is not yours. I will show it to whomever I please, and if you have any issues with that, Helel, I suggest you take it up with my father. Are we clear?”

Everyone fell silent as the man turned his gaze toward Oriakụ. Gali flinched at the way the air changed, at the unexpected malevolence that suddenly swarmed around them, thick enough to block her throat and lungs.

“I don’t work for you,” he snarled. “Unless your father stands before me himself, the decision is mine. The artifact is not a toy you can show off to impress your entourage. If you have a problem with how I do my job, I suggest—as you recommend—that you take it up with your father.”

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Son of the Morning

Akwaeke Emezi

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Son of the Morning

Akwaeke Emezi

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His lips were curled to bare his sharp white teeth and his eyes were glittering. Gali impulsively pulled her arm away from Bonbon. Oriakụ was bluffing; like she said, her father would never give them permission to see the artifact, but Gali could help. Pain sang under the skin of her face as the migraine coated her skull. This man reminded her of things outside the city, things she never wanted her friends to find out about, secrets that needed to be kept secret. Gali had been raised in the work, but there was so much more that was just her, humming in her blood like her swarm. Her family would never recommend what she was about to do. The girls would be surprised, but they wouldn’t actually see anything, just like they couldn’t see the light stored inside him. It would be safe. She could pull it off.

Gali stepped between Oriakụ and the suddenly lethal stranger, placing her hand on his chest. She wanted to touch him, and the contact rocked her even through the crisp cotton of his shirt. Gali hissed in a breath and raised her head to meet his gaze. Oriakụ and Bonbon were staring at her in shock, and the stranger was just a breath away from her now. He smelled of live ash and bitter spices. The gold in his eyes was flaring, but the malevolence in the air had drained away. Gali took a deep breath. When she was a child, the Kincaids had taught her not to gamble with certain things and especially not to take chances in the woods. Her cousin Celestial, on the other hand, taught her that sometimes you didn’t need dice to roll. Sometimes other things were enough, like rocks or small bones.

Maybe if she was a better or more obedient Kincaid, she would starve her ache instead of feeding it, or walk away instead of looking for trouble, but the stinging was in her bones, her head hurt, and her ears rang. Maybe the panting mouth of danger had been her all along. Maybe it was him. Maybe it was this moment when she touched him for the first time and watched his eyes blow wide. Gali couldn’t feel his heartbeat under her hand, and that was a sure sign of nothing good. “I’ll barter with you,” she said.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Celestial snapped her neck up from the bank of a creek and searched the wind with wild eyes. Kincaids did not make barters like other people, but in that moment, Gali didn’t care.

“If I give you a dance back at the gala, you’re gonna let us see the artifact.”

Oriakụ made a sound of protest, but Gali barely heard it. He was looking at her now, really looking at her, and she found herself desperately wishing to be seen. She was so many things and not even sure of all of them. She was wild and barefoot under old trees; she was painted and polished in a mansion; she was nothing decided and everything desired. She wanted to be seized, and he had so many teeth. His mouth softened from its disapproving lines, and the weight of his attention felt like a thousand touches on her skin.

Gali tried to smile, and he dropped his gaze to her feet in the crystal stilettos, then worked his way up her oiled legs, her wide hips and soft belly, her breasts under the soft singing glass and the column of her neck. By the time his eyes stopped and stayed at her mouth, he might as well have stripped her bare, and Gali knew for a certainty that he wanted her.

Unfortunately, thanks to the blatant hunger in his face, everyone else around them knew it as well.

The man with the gray eyes frowned and took a half step forward. “Boss…?”

The stranger’s eyes didn’t move from Gali’s. She held her breath, and it felt like the hallway had vanished into the shadows, along with the people in it.

Say yes, she willed him with all her want. Say yes.

A corner of his mouth curled up. “Yes,” he said. “A dance for a viewing, but I’ll take the dance right now.”

Relief washed through Gali that he’d agreed, but she pouted at the condition. “Damn, I don’t get to see the artifact with my friends?”

“I’ll show it to you later myself.”

“Hold the fuck up—”

Oriakụ started, but Bonbon elbowed her sharply in the ribs.

“Y’all go on ahead,” she said, grinning at Gali with pure evil delight. “We’ll catch up.”

The rest of the security team looked uncertain, and the one who had spoken up before tried again. “Boss. What do you want us to do?”

“Show them the artifact. Show them out afterward.” He was still staring at Gali, and the tension between them threatened to incinerate the air. “I’m going to take my dance.”

He slid his hand over Gali’s, and her breath gave out at the hot touch of his skin, air escaping her lungs in a soft gasp. It felt like a world was closing in on her, the jaws of a trap encircling gently, enough to coax her into letting it hold her in place. Her wanting laughed and shouted inside her as he tugged at her hand, leading them away from the others and the carved door with expensive secrets behind it.

Gali didn’t look back.

Excerpt from Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi. Copyright © 2025 by Akwaeke Emezi. Used with permission by Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Son of the Morning</i> by Akwaeke Emezi appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Historical Fantasy

Read an Excerpt From As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel

Two women—a witch and an immortal demon—make a Faustian bargain and are drawn into a cat-and-mouse chase across multiple lifetimes.

By Natasha Siegel

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Published on November 13, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel, out from William Morrow on November 25.

Cybil Harding was born on Christmas Eve, 1576, under inauspicious stars. Her father had drawn the chart himself; it told him that his daughter was destined for an early death, that she would bring calamity to those she loved and those who loved her. But that was hardly surprising, after all. She was a First Daughter, and a First Daughter was always cursed.

It was clearly laid out in the family grimoire, passed down between generations of Harding witches and written in ink that was no longer blood but might once have been: the firstborn child of each Harding generation would be a witch. But if that witch was a girl, then the grimoire was very clear. No woman could bear the weight of such power. She would be tainted, her magic uncontrollable, bringing disaster to all those around her.

Some would call the Harding inheritance evil, even Satanic. The grimoire spoke of dealings with shadows, a dark bargain made in years forgotten that had traded pieces of each heir’s soul for power. But Cybil’s father, a witch himself, refused to believe his ancestors would have made such a pact. Christopher Harding, a man of the Renaissance, saw his unusual inheritance as an angelic blessing. What else could such magic be but a heavenly gift?

The Hardings were an ancient family—a line that may have once been truly venerable, before the rumors began that they dealt with the dark. They had owned their land since time immemorial, had built their great houses on the same Suffolk hill, over and over, through myriad cycles of destruction: walls of daub and lumber and stone falling to war, flood, and flame; the tenants of their village dying from invasion, plague, and famine; and yet, still, they persevered. Now their walls were brick, they had the favor of Queen Elizabeth, and the village prospered once more after decades of failed harvests.

Christopher Harding had been raised within the fervor of the Reformation. He knew the false idols of stained glass windows and golden statues; he knew that God’s plan, inevitable, ineffable, would never afford such power and prosperity to a family that dealt with the devil. Mayhap his misinformed ancestors had believed otherwise, but now he would lead the Hardings down a path of sanctity. With a touch, a chant, he could make lead into gold, sing a storm silent, cause the stars themselves to fade. All “magic” was an exchange, paying with the light of a soul to command the dark—was this not a form of conversion? The spreading of miracles?

To him, the Hardings were nothing less than a line of saints. But if their blessings were biblical, it made sense that—just as Eve herself was tempted—so could little Cybil, squalling red-faced in his arms, someday squander the angels’ blessing and tumble into sin. There was only one thing to do with a First Daughter, the act all Harding witches before him had performed when faced with the same problem. He would leave her in the woods for the wolves to take.

Cybil had often wondered why he had not done it. It may have been Christopher’s first and final moment of fatherly affection, cradling his child in his arms. It may have been the tearstained and pleading face of her mother, begging him to spare her. It may have been the strength of his faith, that great commandment prohibiting murder. But truthfully—and Cybil knew this well, she spent her whole life knowing it—the only thing that saved the little girl-child was Christopher Harding’s hubris. He had heard the wails of his baby and thought, Here is the final puzzle, the final failing of our blood-line; I shall be the one to solve it.

Christopher Harding did not leave his First Daughter in the forest. He took her to the ritual table instead, laying a salt circle around her. He lit candles and chanted an incantation, calling upon the Holy Ghost to release her from her sins innate, to rebirth her pure. And—as he did so—Cybil began to glow with a light that Christopher could not consider anything less than holy. Her cries ceased, and she looked at him with eyes lucid and burning.

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As Many Souls as Stars

Natasha Siegel

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Natasha Siegel

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Once the light had faded, once Cybil slept and the candles had burned out, he proclaimed the curse cured. It did not matter that he had no proof, that the shadows had swarmed around the edges of the circle and pressed against it, eager and hungry. There was only one thing Christopher Harding feared more than his daughter, and it was the prospect of his own failure. It was the possibility that he was not a saint. It was the realization that God did not favor him, that the Hardings were witches and their souls damned.

Cybil sometimes wished he had accepted the inevitable and left her to the wolves, after all.

Cybil grew. Cybil learned to walk, to speak, to fear the darkness that waited for her in the shadowed corners of Harding Hall.

She knew from an early age that her father did not love her. How could he? To acknowledge her, to accept her, would be to accept responsibility for whatever disaster she might cause. He would much rather pretend she did not exist.

Cybil did not seem to have magic, not in the manner he did, but there was something unearthly about her, something alienating. Sometimes, she had more shadows than she should; sometimes, she had none at all. The flames of candles bowed to her. Once, at church, the water in the font began to boil without reason. They stopped going after that. Once she had the words to do so, Cybil told her parents that she saw visions of violence, that she felt phantom pains as if pieces of her were being carved away. Her father told her she was mad. Her father told her not to speak of it, or else she would make her visions reality.

Cybil’s only real parent, then, was her mother. Bess Harding loved her daughter. She combed her hair out every night, called her “my dove,” taught Cybil her letters, and read her Aesop’s Fables. Together they explored every nook and cranny of the Hall, which had so many rooms and corridors, Cybil felt she could never see them all. With its vaulted ceilings, its pale brick, its sprawling gardens—the Hall was a monument, not a home. It exposed its innards to the surrounding countryside through windows so wide and tall that if Cybil stood before them she would get vertigo, feeling herself falling, tumbling over the edge of the glass to impale herself on the rosebushes below. Bess tried to make it feel friendly, feel familiar: she sang little songs as she carried Cybil from room to room. “Harding Hall, more glass than wall. Harding Hall, wonders all.”

But meanwhile, outside the safety of the walls, whispers of the cursed girl began to spread through the village.

The Hardings employed only a dozen servants, not quite enough to keep the entire place clean. Solitude was Christopher’s preference, and as many rooms in the building were shut up as were used. His father had built the Hall to entertain, as a home magnificent enough for a Royal Progress. But Christopher Harding was not a man who wished to entertain. He had a holy calling, and he would not be distracted from it.

Only a dozen servants, then, but enough to notice the child’s strangeness. Cybil was too intelligent for a girl, too brazen for a lady, and there were further oddities about her, too: she would sometimes whisper words to people who were not there, pluck and swipe at the air as if fighting something off. When she was only four, one nursemaid claimed she had seen little Cybil leaking light in her sleep, a glowing substance running down her cheeks like tears. But then she had been dismissed, and the servants spoke of it no more.

By the age of nine, Cybil was fluent in four languages and had yet to make a single friend; at twelve, she had read all of Machiavelli and had found him to be very reasonable; and at thirteen, she was interrupted by her mother in the midst of a virginal recital—performed to an audience of empty chairs—to be told that she ought to be betrothed. When she heard this, all the chairs began to tremble, as if fearing her reaction. Bess smiled tightly and said, “No fear, my dove. All will be well.”

The next week, Cybil was introduced to the son of a local lord, sixteen and pimpled, with one tooth already rotted from a diet of sweetmeats. The boy’s father had come too, and he had taken a lock of Cybil’s hair in his hand and grunted in approval, for Cybil had the queen’s hair, flaming red, and this was considered beautiful enough to make up for her low forehead and squarish jaw.

The boy spent the entirety of his visit bullying her and trying to peek down her bodice. As the sun set that day, he had shoved her into the garden pond. Cybil, silent and sodden and furious, had stared and stared at him as he laughed and wished that he would die. A bough from the oak tree above them cracked and fell on top of him, breaking his neck. Shocked, Cybil stood in the water, skirts pooled around her, hands balled into fists. She did not know whether to laugh or to cry.

“A terrible accident,” Bess had said. “Oh, how terrible, my dove. Trouble yourself not over it.”

But Cybil’s father did not believe it was an accident. He believed it was magic. Not the wild, uncontrolled power of a curse—of course not; to admit as much would be admitting defeat—but perchance something more useful. Perchance Cybil did have the powers he and his forefathers laid claim to: not doomed and uncontrollable, but the sort that could be honed and applied—the stuff of miracles, the blessings of a saint. So, for one extraordinary year, Christopher Harding had cared for his daughter. He had permitted her to read from the grimoire. He provided her incantations and elixirs, and showed her strange dances to do around ritual circles, teaching her an alphabet of angel letters that squirmed upon the page like leeches. Then he had taken her to the gardens, standing her before the apple trees in the orchard. “Break the bough, Cybil,” he would say, watching her with wads of parchment notes crumpled in his fists. “Break the bough.”

But nothing ever occurred. When Cybil saw the darkness begin to surge beneath her feet like floodwaters swelling across a plain, when she felt the furious, hungry tug of those shadows reaching within her, eager to swallow her whole—Cybil had feared the power too much to allow it purchase. She felt the burning of magic within her, and she made herself douse it. The pain was too much, as if a wound deep within her were being opened anew—and even more so, the possibility was too much, the sense that if she gave the darkness what it wanted, she would set the world itself aflame. She closed her eyes and pulled her light within her until it was smothered. She was not a saint—she was a First Daughter. Cybil had seen the grimoire, and she knew the legacy she carried.

Cybil felt the hunger of the shadows; she heard the voices in the dark.

Her father may have believed the curse was gone, but Cybil knew that he was wrong.

Once it was clear his daughter had no talent for magic—or, at least, none that she could control—Christopher ignored her once more.

No more local lords sent their sons for courting. Cybil told herself she did not mind. She had never liked the manner in which young men observed her, as if she were ripe fruit on the turn, as if they wanted to both eat her and throw her away to rot. Better for her to be alone, surrounded by her books and her mother’s love, without any distractions within the walls of Harding Hall.

That winter, the winter of her fourteenth year, Cybil’s mother bought her a marchpane-and-jam dollhouse for her birthday. It was a reproduction of the Hall: a perfect confection of quince-paste brick, blown-sugar windows, oozing black-red raspberries from its foundations and almond-studded roof. There was even the orchard in miniature, the marchpane trees growing comfits for leaves and fruit: sugar-glazed seeds of fennel and caraway, stained red and orange with beet and turmeric.

Cybil did not like sweet things; she never had. Bess continued to hope she would, for loving sugar was that most basic of childhood traits, a last hope of Cybil’s normalcy. So, she pretended to like it, pretended she would eat it later, but then she brought the entire thing down to the servants in the hopes it might make them like her better.

It turned out the jam was tainted. Many fell sick, and one man died—Cybil would never forget his limp face, the manner in which his body had spasmed. “Terrible,” Bess had said, pale and weeping. Christopher Harding examined the corpse before returning to his study, silent.

The servants had been wary before, but now they were frightened. Although Cybil had never been close with them—she was a lady, it would not have been right—these were among the few faces who were familiar: Mrs. Verney, the ruddy three-toothed laundress with a cloud of gray hair, who on occasion had taken pity on her, and listened to her play the virginal; Mr. Stapleton, the gardener, who hummed tunes as he trimmed the hedges; even Jane Lennard, a young housemaid the same age as Cybil, who had once smiled at her and complimented her hair. All of them now blanched to see her, turning away after stuttered bows to busy themselves with chores. Jane did not smile at her anymore. Once, she dropped a glass in the same room as Cybil, and apologized so profusely, so fearfully, that she began to cry and had to flee to another room.

Afterward, Cybil went to her mother.

“She despises me,” Cybil said to her. “Mother, Jane despises me. What should I do?”

Bess’s face collapsed in sympathy and regret.

“My dove,” she replied, “there is nothing to be done. There is a Great Chain of Being that determines how each of us is born and lives and dies. Jane stands below us on the chain; your father stands higher. We must not worry ourselves with those who live on a different link than ours.”

“What if I wish not to be chained?” Cybil asked.

“You must be,” Bess said.

And Cybil imagined this chain, the Great Chain of Being, wrapping tighter and tighter around her, until her flesh was bruised and she could not breathe.

From the book As Many Souls as Stars. Copyright © 2025 by Natasha Siegel. To be published on November 25, 2025 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

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Excerpts Romantasy

Read an Excerpt From The Seventh Champion by Sylvia Mercedes

A dragon princess joins forces with a scarred prince to escape a competition for her hand in marriage…

By Sylvia Mercedes

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Published on November 12, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Seventh Champion, the first part of a new romantasy duology by Sylvia Mercedes, available now from Ace.

1

Rosie

If this is going to work, the kiss had better be believable.

I mean, it doesn’t have to be the most passionate kiss in the history of kisses. Not the sort of kiss one hears about in ballads when the more lovelorn balladeers wander through town, plucking at their lute strings and sighing soulfully at passing maidens. Those kisses were always a bit much for my taste, though perhaps I would think differently were I one of the par­ticipants and not merely hearing about them thirdhand.

But if I’m going to convince Prince Taigan that he does not, in fact, own me—that I am free to do what I like with whomever I like, and it’s none of his dragon­eaten business—I can’t very well look as though I’m kissing a statue. Which is what this kiss feels like in the first moment of contact when my lips crash against the stranger’s.

To be fair, I can’t blame the poor man. I’m sure he did not take up position in that shadowy alcove, half­hidden behind a curtain, expecting to be collared by a frantic young woman and dragged out of hiding, only to have her whisper a hasty “Excuse me, but I need to kiss you now,” just before smashing her lips on his. It’s not the sort of thing one anticipates when going about one’s day.

I’m not even sure which one of my half dozen unobtrusive guardsmen he is. With my luck, I’ll step back from this embrace only to discover I’ve amorously assaulted poor old Captain Nor­lan, whose mustache droops well past his upper lip and who smells overwhelmingly of stale tobacco. Worse still, what if it’s the weaselly one? The one with the spots and the larynx, who spits gobs when he thinks I’m not looking?

Not that I care. To prove my autonomy to Prince Taigan, I’d kiss a goblin if I had to.

One might think, as far as kissing is concerned, Taigan him­self would make an excellent candidate. For one thing, I know his name and what he looks like, which is more than I can say for my current partner. And I’ll be honest, when it comes to sheer charisma, it would be difficult to find any man Taigan’s equal, what with his sweeping tangle of golden curls and those vivid green eyes shadowed with just enough delicious darkness to be intriguing. No doubt he leaves blushing maidens swooning in his wake wherever he goes.

But I don’t like the way he looks at me. As though he already owns me. It was bad enough being stolen from my home in the middle of the night, carried off to this gods­forsaken subterra­nean fortress in who­the­hells­knows where. To be told I belong to a stranger? I don’t care how broad his shoulders or how warm and throaty his voice. It’s not to be borne.

“Don’t you go bestowing your favors on any other champion,” he said just last night, mere moments after our introduction. With the confidence of a man inspecting a newly acquired mare, he trailed a lazy knuckle down the curve of my cheek. My skin crawled in response, but his smile only broadened. “You’re mine. I won’t stand for anyone else laying a finger on you.”

Oh really? You won’t stand for it, won’t you?

That’s about as much thought as flashed through my head when, about thirty seconds ago, while strolling along the dim passage on my way back from an eye­achingly long lesson in the court library, I’d spotted the prince climbing the stairway toward me. He strode with all the purposeful force of a dragon­slaying hero. Which is what he is. And why he is the First Champion and the odds­on favorite to win the upcoming tournament and claim my hand in marriage.

But he’s not won anything yet.

A thrill of panic raced through me at the sight of Taigan. He hadn’t spotted me, and I cast about for an escape. My gaze landed on a nearby windowed alcove where a bit of curtain stirred in a… well, not a breeze. There aren’t many breezes this far under­ground in the subterranean dwarfish palace of Stromin; I’ve learned that much in the week since my arrival. There aren’t many windows either, considering the distinct lack of view. Per­ haps someone thought it would make the place feel homey to hang up curtains and pretend we’re not all living under several tons of solid rock.

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The Seventh Champion

Sylvia Mercedes

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The Seventh Champion

Sylvia Mercedes

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Regardless, there was a man standing behind that curtain. I couldn’t see who. It didn’t matter; at sight of him, inspiration struck. He was male. He would do.

And now I’m kissing him.

He doesn’t smell of stale tobacco. I’ll give him that at least. Instead, there’s a not­at­all­unpleasant aroma of burnt cedar about him. If he is the weaselly guardsman, neither his spots nor his larynx seem to interfere with his lip skills, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been so hasty to judge. Because this is… a nice kiss. Unexpectedly nice. Startled, yes. That first moment of lips meeting felt rather like kissing marble (this I can state with con­fidence, having practiced kissing on an old carved bust of King Glorindal before graduating to live subjects).

But then a hand slips around my waist to the small of my back, pressing me against a warm, hard slab of manly chest clad in a leather cuirass, all of which is quite unlike anything in my past experience.

This is a mistake. Isn’t it? Yes, it must be. After all, kissing a stranger isn’t going to make Taigan any less determined to pos­sess me. And it might cost this poor, unsuspecting guardsman his job. There are rules among the ranks, surely. Fraternizing with the Dragon Queen’s daughter is probably frowned upon, even if the Dragon Queen’s daughter started it in the first place. I should take a step back, put a little distance between us, and murmur a quick apology before Prince Taigan reaches the top of the stairs. Yes, that’s what I’m going to—

His mouth moves against mine.

It’s not a lot of movement. Just enough to make me suddenly aware that I am not actually kissing King Glorindal’s stony vis­age. This is a living person. A living person who knows what to do with his mouth. It’s amazing what a difference it makes. Granted, I might be too easily impressed considering my rather limited frame of reference. But something about that movement— that slight change of angle, that subtle parting of lips, that unex­pected sense of giving and taking—sends a bolt of pure heat shooting straight to my gut where it blooms in petals of fire.

Please, gods, don’t let this be old Captain Norlan! Because if it is, and this is how I’m reacting, then…

“What is the meaning of this?”

Taigan’s voice lances through my awareness. I yelp, yanking my mouth free of the stranger’s, and try to retreat a step. But the hand at my back doesn’t relent, and when I press my palms flat against that massive chest, it offers no give. Not an inch. I suck in a breath, flicking my gaze up to the face of the man with whom I’ve just shared what can only be described as a moment.

I’m caught by a pair of jet­black eyes. So dark, I might be staring into the void between stars.

My head goes light. And a little fuzzy. The ground under my feet seems to dip, though that might have something to do with the fact that I’ve stood here for I don’t know how long holding on to that gasped inhale. With an effort, I push air from my lungs, simultaneously forcing my gaze to drop from those terrifying eyes to his mouth. His very full, sensual mouth, the lips still slightly parted. He’s breathing hard in short, sharp pants. But then, can I blame him? It must have been a shock to be dragged from his nice, cozy lurking spot where he’d been quietly minding his own business.

Why exactly was he lurking behind that curtain anyway?

The question scratches at the back of my brain. I’ve no time to consider it, however, for just then things start to happen in a rush. First a hand clamps down painfully on my upper arm, and Taigan’s voice is shouting words I cannot in this moment fully comprehend. It’s all a kind of wordless roaring, mostly drowned out by the thud of my pulse. There’s a sudden flurry of movement, which, combined with the way the room is still pitching around me, should send me sprawling to the floor.

Instead, I find myself gripped around the waist by a powerful arm and pressed protectively up against a lean, muscular side. The stranger—my kissing partner—stands at a protective angle, one fist gripping Prince Taigan by the front of his shirt.

Taigan is no puny young squire. He’s as broad and muscled as one would expect from a man who was trained to be a warrior from the time he was five years old. The rigors of knighthood carved him into a glorious dragon slayer by the age of eighteen. Now twenty­four, he’s had time to add both bulk and experience onto what must have already been an impressive frame.

And yet, using only one arm, this stranger has lifted the prince up onto the tips of his toes.

Oh.

My.

Taigan’s voice, abruptly cut off, still rings against the stones around us. As those last echoes vanish, a new voice speaks in a low, dangerous rumble: “You will learn better manners, Prince. Do not attempt to handle the lady so roughly in my presence again.”

For a small eternity, the three of us stand frozen, an odd little tableau for anyone who might happen upon us. My blood roars and my eyes bulge from their sockets. I’m quite certain if that supportive hand at my side is suddenly removed, I’ll simply fall to the floor like a flower with a broken stem.

Reason returns at last with a gust of exhaled breath. “No, please!” I cry. When the stranger doesn’t take his predatory eyes off the prince, I reach up and pluck at his sleeve to get his atten­tion. “I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm!”

“Are you?” The stranger turns and fixes me with those void eyes of his.

My heart jolts to a stop, transfixed by that gaze. “Please,” I manage, pushing the words from my still­warm lips. “Please, put him down! I’m sure he saw us… you… when we were… and assumed… assumed…”

For the life of me, I can’t think how to finish. After all, Prince Taigan, coming upon us like that, probably assumed some assault of virtue was taking place. And he wasn’t wrong. Just not quite in the way he was thinking.

Heat erupts across my cheeks. In this moment, I could prob­ ably light up these dark caverns brighter than a freshly ensor­celled scintil. “I’m sure he was just trying to protect me,” I finish lamely. Gods on high, am I actually defending Taigan? Of all people?

The prince’s stare is fastened on me over the arm of his cap­tor. I cannot bear to meet it, not if my life depended on it. I shift my gaze up to the stranger again. A nearby scintil flickers across his features as I take my first good look at him. Once one gets past the absolute massiveness of his shoulders and chest, the ut­ter blackness of his eyes, there’s plenty to take in. Like the scar that cuts through one eyebrow and trails just past the outer edge of his left eye. It looks unsettlingly like a talon slash. His skin is startlingly pale, almost to the point of sallow. It’s the one flaw in an otherwise oddly perfect specimen. Though perfect isn’t the right word, if I’m being honest. Everything about this man is built on a theme of power, not beauty. His features are large and strong, his nose prominent, his jaw rock­solid. The only thing that might be considered pretty about him is his mouth. Those full lips, flushed and a little swollen by the aggressiveness of my unexpected kiss.

Why do my eyes keep going back to them?

Taigan is speaking again. With an effort, I drag my attention back to the prince, who struggles now in the stranger’s grasp. “You will give me satisfaction, sir!” he cries in a half­strangled voice. “Unhand me at once and face me like a man!”

The stranger’s gaze finally slides away from me and slices into the prince like two onyx blades. “As I recall, it was you who provoked us. The lady and I were peacefully occupied before you so rudely inserted yourself. You had not even the courtesy to launch your attack on someone your own size. Tell me, do you prefer to manhandle women?”

“I wasn’t manhandling her!” Taigan snarls, his face almost purple with rage. “I was saving her!”

“From what?” The stranger smiles. It’s the deadliest expression I’ve ever seen. “From me?”

Oh gods. With a little shrug and a wriggle, I pull out from

under the stranger’s arm. The air is oddly cold now that I’m no longer pressed against his side, and I struggle to find my balance. Find it I do, however, and glare up at the two men. “This is all a misunderstanding.”

“Indeed?” The stranger looks at me again, and I wonder if this is how a mouse feels when caught in the hypnotic gaze of the cat. “Tell me what I have misunderstood.”

My throat goes dry. I clear it with an effort. “Well, you see, I was… I didn’t want the prince to…” Now they’re both looking at me. Whatever explanations I’d half concocted evaporate from my brain. “Um…”

“Was this man bothering you?” the stranger demands.

“Bothering her?” Taigan’s eyes flash with righteous fury. “I’m not the one who assaulted her honor! Do you not realize who this is? She is Princess Roselle Pandracor!”

At the sound of that word—princess—my stomach cramps and my shoulders hunch. It makes me positively sick; I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.

Taigan, unaware of my reaction, continues relentlessly. “Go take your fun in a harlots’ den where the likes of you belong. The princess is far above the base cravings of your foul dreams!”

The stranger’s grip tightens on Taigan’s shirt as he lifts him a fraction of an inch higher. “You dare speak of such things in her presence?”

All right, this is starting to get ridiculous.

“It’s not as though I don’t know what a harlot is!” I snap, toss­ing up my hands. “I’m not some frail hothouse flower. I know things.” The minute the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Gods above, is there any way to get out of this mess with my dignity intact?

Both men are looking at me now. To my horror, a knife has appeared in the stranger’s hand, half­hidden by his long sleeve. The same hand which, moments before, had been wrapped around my waist. The prince has not yet noticed, but now that I see it, I cannot tear my gaze away. A knife. A knife. Where in the fiery hells did it come from? No one is supposed to carry weapons in Stromin Palace. The house guards have their lances, of course, though this one seems to have forgotten his. But a small, deadly blade like that is absolutely forbidden. Even my dull little pock­etknife, which was hardly sharp enough to use as a letter opener, was impounded at the barge docks.

But there’s no doubt about it. The stranger has a knife. And this moment, this very moment, is the one that will mark the dif­ference between this whole debacle turning out all right with no one the worse for wear, or bloody murder being done right before my eyes.

I draw myself up straight. I may not be the princess everyone seems to think I am, but I’m not without my own unique set of skills. Back home—back when I was just Rosie Harpwood, apothecary’s assistant, and had never heard of this Roselle Pan­dracor they keep going on about—I used to break up brawls be­ tween Mistress Iliyani’s demon-­possessed tomcats, and that takes more courage than most people realize. Cats are fickle beasts at the best of times; add possession into the mix, and you’ve got a tricky business. But if I can handle Tiger and Shadow, I can cer­tainly handle this stranger and a prince. I’ll just imagine I’ve got a bucket of ice­-cold holy water in hand. Easy.

“You.” I point to the stranger. “Put him down. Gently!” I add too late as he lifts Taigan fully off his feet before abruptly letting go of his shirt. Taigan lands hard and staggers back several paces. His hand automatically goes for his sword but finds an empty scabbard. Even the champions’ weapons were confiscated. Taigan curses viciously. I point my finger at him next. “Now you. My honor is perfectly intact, if you please. I’ll thank you not to go around defending it unless I ask you to.”

“But he was—”

“I kissed him.” My face erupts with heat again at the admission. I’m once more painfully aware of the stranger’s gaze upon me. “It was… an impulse. I get them sometimes.”

Taigan’s eyes narrow. “You get random impulses to kiss strangers?”

“It doesn’t happen often,” I answer through gritted teeth. Then, with a shake of my head and a firm lift of my chin: “Never mind! My point is, there was no honor besmirching happening whatsoever. I’m fine; my honor is fine. And I won’t have you making a fuss. Or following me back to my rooms either.”

“Was this man following you?” the stranger asks sharply.

“No!” I realize my protest sounds rather stupid, but I’ve only just grasped a modicum of control, and I’m not about to release it. “What I mean is, I saw him coming, and I didn’t know if he was, following me that is, but… I… I…”

Taigan’s eyes burn into my face, hot as hellfire. There’s no getting out of this unscathed. Forget my honor; my reputation as a sane individual is done for.

“I want to make it clear,” I finish as calmly as I can, “that I will stand for no fighting in the halls over me. Thank you kindly, good sirs.”

Taigan and the stranger exchange glares. Taigan’s nostrils flare. He looks ready to burst into flame, whereas the stranger might have been cut from living stone. Finally, the prince snarls, “I won’t sully my honor brawling with men­at­-arms. I’ll save my mettle for the tournament arena.”

“A sight we’ll all enjoy, no doubt,” the stranger answers darkly. I glance down at his hand only to see the knife has disappeared. I never saw him sheathe it. Perhaps it was never there at all. Per­haps I imagined it in the heat of the moment.

Taigan turns to me, offering his arm. “Come, Princess,” he says. “I will escort you back to your chambers.”

My eyes widen. I take a hasty step back. In the same moment, like a choreographed dance, the stranger glides forward, placing himself between the prince and me. “She does not wish to go with you.”

Taigan’s lip curls, teeth flashing in the scintil light. “And I suppose you think she’s better off with you?”

Oh gods. They’re going to start all over again, aren’t they? Just like those damn demon cats.

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” I state firmly. “With anyone.” It doesn’t escape my notice that this is exactly what I’ve been say­ing since that dark night when the soldiers of the High King rode into Gartsworth Village, all flashing armor, glinting swords, and royal decrees. No one paid attention to my wishes then; I don’t have reason to believe they’ll start paying attention now.

But the stranger, his eyes still fixed on Taigan, growls softly, “You heard the lady.”

The prince’s expression radiates such venom, the stranger should be writhing on the ground in agonies right now. When Taigan’s gaze swivels to meet mine, I can’t help flinching. “Do not underestimate your value, Princess,” he says. “It is the honor of every man in this court to guard and defend you. And I intend to prove myself worthy of the highest honor of all—to bind my­self to your service for life.”

That same cold, creeping sensation I’d had last night comes over me. I know what he’s saying, what he’s implying. But I can­not let him know how it makes me feel. So, I merely offer a stiff nod and hold my tongue.

To my utmost relief, Taigan takes my silence as answer enough. He casts one last infuriated glare at the stranger before turning on heel and storming off. I listen to him muttering curses all the way back down the stairs and finally out of hearing range. Leav­ing me alone in this deeply shadowed passage. With the stranger I just forcibly kissed.

Excerpted from The Seventh Champion, copyright © 2025 by Sylvia Mercedes.

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Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From Break Wide the Sea by Sara Holland

In the treacherous waters surrounding Kirkrell, sailors hunting magic whales fear the finfolk—bloodthirsty sea fae who sink ships and curse bloodlines.

By Sara Holland

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Published on November 11, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Break Wide the Sea by Sara Holland, a young adult novel publishing with Wednesday Books on November 11.

Chapter I

The box from the dressmaker arrives just in time.

After our housekeeper carries it to my room, I kneel and sort through the contents, careful not to let my fingernails—long, sharp, reddish-black—snag the expensive fab­rics. Gloves, two dozen new pairs in linen and leather, velvet and silk, of various muted colors. A gray silk pair, I think, for tonight.

I’m tugging them gingerly on, a set of movements perfected by years of practice, when a bright voice from the doorway makes me jump.

“Is that a new dress?” Lydia asks.

Glancing over my shoulder, I see my younger sister teetering in the doorway, craning to get a glimpse inside the box. Heart in my throat, I lean over it to block her view of my hands as I finish pulling the gloves on. “No,” I say, letting the lid fall shut and sit­ting on its edge to face her. “Just some new petticoats.”

She knows that I always wear gloves, but not why. And I don’t want her to see the new shipment and ask again. I have enough lies to keep straight tonight.

“Oh,” Lydia says, disappointed. She’s ready for the sharehold­ers’ meeting in a dress the pale yellow of corn silk, her hair drawn up and her cheeks pink with excitement, or maybe rouge. “You’re wearing that old thing?”

I look down, chagrined. I’m wearing a dress from a few years ago—dark blue velvet, the color of the ocean late in the evening on certain summer nights, when the sky has faded to twilight. It falls almost to the floor, skimming my body, with long sleeves and a high neck. I chose it carefully, hoping to make the sharehold­ers see me as more than an incompetent child, as someone to be reckoned with. “This isn’t a walk on the promenade, Lydia. It’s a business meeting.”

Double-checking that the gloves haven’t snagged, I move to my bedside vanity to fix the last few buttons at my nape, the tricky ones. Maker knows I’ve had enough practice at this over the years, but with Lydia watching it’s harder. “Our appearances are only important insofar as they inspire the shareholders to have confidence in us,” I tell her reflection in the mirror.

Although I fear that inspiring confidence in the shareholders will be an impossible task. Lately nothing I do seems to impress them. Perhaps short of magically transforming into my dead father, nothing ever will.

“Did you get Kit to bed?” I ask. In the mirror, I see Lydia drift into the room, despite how often I’ve told her to stay out unless invited.

“Yes, though I suspect he’ll be up for a while.” She pauses to examine the contents of my open wardrobe. “I told him he could read for half an hour since we ‘re making him miss the party, so I give it two hours before he’s asleep.”

“It’s not a party,” I say, pointlessly, because she’s not listening. She’s radiant, as always, but I can read the nervousness in her pale, set face, how she glances in the mirror and tugs at one lock of carefully curled hair.

Should teach her how to hide that, I think, soon, before—

“This is pretty.” She reaches for the seashell on top of my writing desk, a peach-and-white conch shell nested in a black silk handkerchief.

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Break Wide the Sea

Sara Holland

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Break Wide the Sea

Sara Holland

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I whirl around, almost tearing one of the buttons from my dress in my haste to fling a hand out and block her path. “Don’t touch that!”

She steps back, raising her palms in a conciliatory gesture. “All right, I won’t.” Her brown eyes are wide, alarmed.

I take a deep breath and step back, aware that I moved too quickly. “I’m sorry.” I opt for a partial truth in hopes that she’ll buy it. ‘Tm just nervous for tonight. The shell is from August and I suppose-I suppose I’m rather protective of it.” As I speak, I wrap the shell in the handkerchief—the spines sharp even through two layers of silk—and place it carefully in the top drawer of my dresser.

When I look back up, my little sister is watching me, quiet, considering. “If you say so,” she says eventually. “Do you want me to do up your buttons in the back?”

“Please.” I turn around so my back is to her and move my dark blonde braid over the front of my shoulder, eyes down so as not to meet my own gaze in the mirror. Lydia comes up behind me, lifting her hands. I will myself to be calm, to act like I have nothing to hide.

Because why should I be afraid? Her fingers are soft and warm and nimble, fixing the lace at the nape of my neck, where my skin is still smooth. Her smile in the mirror is sweet, placid. If she feels my pulse thudding under my skin, she says nothing.

There have been times, these past few years, when I’ve caught her looking at me strangely, or for too long. Times when she asked if I was all right, and when I said I was, she held my gaze like she was trying to catch me out in a lie. But those moments grew fewer and farther between, and now she never asks at all. Our conver­sations center around frivolous things, everyday matters. News from the docks, gossip from the neighbors.

I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve gotten better at lying—at hiding—or if she’s simply given up on hearing the truth from me.

My fingers itch in their gloves. I grip the corner of the vanity and try not to think about it.

From Break Wide the Sea by Sara Holland. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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Excerpts Fairy Tales

Read an Excerpt From A Forest, Darkly by A.G. Slatter

A dark fantasy fairy tale of persecuted witches, snatched children, twisted magic, changelings, and the sins that bind…

By A.G. Slatter

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Published on November 6, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A Forest, Darkly, a standalone story set in the Sourdough universe by A.G. Slatter, publishing with Titan Books on February 10, 2026.

Chapter One

I don’t generally, as a rule, get lost.

Or at least not in these woods, or rather my part. I know them, as the saying goes, like the back of my hand. I’ve wandered here for the better part of two decades, learning their paths, open or otherwise, the hiding places above and below, where its pools and ponds and rills wait and run, where the herbs and mushrooms grow best and thickest, where the oak saplings are at their finest and strongest, where sun and moon fail to shine and where they sometimes brighten both day and night. Unsuspected barrows and highest tors that poke above the tree canopy, stone circles where magic more ancient than memory sleeps until it’s woken, places where older gods wait, grown still and stiff with passing time, forgetful of their purpose. Or so it’s said. Never met one myself, or not to my knowledge.

Yet here I am, adrift in a dappled clearing that I cannot seem to escape. The day passing me by in leaps and bounds as I tread in circles, a penitents’ path I neither willingly joined nor suspected. Some sort of faery trap into which I tripped and all the profanity in the world cannot cut me loose. A fly in a spider’s web. How long’s it been here, waiting? Who laid it? Here? So deep and dark, so far off the beaten trails where even I’d not have come, except I was following that bloody hare for my stew pot, and hasn’t it had its revenge? Disappeared before I could even draw my bow…

Trickster thing.

Or merely an animal that’s smarter than me.

The latter is most likely.

I’m not normally so careless, but something gripped me and I ran along with it; I stay fit with work around the holding, tramping the forest and foraging for ingredients medicinal and flavoursome. But I’m no great huntress—meat comes to me in the snares I set, the villagers and rare travellers who bring offerings for aid, for medicaments, for readings to guide their future or find direction—but such barters have been rare in recent days and my snares empty. Mostly, I provide small magics only because it’s never a good idea to let people know exactly what you can do. Something I didn’t realise when I was young, which is precisely how you (I) get into trouble. But in my middle years… well, I’m not normally such an idiot. Yet here I sit, having given up on trying to walk my way out of this blasted circle because all paths lead me back to the centre.

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A Forest, Darkly

A.G. Slatter

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A Forest, Darkly

A.G. Slatter

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At first glance I’d thought it merely a disturbance in the ground, dug up by badgers or the like. At second glance, a penitents’ path such as one finds in the great cathedrals. Third and final (and too late) glance—the only one with proper attention paid, I recognised it for what it was: a maze, ploughed into the forest floor, left like a raised scar, the rough spiral pattern turning back and forth on itself, but with no exit. I’d already stepped over the outer border and was stuck in its warp and weft. And I’d run so far from home, so far from any chance of my shouts being heard had there been another person in my cottage (which there’s not); so far I’d gone past the Black Lake, even, a place I seldom visit more than once a year.

Around me, the forest, dark and quiet—not a peep from bird or bee, fox or badger; no giggle of a stream running nearby, nor even wind skipping through the branches though I can see it moving the leaves. So: an enchantment here, and not a good one. I scan the undergrowth, the trees, looking for any sign of something that might be watching me and waiting for a moment’s inattention, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary, other than the sense that this is a trap laid with intent. Not necessarily to trap me, but anyone or anything foolish enough to wander this far from the village (so perhaps me, dumber than a hare). Or even those from any of the outlying cottages, the few tiny forest farms. When will its maker come back? How many such traps await? How often does whoever or whatever set it check it? Or is that person or creature a long-gone thing, and only these snares remain? Or do they bide their time?

Not knowing is frustrating and while the years have taught me better to keep my temper (or at least hide it), I’ve been sat in this cage without bars for almost two hours according to the movement of the sun. The rage isn’t a sudden thing, although it feels like it could be, except I know it’s been building, fuelled by vexation, that sense of being held against my will. And the memory of that very thing happening has left a mark, indelible, a well from which fury can and does bubble more and more frequently nowadays and, with a profanity, I draw my iron knife and plunge it into the heart of the maze. Blessed iron, so thoroughly grounded, so thoroughly mundane that anything eldritch cannot bear it. So weighty that it drags the unreal into the real world, makes it visible. Solid. A hittable target.

I feel rather than hear a roar, a growl, and I’m up immediately, sprinting for the edge of the circle. Then, at last, I break out, my steps no longer magic-led back into the centre. Free, I turn and spit into the trap. So there.

In that moment, I feel the weight of a gaze, pushing the air downwards, seeking and searching—when it passes over me I’m fool enough to breathe a sigh of relief that I’ve been missed. Which is when it doubles back, that strange gaze, and falls like an avalanche, pins me to the earth, lies upon me like a night-hag trying to steal my breath. I’m very still, although it’s not as if I have much of a choice.

Abruptly, the weight’s gone. It stayed long enough to make a point, but not long enough to kill me. No. It just wanted me to know that I’d been found.

* * *

The closer I get to home, the better I feel, although simultaneously more irked. I can’t deny that some irritation stems from the fact that, usually, I’m the worst thing in the woods (bears and wolves notwithstanding) and I like it that way. The further I am from that particular patch of the woodlands, the safer it seems; I’d wandered much further than I’d meant to, and I might be fooling myself, but my cottage is warded and protected against any number of threats. It’s a secure place. Whatever waits out there would be hard pressed to get in.

I hope.

Maybe it’ll forget me.

Maybe something else will take its attention.

Maybe it’s time to run.

That thought grates.

I ran once before; I ran so far and for so long.

This was where I came to rest.

This was the place that welcomed me and let me forget the things I’d done.

I’ll not give it up, or at least not easily.

Whatever’s in the forest can’t be worse than what I fled.

What I did.

Thus, I will stay. I’ll pretend it never happened, and life will continue as it has for the past twenty years. Yet as I approach my cottage, with its barn and gardens and tiny field for just enough crops, I hear voices, arguing, and it suddenly feels as if this day is the start of worse ones to come.

* * *

Bright blonde curls, summer-blue eyes, a heart-shaped face and trim figure, wrapped in a travel-stained sapphire silk brocade dress, heeled boots with bows and golden cloak—the girl is not exactly dressed for camouflage. Even with limp locks, grit on her skin, shadows under her eyes and reeking of perspiration, she’s a beauty, sitting on a bench seat in the little rose garden, staring across my holding, gaze fixed on the pond and the stream that flows into it. Her companion, her minder, throws exasperated glances at her as we speak, and this woman—whom I’ve known a very long time, and to whom I owe much—tries to convince me that this girl must be my next fosterling.

As yet, I’ve not let them into my home. My white-washed cottage, its angles slightly odd. The interior bright, surprisingly roomy, kitchen, bathroom, sitting room and workroom on the ground level; a cellar below that. The first floor has two bedrooms, and a third in the attic. It’s a sanctuary, and I’ll not easily let others over the threshold.

Witches in trouble oft find their way to dark forests and this is one of the darkest. One of the largest, hence “the Great Forest”. A good place to hide. We live away from the churches and the god-hounds who serve in them. We keep ourselves hidden as well as we may; we’re self-sufficient, making what we can, trading with the tinkers who roam the countryside and sometimes venture beneath the trees for what we cannot. Or bargaining with the isolated farmsteads or villages where our talents are needed (potions and powders for sickness and health, fertility or otherwise for women with already too many mouths to feed, or solutions for wives with husbands not man enough to behave like decent human beings). We’re easier to find than doctors in such remote spots, and more reliable, for what we do sticks. No placebos come from the hand of a hedgewitch or henwife.

It’s grown too hard to live in the cities, too hard to hide what we are, and even those of us who don’t make weight on the witch’s scale, those untouched by power, light or dark, still aren’t safe. It’s too hard to be a cunning woman or even a simple henwife when either term might so easily be pronounced “witch”. Out here we can be safe—we can’t all have the privilege of the Briars of Silverton. We’ve been hunted, yet we survive and sometimes parents and friends who love more than they fear send girls like this one to women like me. Sometimes girls like her go back home eventually; sometimes they can’t.

This one, Rhea, can’t apparently, and Fenna has spent the last ten minutes trying to cajole me into helping. To open my home. She speaks at normal volume, the girl hearing everything that’s said about her, some of which is not flattering, and this tells me Fenna is at the end of her tether, and any thought of protecting feelings has long fallen by the wayside.

‘Mehrab, please. Yes, she’s sulky and stubborn, but she’s also afraid. Give her a week, she’ll settle. If she doesn’t then send her away. Once she realises there’s this or fending for herself, she’ll buckle under.’

Will she though?

I look from Fenna with her greying hair with a thick white streak at the widow’s peak, hard lined face, dark cloak over trews and shirt of browns and greens and greys—a woman who knows how to blend in—to the girl with all her golden beauty; weigh the trouble this will cause me. I’ve not fostered in some years, have become used to solitude and my own ways. Grumpy and impatient, I’ve been quite happy sinking into this stage of life. This Rhea looks like hard work.

‘Where’s she from?’

‘Lodellan.’ Something in her expression tells me there’s more.

‘How bad was it?’

‘An insistent suitor.’

‘And?’

‘Later,’ she says in a low voice. I look at the girl on the bench, patting the fat tabby cat that had wandered out of the forest though Mr Tib stayed, though not invited to, even after I treated him roughly to make sure he was no shifter. I did name him, and that’s my own fault for giving such encouragement. I raise my voice a little: ‘Girl, what can you do?’

A defiant gaze turns on me; she holds one hand palm up and in a trice there’s a single blue flame of witch-fire dancing there. Mr Tib hisses and scarpers—not from the craft, but the flame, so close. She holds my stare, does this Rhea, and I know I should say No. I should say Take her elsewhere, Fenna! But I don’t. There’s something in her face that reminds me of another’s—not the looks, no, but the expression, the air. A sadness at the heart of the insolence. (A voice in my head whispers Be bold, be bold but not too bold, and another replies Be as bold as you like!)It reminds me of my debt to another, unpaid. The force of that failure presses the word ‘Alright’ from my mouth and makes me nod. I can’t help but think it’s the worst decision I’ve ever made—but I know that’s not true.

Excerpted from A Forest, Darkly, copyright © 2025 by A.G. Slatter.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>A Forest, Darkly</i> by A.G. Slatter appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Horror

Read an Excerpt From The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo

A dark history is unearthed amid crumbling façades in this gothic tale of family, homecoming, and postcolonial vengeance…

By Victor Manibo

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Published on November 5, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Villa, Once Beloved, a new gothic horror novel by Victor Manibo, publishing with Erewhon Books on November 25th.

April 7
Monday

The walls of the stone manor gleamed dull under the moonlight. The masonry, weathered by what now had been a century and a half, finally seemed to show its age. What once was the pride of the Sepulveda clan—no, the pride of the entire province, the jewel of Leyte—looked as though it was built with chalk, under threat of collapse from the faintest breeze.

This was how Don Raul Sepulveda saw his ancestral home as he looked upon it from the driveway, barefoot in his night­clothes. The stiff wind and the cloud-laden sky told him typhoon season had arrived much earlier than expected. He worried about the coconut plantation, tallying in his mind the acreage he might lose, but more than that, he worried about Villa Sepulveda, fixed in the firm yet absurd belief that the manor would dissolve in the rainfall.

The old man fastened his robe, which did little to prevent the chill from seeping. Arms wrapped around himself, he made his way through the garage and into the silong and its maze-like walls. He felt his way through the dark, guided by the mahogany posts of the manor’s foundations, until he found the room where the groundskeeper stored the tools that, for weeks, had been waiting to be used. He took the shovel and the pickaxe down from their hooks. He felt their heft in his hands before placing them into a wheelbarrow. He took an electric lantern too, the only one that had some charge left. Bags of cement languished next to stacks of marble tile. He felt his blood pressure rise.

Raul had unfinished business, and he didn’t have a lot of time.

He carted his implements back the way he came, then around to the back of the manor. Past the veranda, he tra­versed the large expanse of lawn, stopping as he reached an overgrown depression close to the stone fence that bounded the villa from the plantation’s groves. Under his instructions, the groundskeeper had erected bamboo stakes to demarcate the plot for the don’s project. Raul squinted to find them and thanked his stars that Tiago had tied a tattered shred of red cloth at the end of each stake. This should not take too long. He set the lantern down by the wheelbarrow. Shovel in hand, the old man began to clear the soil.

His eyesight had not left him in his dotage, and he found little difficulty in spotting the rocks that needed to be sifted. The difficulty came in getting them off the ground and haul­ing them back onto the cart. He didn’t mind the roughness under his bare feet, or the chill wind that turned his skin into gooseflesh, but the strain on his back and the tightness on his forearms worsened with each load.

At length, Raul began to slow down, both to give himself a respite and to make as little noise as possible as he placed the rocks into the cart. The crickets’ chorus was not loud enough to drown the clang of rock on metal, and he didn’t want to stir his wife from sleep. Catching him at work in the dead of night wouldn’t surprise her; she knew of his plans, and she knew of his bullheadedness. Still, he was not inclined to get into an­other argument, to be mocked for his folly. Oh, how he longed for those days when she never gave him back talk.

Once the wheelbarrow’s load was heavy enough to support him, the old man sat on its lip for a rest. He gazed upon the manor once again. His papa, and his before him, had boasted that Villa Sepulveda had been built from stone dug from the very land they owned. They boasted too that the men of the family built the place with their own hands, with calluses to show for it. Raul easily dismissed that claim. His forebears had laborers, retinues of able-bodied peasants. He saw them himself, and when his time came, he too had his own army of workers. They would have been doing the backbreaking work instead of him, if he hadn’t fired the architect and the contrac­tors, if he hadn’t berated every single mason, one after another, until they all quit, until no one in the entire town was left to take the job. No matter. He had exacting standards, and if no one could meet them, then he would do what his father and his grandfather had only claimed to do. He would build some­thing with his own two hands. He would erect the mausoleum himself.

All the Sepulveda patriarchs were laid to rest in a graveyard on the west of the property, on a hill far enough away from the groves and where the trees had long been cut down. The family had a special dispensation from the bishop that let them eschew the Catholic cemetery by San Isidro Church. And when Raul broke ground to build his mausoleum, he did so without obtaining a special permit from the municipio. “This is our land,” he’d said, “and we’ve been here even before the diocese was established.”

Raul resumed his work with more vigor, out of spite for the lesser men who’d left him to toil on his own. He imagined the laborers laughing at him as they did when they walked away from the job, shaking their heads at the crazy old man. He imagined his late papa too, and his lolo, both looking down at him, their arms crossed in smug expectation. “I’ll show you,” Raul spat between heaving breaths. With each load, he imagined his great-grandfather who’d built the stone house, his grandfather who’d replaced the quarry and planted the coconut groves, his father who’d bought the neighboring par­cels and expanded the plantation to cover an entire face of the mountain. Raul wouldn’t just restore Villa Sepulveda to its former glory—though he knew such revival was only needed because of his own neglect—he would preserve the family’s legacy, more than any other Sepulveda before him did. The mausoleum, strong and grand, would stand on this spot for centuries, protecting them all.

His vision for the project was influenced by mausoleums of antiquity and great monuments he’d seen in his travels. It had to be sizable, as he planned not only to house himself and his wife in it; he wanted to move all the other bodies from the family graveyard. He planned on exhuming the noble Bartolome, the enterprising Oscar, and Raul’s own father Claudio, the fierce general, plus their wives who’d been laid right next to them. The family had only ever considered the patrilineal heirs to be entitled to a plot. The long series of first­born males and their wives. Not even the second-born sons, nor the daughters, were on the hill. They were in the town cemetery, side by side with other members of the extended Sepulveda clan, both the ones who were legally acknowledged and those who were not. And, boy, were there a lot of those.

A gust whistled through the palms of the coconut trees. Raul heard a rustle in the overgrown grass beyond the bamboo stakes. He stilled to listen. His lands didn’t have wild animals, Tiago and the farmhands made sure of that, but just the same he lowered the rock he was holding.

The rustling grew louder, this time from another corner of the plot. The scrap of tattered cloth danced in the breeze.

Raul squinted at the gaps beyond the tall grass. It was probably Tiago’s cur, Askal. “Haaaaa—” the old man half yelled, hoping it would scurry away. The rustling stopped.

In measured steps he made his way back to the silong to get a bolo, just in case. He found one with a worn leather scab­bard and slung it around his waist. He returned, setting the lantern closer before swiftly resuming his work. If he were an honest man, he’d admit that his haste was out of fear, but he told himself that it was out of annoyance with all these inter­ruptions. He had a plan, and it needed to be done now, before the torrents came.

Before death came for him.

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The Villa Once Beloved

Victor Manibo

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Victor Manibo

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He had seen its omens and heard the cries of its herald. His time was coming. The mausoleum needed to be built soon— for himself, for every Sepulveda buried on the hill beyond the stone fence, and for the sake of the few Sepulvedas still living. He wasn’t crazy; he just happened to be the only one who could see all the signs.

The mausoleum hadn’t always been the plan. At first, Raul only wanted to spruce up the graveyard, update the markers, and most critical of all, build some sort of enclosure. Tiago had told him that wasn’t necessary—the site had been unmolested for decades—but he’d be happy to maintain it more often, es­pecially after the don and doña’s return from the States. Yet Raul insisted. He contracted a builder to erect a stone fence around the plots. In the last few weeks, however, Raul grew to believe that a fence was not going to be enough. His ances­tors had to be locked up in marble. When the contractor said the section of the hill was neither large nor stable enough for the structure, the old man was only too happy to have it built much closer to the manor. They would be better protected that way, he said. At first, he never spoke of what these long-dead bodies needed protection from, but in those moments when he lost control of his tongue, he would say it. The balbal was lurking, eager to come dig up the corpses and devour them. It didn’t matter if they were bones and dust at this point. The monster wanted them, and Raul wouldn’t let it have them.

The electric lantern dimmed. He gave its case a couple of hard taps, which only caused it to flicker and then die.

The tall grass shook violently. The rustle was all he could hear now; the crickets had grown silent. The old man placed a hand on the bolo’s hilt. In the corner of his eye, he saw the dog’s hindquarters dive into the brush. He called out to it. “Hoy! Kadna ngadi!”

Askal turned toward the call but then disappeared into the shadow of the trees that lined the stone fence. Raul followed the dog, shambling on the uneven ground. It was easy to miss the rotting head of coconut in his path. The pain came first, then the fall, flat on his face, having failed to brace himself in time.

Groaning, the old man lifted his head. Inches away, a smooth, white stone stuck out of the soil. It gleamed even in the dark. He lifted it with his fingers, brushing the dirt off.

It was a bone, the joint of some small limb.

Raul flung it away and hurried to get himself upright. As he did, more bones caught his eye. Underneath the dislodged soil were the ends of long, narrow tapers: five human fingers, still held by a knot of wristbones.

He knelt up, legs quaking in pain and dread. Then, a shadow came before him, darkening the unearthed bones. Raul raised his head at the hem of a flowing gray skirt.

The figure floated above the ground, its soiled feet and blackened toenails peeking from underneath tattered cloth. A low murmur issued from above him, repetitive and pressing. The words sat on the edge of comprehensibility. He stumbled onto his rear and found himself beholding a pale, faceless woman.

Raul froze, every part of him paralyzed. His joints locked in place, and no sound came out of his open mouth. Even his eyelids couldn’t blink to shield him from seeing. The specter raised an emaciated finger, its veins pulsing blue beneath the paper-thin skin. She hovered closer, pointing at him.

He began to hear the woman’s words as though they were whispered right into his ear. Tears streamed down his face. He recognized her now.

Then, the icy tip of her finger touched his forehead.

With impossible force, the old man fell back as though pushed into an abyss so dark and vast it seemed to consume all of him, and the villa and the land it stood on, the coconut trees, the bones, all those bones, the whole island, the oceans, the planets, all light and all life and the very universe itself. An eternity seemed to pass as his consciousness screamed, trapped in a leaden, unmoving body, calling for his wife, for God, calling for mercy, begging, begging, begging until his fall was finally arrested.

Yet instead of landing on the dirt among the weeds and the carabao grass, his body found a soft landing. Everything re­mained dark, but in due course, his sight was again aided by the moonlight streaming through embroidered lace curtains. Above him he saw the drapery that hung over his four-post bed.

A nightmare, he told himself. That was all it was. He’d had another one.

Raul wiped the sweat off his brow. His robe had been soaked with sweat, and worse, his pant legs were drenched with piss. “Putang ina!” he cursed as he sat up. The incident brought him back to the worst nights of his Alzheimer’s, before the treatment worked. He may have regained his faculties and his memories, but he’d also gotten night terrors alongside them. Part of him still felt the price was not worth it. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He had half a mind to call for help, but he wouldn’t stand for the shame of having soiled himself.

Then, a great figure overcame him, pinning him back onto the mattress. It fell on him with the force of the Almighty’s fist. The wooden bed frame cried from the impact, its creaks join­ing the old man’s bones as they cracked. He screamed in pain.

A massive hand, or hands, he could never quite tell, held down his head. His vision adjusted to the dark and he saw a naked gargantuan straddling him, crushing his torso and pin­ning his limbs. A giant, he thought, but no—it had too many parts. What he thought were thick folds of fat turned out to be several bodies. Arms and thighs, heads and backs, bellies and breasts and buttocks, all writhing against each other, piled on top of him, on top of each other, growing and expanding into a living monument, a pyramid of flesh. Starving mouths, agape with yellowed teeth, moaned with the old man’s muf­fled groans, and their frantic breaths matched his own as the monstrosity grew to reach the canopy, tearing the sheet that hung above the bed. Raul felt his rib cage collapse, his insides pierced by his own brittle bones. He coughed up blood and his mouth became a fountain of red spray that rained on the sheets and the undulating bodies that kept growing and crush­ing and forcing him to take his last gasp, choking in his own blood.

* * *

In the morning, after Doña Olympia arose from her own four-post bed, and after she made her way across the hall into her husband’s bedchamber, the first thing she noticed was the window. Odd that Raul would leave it open. Did he want to be feasted on by mosquitoes? As she went to shut it, she noticed her husband’s face. He was drained of all color, and his hands clutched his chest. His mouth was agape and so were his eyes, which stared fixedly, almost maniacally, at the canopy above his bed.

The doña screamed, throwing herself onto her husband’s cold body. The caretaker, Remedios, tried to shield her away from the master’s corpse, but Olympia refused. She tearfully held onto his arm, her body half collapsed onto the floor by his bedside. She reached for his hands and enclosed them in hers. She wailed. Fifty years. Who was she without him? Had there been life before Raul? She didn’t remember anymore. She wailed and wailed, her eyes an unstoppered dam. Half a century’s worth of sorrow was only interrupted by a feeling of roughness on her skin. Olympia unclasped her hands around the rigor mortis of Raul’s fists.

With effort, she opened his petrified fingers. Then she found, to her utter confusion, enough to stem the flow of tears, that her husband’s palms were completely covered in dirt.

Excerpted from The Villa, Once Beloved, copyright © 2025 by Victor Manibo.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Villa, Once Beloved</i> by Victor Manibo appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts fantasy

Read an Excerpt From The Sacred Space Between by Kalie Reid

An enemies-to-lovers fantasy about an exiled saint and the devout iconographer sent to paint him.

By Kalie Reid

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Published on October 29, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Sacred Space Between by Kalie Reid, an enemies-to-lovers romantic fantasy out from Little, Brown and Company on November 4.

1

Maeve

The toll of the Abbey’s bells cracked through the silence. Maeve lurched upright.

Fractal sunlight arched across the basilica’s ceiling like the ribcage of a great leviathan. This late in the morning, she was alone in the colossal room, a fact she was secretly thankful for. Praying was a vulnerable practice, with her knees aching and the nape of her neck prickling with cold. She preferred privacy with the icons to the other acolytes’ whispered requests.

Her icons.

Her chosen saint, a middle-aged woman called Siobhan, stared down at her with her usual lack of emotion. The wall before her held the Abbey’s hundreds of icons, each neatly framed and hung from long lengths of silken rope stretching from one end of the room to the other. Despite all the options Maeve could kneel in front of, she returned to Siobhan because she liked the colour of her robes. Cadmium yellow was so hard to get lately.

She studied the stone floor under the kneeler, the spot of red beside her left knee. She scraped it with her nail, examining the flakes stuck to her thumb. Oxide red.

The guard stationed at the door to the basilica tutted at her tardiness as he eased open the double doors for her to leave. Maeve dropped her eyes, ignoring the heat in her cheeks and the weight of the guard’s gaze as she passed. She’d overstayed her allotted time. Acolytes could only enter the basilica alone under strict supervision, but her status as an iconographer granted her some level of leeway. Even so, she shouldn’t make a habit of abusing it.

A briny layer of seawater coated the corridor leading to her studio. The room occupied a lonely corner of the Abbey, far from the other acolytes. Maeve liked the seclusion; painting was an act best done alone, in her opinion, but the walk to and from the basilica often felt never-ending.

Her boots slipped on the wet stone as she quickened her pace. She needed to return to her studio before the oil paint hardened beyond use. Ezra’s temper might burst if she let more paint go to waste. She’d already begged her mentor for coin to buy more onyx and ochre twice this month.

Besides, Felix might be early, and she couldn’t stomach the idea of the saint waiting for her.

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The Sacred Space Between

Kalie Reid

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The Sacred Space Between

Kalie Reid

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Gaining an audience with Felix was a privilege earned through years of devotion, study, and dedication to her craft. Though she was trained to paint an icon with little more than a vague description, the honour of having a saint sit for her was one she didn’t take lightly.

Felix was her first in-person sitting, the first saint of his stature she’d put to oil and canvas.

She couldn’t help the dart of hope shooting through her chest—maybe it was more than an honour. Maybe it was a sign.

Brigid, the lead iconographer, hoped to retire in the next few months. The position would be open.

It could be Maeve’s… possibly. If she kept her wits about her and proved her devotion, she could move up in station and have her voice heard in the strictly regimented Abbey hierarchy. She would be allowed to form friendships with the other craftsmen, a seat at the monthly conclave of elders and senior craftsmen where every moment of Abbey life was decided. After fifteen years of living in the limestone halls, she would finally see behind the curtain. Her life would no longer be one of questions and sightless trust. Purpose and belonging: two peaks she had long pointed herself towards, finally within reach.

If her icon of Felix met Ezra’s ruthless standards, of course.

Simple tasks, really.

The stiff set of her shoulders finally relaxed at the sight of her empty studio. No Felix yet.

She lowered the scarf from her hair and toed off her boots, stepping into a pair of soft-soled slippers. The studio was small, barely more than a closet, but it was hers. It was more than many people held claim to, and she was grateful for it.

A draught from the half-closed window slunk through the space, skating down her neck with icy fingers. She crossed the room to close it fully. It was usually open to air out the ever-present smell of turpentine and oil, but as winter sharpened its claws, she’d need to put up with the fumes. That, or freeze.

Would the room be comfortable enough for Felix? Wherever he spent his time when he wasn’t at the Abbey, it was sure to be lavish.

If he lived at the Goddenwood, she could only dream of the luxury and comfort he was used to. The secluded village where the holiest of saints lived in community with each other was a fabled mystery in its own right. She’d never been tasked with painting it herself—her talents lay more in portraiture—but she’d studied depictions of it enough to picture its gabled, gold-tipped roofs and jewel-toned buildings with perfect clarity. Outside of the Goddenwood, saints lived in isolation, sequestering themselves to better focus on the prayers only they could answer.

Maeve aspired to their piety, dreamed of it, even, but she found the idea of such a lonely existence hard to grapple with. Maybe that was why only the holiest of saints were allowed to live in the Goddenwood—community truly was the highest reward.

Monasticism might have been a virtue, but loneliness…

The Abbey was isolating enough as it was. Hundreds of people lived in the limestone halls—acolytes, craftsmen, elders, guards, household staff—yet interaction between them was kept to a bare minimum. Sometimes, Maeve went days without speaking, longer without touch. Coupled with the Abbey’s strict censorship of information from the outside world, the solitude often felt like a physical weight on her chest. Impossible to breathe around.

The saints were worth every bit of the sacrifice living at the Abbey called for. Maeve was grateful for the life she had been given, the life her parents had chosen for her at seven years old. Always, always grateful for the opportunity to pray and to paint.

The icons she dedicated her life to creating were more than just portraits—they were objects of focus, symbols designed to connect the intercessor to the saint. She didn’t take her role in the sacred practice lightly, nor the prayers sent dutifully to the saints she so carefully depicted.

Carefully, Maeve traced the edge of Felix’s profile with the tip of her paintbrush. A heady tremor passed through her fingers. A slow-burning peace, undercut by the steady thrum of devotion, not unlike what she felt during prayer or hymns. Warmth, bright and golden and consuming, threaded through her chest.

She ’d already completed the underpainting in preparation for Felix’s sitting. Hopefully, the remaining work shouldn’t take more than four or five sessions, though oil painting was a fickle beast and might take longer than she ’d mapped out. The detail work could be done without the saint, of course, but a part of her was tempted to extend it as long as she could to keep herself in his presence.

Her hand twitched, smearing a line of burnt umber across his jaw.

Maeve dropped the brush.

No questions. She needed to stay professional. Only professional.

Just as she was collecting her brush from where it had dropped on the floor, a knock sounded at the door. With a stern word to her nerves to stay in line, she moved to open it.

Felix stood on the other side.

The reality of him forced the breath from her lungs.

A saint. Here, in her studio.

Felix was tall and imposing, with dark brown skin and a finely boned, carefully blank face. Perhaps five or six years older than her. He stared down at her for a beat before his gaze fixed somewhere over her left shoulder.

Words formed and died on her tongue. She’d seen him at a distance before, but never so close.

The thick brocade piping on his black robes shone silver as it swirled over his shoulders and down his chest. A swathe of shiny scar tissue ran up the left side of his neck to spider over his cheek and jaw, dragging down the corner of his eye. A medallion hanging at the centre of his chest glinted as he breathed, revealing a hollow centre. It wasn’t a relic, a medallion that signified an elder’s connection to a particular saint, but it resembled one. Enough for her to take an unconscious step forward to examine it closer.

She was sure she had seen something wrong in the light refracting off the metal.

Felix cleared his throat.

Maeve flinched, stepping aside to let him into the room. ‘Apologies. Thank you. Welcome.’ She cringed, swallowing another rush of mindless words as Felix moved past her.

‘Where do you want me to sit?’ he asked. His voice was low, scratchy.

‘There. Please.’ She pointed towards the stool she’d set up by the window.

He complied, angling himself to face almost entirely in profile. The scarred left side of his face wasn’t visible from Maeve’s position by the easel. Usually, saints faced fully forward, one hand raised, the other on their lap. Her preliminary drawing had posed him that way.

She picked up a brush and tried to think around the heavy silence. She needed to ask him to move, but would it offend him? He seemed wholly absorbed in staring out the window. If it weren’t for the stiff set of his shoulders or the subtle movement of his fingers under the cuff of his robe, she’d wonder if he was aware of her at all. She couldn’t paint him as he was. Ezra wouldn’t be pleased, and she needed Felix’s icon to be perfect.

‘Felix?’ Maeve hedged. Her knuckles bleached white around the paintbrush. ‘Could you… I mean, please, could you move to face me?’

His eyes flicked briefly to hers. ‘No.’

‘I need to see your entire face for the icon,’ she said, voice petering softer with every word.

His fingers moved faster beneath his cuff—a frenetic rub of his forefinger with his thumb. ‘This will have to do,’ he replied after a bloated pause.

Maeve dipped her brush in the paint. It was doable, she reasoned. She could follow her sketch from the neck down and still keep his face turned away. A thought occurred as she limned the curve where his neck met his shoulder in gold, lining out the halo’s contours surrounding his face—did he want his scar hidden?

The texture was unlike that of the scars on her own body or ones she’d seen on any of the men she met in the town—though she’d rather not dwell on her secret dalliances right now, worried that Felix might somehow know what thoughts swirled in her head. She was painting his icon, after all, and outside of answering prayers, his saintly abilities were largely a mystery.

The Abbey didn’t know she liked the occasional night away in someone else ’s bed, and she wanted to keep it that way. Some things were a private indulgence just for her, sweetness tinged with shame. A constant teetering between letting the guilt suck her down or pushing back against the Abbey’s rhetoric around chastity. As an iconographer, purity was expected. Her personal feelings didn’t matter under the weight of her title.

Her thoughts spun out the longer she painted, the deeper the silence grew.

She had a saint in her studio. Would she ever have the honour again, an object of her devotion at such close range? Alone, with no listening ears at the door?

If she gained Brigid’s position, certainly. If not… Maeve didn’t know what shape her life would take. She tried to shove the gnawing thought from her mind. So much of the Abbey was kept from her. If she became lead iconographer, perhaps that would change—

Slowly, her eyes rose to Felix.

A saint in front of her. Questions on her lips.

Long-fermenting wonders about sainthood, his holy magic, the mystery surrounding his very existence. Her own prayers cast doggedly into the world. Forbidden questions and even more insidious doubts.

But she couldn’t ask him. She couldn’t.

Not Felix, not Ezra… no one. There was no one she could ask, no one who would reassure her.

She forced her eyes back to the painting. Lifted her brush. Pressure built just behind her eyes.

Waves drummed outside her window, urging a comfortable looseness to Maeve’s limbs. The action of sliding her brush across the canvas rode on instinct. The weak sun shifted into shadow, shadow into dusky blackness. Her gaze strained to focus only on what the bristles touched. An ear. The fold of a cloak. The arch of his cheekbone highlighted in raw sienna.

Minutes, maybe hours, ticked by.

Her breathing grew shallow, muscles tensing in her shoulders and wrist. Nothing else remained but him. Nothing could exist but what she formed by paint and brush. Gold-tinged candlelight flickered at the furthest reaches of her vision. Perhaps it was a mistake keeping the window shut as paint fumes filled her lungs.

A deep hum trickled into her ears.

With it, a voice. A whispered suggestion.

Maybe she could ask him whatever she wanted. Maybe she could beg him to answer her prayers, to call upon his glorious abilities and grant her every petition. If she could paint an icon worthy of him, an icon that would propel her into lead iconographer, she could have the security she wanted so desperately. All Maeve wanted was to belong. To be acknowledged. To be trusted with the Abbey’s secrets. She wanted to be carved into their history as securely as the icons she depicted. All she had to do was her best, and everything she wanted could be hers.

Everything.

She sat at the cusp, the precipice just before the fall. Wind beat at her back. Never before had she stepped so close to the edge. How would it feel to jump? To break all the rules and ask, ask, ask. To shatter the mirror and open the door. To fully see the glory of the Abbey she’d so readily given every particle of unflinching faith she had to offer.

A shivering wash of pain coasted down her arm to the fingers clamped tight around the brush, skating up to linger behind her eyes. Her vision began to blur.

In the space between breaths, Maeve tipped backwards on her stool.

She blinked slowly, slowly.

High above, the ceiling swam and dipped as the world shifted to glimmering, gauzy metallic. Reality unspooled like yarn. Warmth moved up her arms, down her shoulders and ribboned around her spine. A soft space of welcoming nothingness. Dreaming without sleeping.

A push on her shoulder. Fingers on her pulse— Maeve returned to herself with a choked gasp.

Excerpted from The Sacred Space Between, copyright © 2025 by Kalie Reid.

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Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer

A retelling of the story of Bluebeard as a romantasy/murder mystery.

By Marissa Meyer

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Published on October 28, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer, a young adult retelling of the story of Bluebeard publishing with Feiwel & Friends on November 4th.

She ducked into an unused guest room, the furnishings cov­ ered in ghostly white cloths, to compose herself.

Mallory sank against the door and buried her face in her hands, still scented with the shaving soap. The pleasure that had shivered at the end of her nerves now felt cold and traitorous.

She spent an entire minute trying to convince herself that she’d been mistaken. It wasn’t Julie’s ring. It was only something similar. Surely other girls had sapphire wedding rings. Surely Armand couldn’t have murdered her. Surely…

Nothing she told herself made any difference.

All the signs were there. The way Julie had talked about her beau, like a knight coming to rescue her, like he was too good to be true. The pressed flower in her prayer book. The ring hidden beneath Armand’s vanity.

She had to go to the police. Tell them everything. Have Armand imprisoned before he could harm anyone else.”

She shuddered.

For the first time, she felt like she could truly begin to under­stand what had compelled Bastien’s wives to choose him, despite all the signs that he was a man to be avoided. What had Julie said?

The heart wants what the heart wants…

Right now, her heart wanted away from this place. Away from Armand, and his manipulations, his lies, the way his uncertain smiles seemed crafted entirely for her…

Crouching over her knees, she stuffed the hem of her skirt into her mouth and screamed. The fabric muffled her frustration and anger and betrayal, but didn’t lessen it.

Gods alive, she liked him. She liked him so much. His curiosity. The way he flustered so easily. His bravery in the face of mon­sters. His willingness to believe her, no matter how many times she lied to him. The way he’d kissed her, as though she was both fragile and dangerous at the same time.

Breathless, Mallory let the fabric fall from her mouth. She stared balefully at the floor as her pulse gradually slowed.

She had to be sure.

She had to be absolutely, without-a-doubt, cannot-possibly-be­ wrong-about-this sure.

She stood, forcing strength into her legs. Smoothing her hair away from her face, she dared to step back into the hall.

She found Anaïs in their room, embroidering a border of for­tune’s wheels onto a handkerchief, a full cup of tea on the table beside her. She startled when Mallory came in, pricking herself
with the needle.

“I was beginning to worry about you. Have you learned anything?” She must have seen something in Mallory’s face, because she sat straighter as she popped her jabbed finger into her mouth.

“I need your help.”

Anaïs watched her a long moment. Swallowing, she set the embroidery aside and picked up the teacup instead. The china clattered in her shaking hands.

She turned back to the window and took a sip.

“Please, Anaïs” Mallory dropped onto her knees beside the settee, pleading with her. “You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”

Inhaling sharply, Anaïs glanced at the sky. Dark clouds were rolling over the vineyards. “I knew you would,” she whispered. “From the moment I saw her body.”

“Anaïs—”

“‘Just as I knew that you shouldn’t have to. Maybe I should have offered to do it from the beginning. But… I’m scared, Mally. It’s unnatural, and dangerous. And… what if it happens again?”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We can hardly summon him twice.”

Crossing her arms, Anaïs settled deeper into the cushions, studying Mallory. “Who do you think it was, if not Le Bleu?”

She didn’t want to say it. Saying it out loud would make it too real, too… plausible.

The words came out brittle. “I’m afraid it was Armand who killed her.”

Mallory had hoped for a gasp. Some shock. A whispered, no, surely not Armand.

To her disappointment, Anaïs nodded. “I fear that as well.”

Excerpted from The House Saphir, copyright © 2025 by Marissa Meyer.

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The House Saphir

Marissa Meyer

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Marissa Meyer

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Excerpts Fairy Tales

Read an Excerpt From The Changeling Queen by Kimberly Bea

A lyrical, sensual, feminist retelling of the Scottish “Ballad of Tam Lin,” combining folklore, desire, sacrifice, and nature’s wonder…

By Kimberly Bea

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Published on October 23, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Changeling Queen by Kimberly Bea, a retelling of the Ballad of Tam Lin, out from Erewhon Books on October 28.

Samhain, Carterhaugh

I should have taken away the lordling’s heart.

With my nails sharp as talons, I should have pierced his breast, carved out a cavity inside him, and ripped out the pulsing organ with one hand. Let the soil of Faery feast upon his essence, as he and I once had on honey and nectar. There was a time I could have done so, and he would have thanked me for the pain.

Instead, I garbed him as any other of my knights, and hid him among our company.

Tonight, we make our Samhain rade.

His steed is white as milk, and he rides closest to the town, the sole acknowledgment that he, among all these rid­ers, Aos Sith and Sluagh, pixies and elfin knights, does not belong. He alone is mortal, and the time of his death is nigh.

It must come at my hands, though once he was my lover. Our history makes no difference at all.

From out of the hedges creeps a mortal woman, scarce more than a girl. Her plaited hair is yellow, her skirts kilted above her knees.

And she goes great with child.

My heart seems to still within my breast. I did not see her there. How did I, queen of all the canny fae, fail to notice this mortal girl? For now, the scent of her mortality surrounds me, blood and bone turning to dust, flesh eaten by worms and de­caying into the loam to feed the earth. Sharp sweat rises from her, more than such a mirk and chilly night should warrant. I sense she is nervous. Good. Mortals should be nervous when caught out on All Hallows’ Eve, while faery folk do ride.

Yet somehow, those nerves failed to stop her. I could al­most be impressed.

The girl is hard to look at, even while she stumbles into our path and lumbers alongside the procession of troop­ing fae.

Then I see it. Her mantle—she has turned it inside out.

Clever girl, knowing how to beguile the senses of the fae.

I am not impressed for long.

The girl is not graceful, heavily as she carries the child within her, and she walks with determination, rather than speed. But we too do not rush; this is a somber ritual, full of pomp and ceremony, and there has never been any need to before.

No mortal would dare interrupt the faery rade.

She has caught up to the white steed and, ungainly as the girl is, grips its rider. With an enormous grunt of effort, she pulls Tam Lin off his horse. He falls, dazed, to the forest floor.

The rade stops by instinct, not at my command. The horses still, by no order from their riders. The nighttime for­est around us goes unearthly quiet.

My breath catches, and I sit rigid, clutching tight to my horse’s reins.

“My queen.” My seneschal Lyel, riding beside me on a horse of dapple grey, tersely shakes his head. “This is not the time for intervention. Wait.”

This is a game we play, with rules we invented and never deigned to share. This girl, though; somehow, she knows ex­actly what to do.

On the other side of the Veil, something withers and dies. I can sense it in my bones. Mayhap a single flower, a cowslip from my garden, or the eglantine that blooms against my palace walls. It does not bode well. My skin grows tight, and a hunger pierces my belly, one that will not be sated by food. I am immortal, age­less, but I feel the heaviness of my years upon me, as if I were a mortal woman, with all the fragility and weakness that entails.

No. I am no mortal. I have left behind all that is not pow­erful, fae, and pure.

She is mortal. The girl who now would claim Tam Lin.

She helps him to his feet. He stumbles and murmurs her name—Janet—before falling into her arms. She catches him, though he towers over her and, while lanky, is heavier than he appears. I have known the weight of Tam Lin atop me, be­neath and beside me: this baron’s boy is a fit specimen indeed.

He trembles like a blade of grass in the wind.

His Janet holds him up and she holds on, clinging as if she loves him. Needs him. No doubt even thinks she needs him more than we do.

She thinks wrong.

My belly roils and my mouth tastes of wormwood. I can­not stomach this blatant theft of what was mine alone, what I claimed years ago when Tam Lin fell from his horse while hunting. I saved his life then. Ever since, he has been living on borrowed time.

“Hold him, will you?” I say, my voice like thunder in the silent forest. Lightning burns beneath my skin, and I hold my arm aloft, pointing. “Let us see how you enjoy this embrace.”

Tam Lin stretches and grows, taller, wider, heavier. Thick fur sprouts across his body; his ears grow round, hands be­come paws, his nails thick claws. He roars, in pain, in horror, or simply to release the beast within.

Tam Lin has become a bear.

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The Changeling Queen

Kimberly Bea

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Kimberly Bea

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He claws at Janet’s back, tearing through her kirtle and marking the skin. Drooling and frothing at the mouth, he holds her so tight he might squeeze the life out of her. Still, she holds him, heedless of the noise he makes, how he claws at her, and the blood he spills.

From the distance, far across the expanse of the Veil, comes the crack of a dead tree, falling into dust.

Rage is a maelstrom inside me.

I will not give up.

“Viper!” I scream, and so Tam Lin becomes, larger than any natural serpent I have seen, squeezing out Janet’s life in his coils. His fangs are sharp and deadly; venom drips off them onto the lady’s flesh, where it burns.

She cringes, she grimaces, her face goes green as grass. Yet she does not let him go. She will not let him go.

I do not wish to like this girl. Her courage is worse than useless; it is inconvenient, threatening to rob Faery, my Faery, of what it needs.

What we call the Teind.

I reach deep inside myself for a part of me I thought long banished. What is most toxic to the fae, what is most com­mon among the mortals. I pull this vile substance from Tam Lin himself, the metal flowing through the blood in his veins, from every door hinge and lock he has ever passed, every knife and sword he has held, from armor and buckles and the shoes his horses wear.

Iron. I make Tam Lin into what I despise the most, what I most fear, even more than church bells and crosses, holy water, and prayer, for those harm us only so far as the belief in them. Iron is eternal, and so Tam Lin becomes.

Then I set him on fire.

Janet screams, and her cries rend the silent air of the for­est around us. In her hands now is that which is too hot to hold, a burning brand. She cannot keep it too long in either hand; she’s blistered and burned enough as it is.

Yet, she never completely lets go.

Instead, she breaks into a run.

A galumphing run, with how unbalanced the state of her body has left her. I am startled, if only for a moment.

I cry out to the procession of trooping fae: “After her!”

“Your Majesty,” my pretty seneschal says, to keep me within the rules of our game. He does not need to finish. I know what he would say.

We are not to intervene.

“After her—slowly,” I grit out. As if so many fae, of all shapes, natures, and sizes, acting in accord, could move with any great speed. The brownies are short of leg; the lamiae must slither along as snakes do, and the fachan, for one, has only the single foot.

The Teind is getting away. I will not call it panic, the sensa­tion rising now in my breast, but it is as close as the Queen of Faery can come.

What part of our land is now becoming desert? Where does the Underhill now recede further away from mortal realms? We need that connection to survive.

We need sacrifice, the gift of a soul, to survive.

At the moment, it does not appear Tam Lin will pro­vide it.

I will not let him go.

We follow Janet to the well, the very place she must have met her young man, for it has long been a popular trysting place for the fae and the fae-they-seem. Among the ferns and gorse, the well is now grown about with roses that bloom the dark crimson of my hair. Janet trips over them; they catch at her skirts and the thorns tear at her ankles. I smile, for the roses are an extension of me.

Janet does not stop until she throws the burning brand into the well.

A sizzling rises from within, and I feel it in my flesh, as though some deep and treasured part of me has burnt to ash.

It is not over yet.

From the well emerges a wet and naked Tam Lin. He stoops and shivers, water drips from the ends of his dark hair into his bonny grey eyes.

I wish I had ripped those out. Given him eyes of tree, that he should never have seen this Janet, who even now covers him with her mantle green.

Something breaks inside me. It cannot be my heart.

I am meant to yield now. Janet has won Tam Lin.

I do not remember how to yield. It is a skill I lost long ago.

Faery still needs him. The Teind must be paid.

I let no show of desperation cloud my face, but calmly dis­mount my horse. My green gossamer skirts settle around me, bedecked with garnets like drops of blood. I raise my arms as I stand before the procession. “My people,” I say. “Our rade is ended. All Hallows is nearly through. Do you now return beyond the Veil.”

A mist rises around the creatures of the fae: riders and walkers, Sluagh and Aos Sith alike.

My seneschal looks at me in confusion, suspicion, con­cern. My words are his command, but he would act as my conscience and seems reluctant to leave us alone.

A conscience is a luxury I cannot afford.

I smile sweetly, reassuring him. “I will be safe. What dan­ger can they possess, a pregnant woman and a naked man?”

Although I know his worry is not for me.

For Samhain is not over yet. And I am no worthy ruler of Faery if I give up Tam Lin without a fight.

And so, I begin my tale.

Chapter One

Selkirkshire, Scotland
Imbolc, seventy-five years before

My mother always wept that I was not her child. This wounded me far less than knowing she was right.

She lost her wits when I was but thirteen years old.

We had just delivered the child of Peggy the Cottar, though ’twas born out of wedlock and Peggy had not the coin to pay. Her family never did. Eamon, Mairi’s husband, frowned upon such acts of charity and upon his wife’s cun­ning woman skills; at least, after he’d spent time with our parish priest, he did. But Mairi had never paid that any mind.

“Peggy should have come to me long before now,” she con­fided in me as we walked home together. “The moment she first knew her courses were late. I could have helped her bet­ter then.”9

There was no sick person Mairi Grieve would not help. I deeply admired her for that.

“Anyway, Eamon was wrong,” she continued. “Peggy paid us, didn’t she?” And she gestured at the ailing chicken I now carried in my arms.

“Some fee,” I muttered. The bird was like to die any mo­ment now; its feathers were molting and bedraggled; it sat a half-starved bundle in my arms. “We shall have to nurse this one back to health, too.” And by “we” I likely meant “I.” As the youngest of the household, my job it was to look after the chicks.

Mairi laughed and tugged upon one of my plaits. “’Tis good practice for you, my cuckoo!” She always did call me that, the little stranger who had been reared in her nest, like a cuckoo’s egg. Back then, she meant it with affection; had never said it with any malice, only a bit of wistfulness color­ing her tone. “Ye were a good help to me today, lass. I was glad to have ye by my side.”

Not so glad as if I were the true Bess, your daughter. I pressed my lips together that the words would not come out.

I did not know why the true Bess Grieve had been taken by the faeries, and I left in her place. The Grieve household was riddled with fae, from the shadows who danced upon the walls to the Cait Sith who curled up before the fire and chased away the occasional mouse. I could sense these fae as none of the household’s mortal members did, but never would they speak to me. Only the brownie Morven acknowl­edged me, when I stayed up late to watch her scouring the pans and sweeping out the hearth.

“Blood will out,” was the explanation she gave. “I can smell the mortal in ye, lass. I warrant yer blood is tainted, and ye were too sickly to remain in the Faery realm. Consider yerself lucky ye found a home here.”

I did consider myself lucky, in some ways. Eamon was not a warm person, but he was prosperous enough to feed and house me and my siblings—nay, Bess’s, really—a noisy and ungrateful throng. Mairi’s work as a healer was not needed to supplement the household income, nor did Eamon welcome it as his status in the village rose, but she was generous in her healing and teaching and far kinder to me than I deserved. Despite this kindness, inside my head the refrain echoed: Not True Bess. Not wholly fae. You are Mairi Grieve’s cuckoo, and that is all you will ever be.

On days like this one, when the warm sun beat down upon our heads, and we brought new life into the world, when Mairi Grieve herself had said I was a good help to her, it almost felt like enough.

The chicken pecked me, and I tried to get my arms more comfortably around it, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw something pass beside Mairi’s face. Long fingers strok­ing her cheek. I breathed in the scent of musk and loam and green things gone to rot.

The world seemed to go still, a heaviness filling the air. Wicked laughter hovered around me, turning to birdsong when I listened close.

Then Mairi stumbled, fell to her knees upon the dirt path, dropping her basket of simples and herbs.

“Goodwife Mairi!” I cried out, addressing her as my mis­tress since calling her “Mother” would have been a lie. The chicken leapt out of my arms. I let it wander free as I dropped down beside her, my kirtle dragging in the dust.

Mairi’s face drooped on the right side; her eyes were star­ing and wild. She murmured words I could not understand, interrupted with the occasional word I could. “The queen… the babe!” she cried out. “Where is the babe? Where is my little Bess, my child?”

She is right here, I longed to say, but the words caught in my throat.

We of Faery cannot lie.

“Raise your arms,” I said instead, as I had heard Mairi herself command her apoplectic patients. “Can ye show me a smile?”

Mairi’s left arm rose to her shoulders; the right hung limp and weak. She bared her teeth, but her lip hung down on one side, and she drooled. The shadowy goblins that danced across our walls appeared comely in comparison. Oh, Mairi.

She was stricken. Faery-struck, they call it, though neither Mairi nor I much liked the term. And yet—

And yet there had been that peculiar green scent. Heavy. Intoxicating. The overly long fingers that touched the side of her face… then vanished. I shook these memories away, as I could not understand what they meant.

Instead, with great care, like she was naught but dust and skeleton leaves, I helped Mairi to her feet, let her lean upon me as I walked her home to bed.

And not once did she leave it for the next five years.

Samhain

You are telling us a story?” Janet says incred­ulously. “The hour is late; the night is cold. We wish to go home.”

Only three of us stand now in Carterhaugh, by the ancient well, where the roses grow wild and the ferns do droop: Janet and I, and Tam Lin, who was my favored knight and consort. Once I held his heart like a pebble in my hand. Now she does.

I do not think Janet will want him, once I am through.

I hold my head high beneath my branched crown, pre­tending it has no weight at all. “You would take away the bonniest knight in my company. The least you can do is give me a moment of your time.”

“A moment of my time?” Janet pulls her mantle closer around her young lord, then looks me in the eyes. “I have freed Tam Lin. And I have saved his life. I demand you let us go.” There is iron in her spirit, a determined set to her chin. I sense she is not accustomed to being told no.

Neither am I.

I saunter around her like a hawk circling its prey. “Demand, you say? Such foolhardy words to use to the Queen of Faery herself.”

To her credit, Janet drops her gaze. “I am sorry, Your Majesty. But we are nothing to you. Please let us leave.”

I only wish they were nothing to me. Yet somewhere in Faery a tree falls. The ground cracks, opens a fissure where nothing can grow. For want of the Teind, our seven-year sac­rifice, the land is dying. It will be on my head if it does.

The land will take me with it when it goes.

I cannot allow them to leave.

I ignore Janet’s pleas, and look down my nose at Tam Lin. With a finger, I push him out of my way. “Do you know, I knew his ancestor? A long, long time ago. And let me tell you, loyalty does not run in the family.” Those grey eyes, though, they do.

I should never have let Tam Lin keep them.

The lordling opens his mouth to protest, but I flick my finger in the air and he grows silent. I am done listening to him. He is only the prize we fight over.

Color rises in Janet’s cheeks, and her spirit burns hot, de­spite the chill of the autumn night. “I do not care how well you knew his ancestor. Tam Lin is not like him.”

How would she know? I speak of one who died long be­fore Tam Lin was born.

“Nor was Thomas Shepherd like his kin, not at first,” I tell her. “Or, excuse me, you would know him as the baron, Thomas de Lyne.”

Tam Lin makes a strangled noise deep in his throat. I wave my hand and free his lips, but throw him such a dark look he stays silent in any case.

“Let us go home, Your Majesty,” Janet pleads. “It must be close to dawn.” Her teeth chatter, with cold or with fear, it is impossible to say.

“Oh, I shall let you go home,” I tell her, though I give no specifics as to when. “And I shall give him his freedom, as­suming you still want it for him after I have told my tale.”

Excerpted from The Changeling Queen, copyright © 2025 by Kimberly Bea.

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Read an Excerpt From Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

An ethereal and revelatory short story collection about faith, delusion, and the demons that can’t get enough of us.

By Melissa Lozada-Oliva

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Published on October 22, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!, a short story collection by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, available now from Astra House.

Heads

I find Tootsie’s head in the lettuce garden, her snout open and her beady eyes, too. She’s looking at me like I know something, like I’ve always known something and it’s just a matter of when that something bubbles out of me and grows legs. She was a little thing; a fuzzy, almost-Chihuahua you could lose easily or sit on. I open the cotton purse with the purple flowers sewn on the handles, grab Tootsie’s head by the ears, and toss her inside. Blood leaks through the cotton. I have to tell Linda and I don’t want to. Linda’s older. She’s my friend. She was the one I ran to the night my father bashed my mother’s head into the kitchen sink.

“I’m sorry,” I say, holding up the cotton bag for her to see, “It’s Tootsie.” The heads don’t bother me or make me sick, they just freak me out about the patterns of things, and when strung together, what everything can start to mean. Linda looks inside the bag and gags.

I see her eyes well but she puts herself together, brushes her hands on her apron. “We had a few good years together, didn’t we?” We don’t talk about looking for the rest of the body.  I follow Linda into her backyard, her flowered skirt billowing around her dry ankles. She limps slightly, dragging her left foot on the ground. She hands me a small red shovel and I dig a hole in the yard we share. She throws the cotton bag with Tootsie’s head into the hole.

“What do you think,” Linda says as I pat the dirt down with a shovel, “Is it that monster you’re always talking about?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah. Is that crazy?”

“I’ve seen stranger,” Linda says, sighing and looking out into the trees. The wind makes them dance.

“Shall we?” I ask. Linda’s voice quivers as she begins, following the words of Ruth.

“In this long life of shared pain, I found your soul, and you found mine. You were there, and so was I. We will work now, in your name, as you rest. Rest.”

“Rest,” I repeat, placing a hand over my heart.

“Do you want me to ride with you?” she says, squeezing my shoulder. Today I turn eighteen. I’m finally allowed to visit my father at the Halls, but I also have to decide how I’m going to contribute to the district. I haven’t given it a lot of thought, though everybody expects me to just do Food Distribution with my Aunt Beatrice. I shake my head, focusing on the fresh mound of dirt.

“No, that’s okay,” I say, “You should relax.” When Linda was still one of the head coordinators at Food Distribution at MA-13, she used to hold 70 pounds of groceries at a time. Then she tripped over a branch she broke her ankle. Our medics set it back but it never quite healed. Some people think she was sabotaged because you get extra rations when you’re a head coordinator. Now rations get delivered to her every Tuesday and she doesn’t have to work, which more people are mad about. I like that she doesn’t work so much, because then I get to talk to her.

“So, what’s the deal,” Linda says, her hands on her waist, “You afraid?”

“A little bit,” I swat a fly away from my face. “Why, do you think I’m self-centered?”

“I don’t know why they have you thinking all these things. Self-centered,” she swats the word away like a bug, “They think they invented piousness. Look, sweetie. You don’t have to go. Nobody’s making you.”

“But I want to,” I say, “I think the screenings helped. It’s sad to see him in those rooms. I think he needs company.”

“Those rooms look like my old college dorms!” She says, the skin around her eyes wrinkled petals, “I’ve seen them! Your dad is a lucky man.”  I rub one thumb over the other, like I’m trying to tell it to calm down. 

“You’ll be just fine, honey. Come back when you’re done, okay? We can talk about it.”

“Thank you.” I pause. “I’m sorry about Tootsie.”

“Not your fault, my dear. Not like you tore her head off!” She cackles and gives my hand a squeeze. I walk back to our living area, dead leaves sticking to my heels. My Aunt Beatrice chops wood in the back.

“There’s blood all over the lettuce again,” she says, the wood splitting easily into two. “Was there another head?” I nod.

“I’ll write the street chat, ask them to keep a look-out for wolves. In the meantime I’ll cancel pick-ups from our neighborhood. No salads for a while.” Aunt Beatrice lifts her axe again. The pieces of wood dive away from each other.

“What if it wasn’t a wolf,” I offer, “What if it was a monster?”

“Mari, please. We need to get the wolf situation under control. Neighbors are in danger.” She grabs another stump and sets it on the ground. The axe rises.

“How’s Linda doing?” She twists the handle of the axe as it gets trapped into the stump. It breaks and she keeps hacking.

“Still limping. It was Tootsie’s head.”

“Well, that’s a shame.”

She doesn’t ask me about how I’m feeling today. She doesn’t want me to go. When my mother was killed, she threw out all of my father’s clothes and burned them in the street’s dumpster, wailing in a way I’d never heard before. A wail from the earth. From inside her blood. It was her one act of pain, and the only form of vengeance she was allowed. She let me keep one photograph of him, where his eyes look red and filled with blood. The rest she threw in the fire.

“Listen, I won’t be home when you get back,” she says, hacking away. “There’s a lot of nonsense happening in Education and they need me to mediate.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.” I don’t want to show Aunt Beatrice that I’m a little hurt she put her responsibilities before my birthday because then I’d have to hear about being self-centered and how I didn’t even know how bad it was Before.

“Sounds good,” I say. 

“Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“No.”

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Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!

Melissa Lozada-Oliva

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Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!

Melissa Lozada-Oliva

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“You haven’t given it a single thought? You’re 18 today, Mari.” A happy birthday Mari would’ve been nice.

“I wanted to decide at the end of the day. It’s not like it’s set in stone, either.”

“You don’t have to do Food with me. You could always teach. You have me worried talking about these monsters. Waste of time. What about composting?”

“I feel like I’m too disorganized for that.” Aunt Beatrice kicks over another stump.  I think my aunt is happiest out here sometimes, hacking away at dead trees. It’s not that I don’t want to do Food with Aunt Beatrice. Everybody has a role, that’s what we were taught. Every life is precious because everybody is responsible for keeping somebody else’s life safe. I just never feel like it’s my own life. 

“Grab some, will you?” She throws the axe down and gathers the wood in her arms. Maybe because it’s my birthday, but she doesn’t lecture me. I pick up a few blocks. One of hers rolls into the lettuce patch. She tosses the blocks to the side and shakes her head. She kneels and wipes blood off a leaf with her hand.

“Goddamn wolves,” she says.

My bike’s the only thing I have left of my mother. It’s a baby blue two-speed that a mechanic in MA-11 helped me re-gear. I thought about being a bike mechanic because they get first dibs on what crops they want delivered, but the warehouse I went to had all these men and I hate admitting this, but they made me blush. I pedal softly through my streets. I see Eva biking towards me with carrots in her basket. She’s wearing a long-sleeved pink dress with built-in shorts. Her mother is the district’s seamstress and she always looks more put together than everybody else. The outfits I’ve been given for the season are fine but Eva always looks like herself. It would be nice to look like myself sometimes. I don’t even know who that is.

“Helloooo!” Eva says, “Happy birthday!” She remembered. I smile. “Where you off to, Mari?” We pedal together, our wheels buzzing in time.

“The Halls.”

“Oh, right!” she says, her eyes growing wide,  “How are you feeling about that?”

“A little freaked out.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” she says and while she means it I know she’ll never relate.

“You started delivering today?”

“I did! But oh my gosh, I got kind of confused with the spreadsheet. All the numbers.  Maybe this isn’t the right job for me.” She laughs to herself, “I feel like Linda might be mad. But everybody has their place right? That’s what they say!” She giggles at what everyone says. She’s always giggling.

“Linda doesn’t get mad,” I say. Eva bikes ahead of me. Her curls are a breathing forest. Sometimes as I fall asleep I dream of myself colliding with the ground, pieces of my skull flying everywhere and turning into little white birds. I don’t tell Aunt Beatrice about those dreams. We’re pedaling together and pretty content with it, side by side, enjoying the beautiful day.

“I think I have a crush,” Eva tells me, darting her eyes at me mischievously.

“Oh?” I say, focusing on my spinning wheel. A pink flower got stuck and is getting squashed with each pedal.

“One of the gear guys,” Eva says, “Who knows he’s probably –“ Eva lets out a scream and crashes into a bush. The carrots rolls to the ground. I leap off my bike and run to her.  

“Are you okay?”

“You didn’t see that?” she says. The skin on her knee’s broken open and blood’s slinking out.I take the ointment I’ve packed out of my purse and kneel. She sucks her breath in through her teeth.

“What did you see?” I apply ointment and she winces as the blood starts to bubble. I’ve already told Eva my theories about the monster, and she’s been kind, but I don’t think she really believes me.

“Thank you.” I help her up and she wipes the dirt off her skirt. “I don’t know what it was,” she says, picking up the carrots scattered across the road, “Whatever, I probably made it up. You didn’t see it?”

“No.”

“It was probably one of those wolves.”

“Have you ever seen a wolf?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know it was a wolf?” I’m being aggressive.

“I guess I don’t know.”

“Listen, Eva. I found a dog head in my lettuce this morning.”

“Another one?”

“I feel like it’s all connected.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know. All these heads. And that thing you just saw? I think something is going on. A conspiracy.”

“Mari, I don’t want to sound mean, but maybe you’re listening to too many of those radio shows at night.” I hand her the last of the carrots and she can tell that I’m annoyed.

“Well, I better deliver these,” she says, mounting her bike.  “Thanks for the ointment. Good luck today.”

“Whatever,” I say. Eva pedals away, the carrots clapping together in her basket .

The Halls rests on the top of a hill, surrounded by mulberry trees. The teachers say that the Halls was an abandoned “elite” university after the rebuild. Now it houses people you aren’t allowed to see until you turn 18. A lot of care goes into these facilities, and some cynics think that neighbors will cause harm in order to get the Halls treatment, but who are they kidding? Nobody really wants to be there. I pedal while standing to give my thighs a little break as the hill swells. I reach the yellow brick building and set my bike in the tall grass. Inside, a woman wearing a yellow pantsuit sits behind a glass case. She has her hair is slicked up in a neat bun. Behind her there’s a golden banner that reads “WE ARE NOT WHAT WE HAVE DONE, WE ARE WHAT WE CAN BECOME.”  I grab a mint from a bowl that’s also golden, unwrap it from its yellow shell.

“I’m here to see Gabriel Ernez, MA-13”

She squishes her face at me into a smile. My father’s face appears against the glass case,  the reason why he’s here, the night that it happened. I breath in, then out.

“You’re his child?”

“Yes.”

“It says today is your birthday?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Happy 18 years around the sun,” she beams, “Do you know what you’ll be doing? It’s an exciting time.”

“I’m not sure. Maybe teach.”

“Oh, that’s fantastic,” she says, “You must be very patient. I never had patience so that’s why I’m doing intake. Plus, I get time to work on my plays.” She puts a finger to her mouth, and points with the other to the computer, like it is our little secret. It’s not against the law to make art, it’s often encouraged, but there are a series of tests to take in order to live as an artist in the artist commune, creating all day. Some of them paint murals on the schools, others make radio plays and broadcast them at night. The fact that she’s working on her plays at her designated job must mean she’s not very good.

“That’s cool,” I say, “Can I go inside?”

“Oh,” she says, “Right, of course.” She presses a button and the door next to the glass case opens. I’m met with a gush of cold air. This is the only place in our district that’s air-conditioned. We just keep the windows open at home. 

“Take a seat and help yourself to some food. We just got a delivery this morning. There’s also some ice water.” I walk through the doorway and the door slips closed behind. The waiting room is the color of butter and the seats are cushiony, impeccably white, like the marsh mellows we ate before they all ran out. I sit carefully in one of them, afraid I will dirty or break them. Beside me are a few other visitors my age, probably also here on their birthdays. We glance at each other and give little nods of understanding. There’s a giant window looking into a sunny courtyard. There’s a painting of three brown puppies, nestled into each other like blankets. I look through the pamphlets on the cream-colored table next to me. One says: “TALKING TO A LOVED ONE IN THE HALLS: SOME SUGGESTIONS.” I read through.

For decades, The Halls has committed itself to the rehabilitation of those who have Taken Life or Severely Traumatized the Lives of Others. Our patients undergo daily therapy sessions and have their choice of 1-6 “extracurricular” art activities. We have a gym facility for patients —

I fold the pamphlet into quarters and then unfold them, trying to smooth out the wrinkles and make them young again. I tap my foot. I stare at the puppies. I’ve been taken care of in this life. Aunt Beatrice read to me and stamped a kiss on my forehead every night. She said “Love you,” to me the way she also said, “Wipe down the counters,” a hard after-thought, an ordinary direction. A lot of people grow up without fathers or even their biological parents. I am not special because of this. I’ve always had a community around me.

I hear my name called. A person in white linens holding a clipboard calls me into an office. Suddenly I feel exhausted by all of the steps of this, all of the checking in, all of the lights and the seats and the walls and the cakes. I take a seat in a red wooden chair. On this person’s desk is a photo of them and another person, maybe the person’s spouse, and a little baby.

“How are you feeling today about seeing your parent?” They fold their hands. They have long hair and gentle eyes, soft hair swimming across their arms.

“I don’t know,” I say, “I think fine.”

“That’s good. I’ll be in the courtyard the whole time. You only need to press this button on the pad,” they hand me a silver pad with a screen, “If you feel unsafe. Your parent has done a lot of work in his time here so there should be no problem. You already know this, but there are no weapons here. Everything is built on trust.”

“Okay,” I say, fingering the edge of the screen.

“Happy birthday, by the way.” They do not ask me what I’m planning to do.

“Thank you.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

They lead me down the hallway, where more people in white pass us by, towards an open courtyard with an empty swimming pool.

“He’s right over there,” they tell me, pointing with their finger to a man sitting in a chair looking out at the courtyard. It’s the back of him. There’s his hair, grayer than I remember. There are his shoulders, broad like a mountain. There are the dark, curly hairs peeking out of his shirt.

“I just go and say hi?” I can feel my shirt damp from my armpit sweat. I wonder if it’s possible to just turn eighteen next year.

“Yes,” they say, “Or whatever you feel is best. Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” I say, taking one step closer, “I’m excited.” The puppies in the frame start looking disgusting to me, a three-headed furry worm.

“Hmm,” they say, “It’s good to frame things that way. You sure you’re alright?”

“Yup!” I say, swallowing. I take another step and something inside of me flies down a slope, turns, and crashes. I start sobbing. It’s humiliating. All the blood in my body feels like it’s at my face. I turn and run away.  

My Dad taught me how to ride a bike, but I can barely remember the moment now. I’m sure I was frustrated at first. I’m sure there were scabby knees and many tears. I can remember all of us riding together in a line. My mother on her blue one, my father on his black one, me on the white standard children’s one because I was small and still feel small when I drop a glass or have to hold in my pee. He must have had his hands on my waist, holding on to me like a loaf of bread, right before he let me go. It was before he started talking about conspiracy theories about the other neighbors and he stopped sleeping.

I’m practically flying down the hill. I cannot pedal fast enough. The mulberry trees blur past me as I make my way to familiar roads, thinking of my father’s curly back hair and the back of his graying head and=Tootsie’s pink open mouth, and the puppies on the wall all nestled into one another like they were a single pulsing body. I stop at Linda’s house, leaving the baby blue bike on the front porch. I knock on her doors. She doesn’t answer. I peer through the windows. Maybe she’s in the kitchen.

“Linda?” I run to the back where she keeps the key underneath a rug. I pass by the mound where Tootsie’s buried and open her back door. They took all the locks off before I was born. I enter her kitchen, afraid I’ll find her headless body seated at the table and her head somewhere dripping nearby. Something turns the corner, and I grab the red shovel by the door, but it’s Linda holding a small corn cake with a single wax candle in the middle. I’ve been told that you used to light it and then blow it out, but it isn’t worth wasting the oil now. Eva is behind her, her hands clasped together, smiling. They start singing together and clapping and I drop the red shovel.Eva jumps up and down and Linda sets the cake down at the table.

“Make a wish sweetie!” Linda says, gently arranging my hair away from my face. I close my eyes and blow on the candle, imagining a flame I extinguished with my breath. “What were you gonna do with that shovel, Mari?” Linda laughs and so does Eva, and I find myself laughing too, for being so ridiculous.

“I’m sorry. I had a weird morning.” Eva turns on her heel and rushes out the door.

She’s probably sick of hearing about this. I get it.

“How did it go?” Linda rummages through her kitchen cabinets, taking out a small knife.

“I couldn’t do it.” She cuts the cake in three even pieces, picking one up for herself.

“Aw, honey, it’s okay. No one’s blaming you.” I bite into my piece, trying to concentrate on its sweetness and not how guilty I feel. Linda wraps her weathered hand over mine.

“You didn’t know how you were going to react until you did. It takes time.”

“I saw the back of his head and I thought about Tootsie’s head, I think? I don’t know.” Another sigh from Linda. She sucks her fingers when the cake is done and smiles at me. She looks all worried, the same look everyone has given me since my mother died, like there’s something inside of me that’s gonna mutate and grow on the walls.

“They had a portrait of dogs in there.” Linda leans forward and knits her brow. Even if she doesn’t believe me she’s interested in what I’m saying, like it’s the plot of a radio story. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what I should do. If I should join the bungalows and write elaborate stories with other artists. But I can never think of anything good. Everything is recycled from something a little better. I think some people need to be the ones who listen and it’s okay if that’s me.

“Go!” I hear Eva say, and I hear little nails scratching on the floorboards. A chocolate-colored puppy runs all over the kitchen and jumps on Linda, licking her face. Another puppy in a day of puppies. Strange.

“You got Linda another dog? After this morning?” I’m defensive.

“The dog’s yours to take care of, silly,” Linda says, and the puppy leaps off Linda and waits at my feet. I hold out my hand and she licks it.

 “I found her on my delivery route today,” Eva says, “My parents are allergic and nobody can take care of her. She’s yours.” Eva corrects herself, remembering that nothing belongs to us, “Yours to take care of.” The puppy chases her tail. I’m envious of her. She doesn’t know anything about anything.

We take her out into the shared yard and I’m amazed by how fast she goes, her legs taut and muscular, built to move fast and catch things and bring them to us. She knows what she’s always been meant to do. She doesn’t even have to think about it.

“How was today?” Eva asks me, wrestling a rope from the puppy, the puppy making aggressive play-noises at her.

“It was fine.” I don’t tell her anything else.

“I heard it’s really nice in there,” Eva says, the puppy gnawing at the rope. I feel Linda’s eyes on me.

“So nice,” I say. Eva smiles. I wonder what it’s like to be her. She doesn’t know what kind of questions to ask because this hasn’t happened to her.

“Oh, darn,” Eva says, looking at the sinking sun,  “I have to go. My dad wants us all home for dinner. He’s a little nervous.”

“About the monster?”

“The wolves,” Eva says, not meeting my eyes.  Linda gives Eva a hug.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Linda  says to me, “But I have to get going, too. It’s our monthly neighborhood check in meetings.” I make kissing noises at the puppy and she doesn’t know that that means to follow me.  I feel really lonely all of a sudden.

 Eva waves goodbye to me from her bicycle and I watch her pedal away. Shadows stretch all around our house. The puppy runs ahead of me, sniffing the porch and the door. She rushes inside when I open the door, sucking the entire history of her house up her nose.

On the counter there’s a new delivery basket with a note from Aunt Beatrice. I’ll be back home later. There’s chicken in the ice box. The puppy nestles into a ball on our old blue couch and I think once again of the painting at the Halls. I shut the windows. I turn on the radio and listen to a teleplay about space and time travel. Nobody goes to space anymore. The world is smaller, and it is better than way. I listen to the news. Medicine developments. Another year of climate catastrophe delayed thanks to No Cars. A group of ability activists asking to make the wagons for those who can cycle more comfortable, the pushback from mechanics who need the resources to fix bikes already in use. The sentiment from everyone that at least its better now. I take the chicken from the ice box and make a fire outside. I fry the harvest of okra and mushrooms in lard we had stored, still fresh from delivery on Tuesday. I make a list of things I could do with the rest of my life. I cross them all out. In the trees, I see two red lights. I blink and they’re gone. I think I’m seeing things, just  putting together a story to make myself feel better. The teleplay ends. The astronauts make it back home. It’s a happy ending but it turns out one of them isn’t an astronaut at all. He kisses his wife goodnight as a stranger, and as a stranger, turns off the lights.

“Puppy,” I say, “Let’s go to sleep.”  I climb into the bed I share with Aunt Beatrice  think about energy preservation and how it is best to keep the lights off but the teleplay scared me a little bit so maybe I can deal with Aunt Beatrice yelling at me when she gets home, in exchange for being at ease. The puppy jumps into bed with me but I don’t want to get her started on bad habits so I place her on the floor. She jumps back up. I put her back on the floor. We go back and forth like that until she gets the point and gives in to the floor. I hold out my hand to let her lick it. Her tongue is warm. I do this every five minutes until I dream of the puppies in the photo, swirling and gnawing at each other’s tails, swallowing each other’s heads.

 I wake up. The lights are all still on. I don’t hear Aunt Beatrice anywhere. Where is she? I hold out my hand for the puppy to lick it and she does, her tongue warm and comforting. I’m fine. I’m safe. Aunt Beatric will be home soon and then I’ll wake up to her snoring.

When I roll over the puppy is next to me in bed, her small body rising and falling as she peacefully snores. Who was licking me? I twist my body and slowly inch towards the edge of the bed. I lower myself slowly, so slowly it’s almost painful. I try not to breathe. When I see the two blinking red eyes in the darkness I’m frozen. It’s come for me, I think. I leap back up and grab the puppy, slamming the door shut and pushing a flimsy chair in front of it. When the door rattles and I run with the puppy into our closet in the hallway. The puppy is growling and I hold her snout closed with my palm. “Shh,” I say. I hear heavy breathing and that awful nail scratching and know I’m not crazy. I know it’s not a wolf. I see its shadow beneath the door, it’s awful breath rattling. It almost sounds like it’s laughing. Then it lets out a horrific howl and dashes away, nails scratching on the floor. I hear glass break.

There must be a reason why I am the only one finding the heads, on this day of all days. I remember my dad’s curly back hairs. I keep my dad’s photo in this closet, in an old shoebox of memories. I look out the window. Red eyes, staring up at me. So it is him, after all. Does that mean whatever is in him, is in me? Everything comes together for me, suddenly. I move our jars of pickled vegetables and find the pad installed into the wall. I dial Eva first.  Her face flashes before me.  She looks sleepy.

“Hello?”

“Eva. Can you come over here?”  Eva yawns.

“Why? What’s up?”

“You know that thing you saw earlier today? Did it have red eyes?”

“I don’t know. It was in a tree.”

“I think it’s trying to tell me something.”

“Like what?” Eva’s eyes got bigger.

“I don’t know. Something about …. I think it’s my dad.”

“What?”

“I think my Dad turns into a monster. I think he sneaks out from the Halls.”

“To kill dogs? Mari, what are you talking about?”

“I already told you.” Eva’s silent on the other line.

“Hello?”

“I’m just worried about you,” Eva says.

“Well, I’m only calling you because I need to call someone before I press the green button. So thanks for being that person.”

“The green button? That’s for emergencies.”

“Good-bye, Eva.”

“Mari, wait!”

I hang up and move my finger to the upper right hand of the screen where the green button lives. My hand shakes. I haven’t pressed the green button since the night my mother was killed. And even then Linda did that all for me.  The screen asks me if this was a life or limb-threatening emergency. I click yes. The screen asks me if there was anyone in my immediate surroundings who could help me. I look at the puppy who is licking her asshole and click no. The screen asks me if I have reached out to someone I can trust with this information. I click yes. The screen asks me if this person can help the immediate situation. I click no. The screen asks me if I remember the laws of our district, which state that you can only press the green button if you are completely helpless and cannot defend your own life. I click yes. The screen asks if I am ready for the process that will follow for pressing the green button. I click yes. It asks me for my birth number and the code for the screen. I type it in along with the code: my mother’s birthday. The screen begins counting down by ten, the electric numbers blasting my brain awake. I hold my breath. I bite my lips, chew on the dead skin.

A slow jingle begins down the street, then gets louder and louder. There will be drama, I’m thinking. There will be neighborhood gossip. But this is normal. This is just the system working. The puppy and I are in the living room and I’m holding the red shovel as protection. She’s running around in circles, chasing her tail. Our window’s been broken and a piece of bloody fur sticks to the edges. That’ll be good. Evidence. They’ll believe me. They knock on the door and the puppy runs to it, happy to greet strangers. I try to feel confident and reasonable. A knock on the door.  I’ll explain to them what I explained to Eva and they won’t think I’m crazy or somebody who causes harm to others and they won’t stick me in a courtyard waiting forever to die.  When I open the door, the responders are all in white, their bikes parked on their stands in a little line. One of them carries a bag which I know holds tranquilizers. A tall man with a hefty beard clears his throat.

“We are here because the green button was activated. We will not use force unless there is an immediate threat. My name is Neighbor Gary and the person holding me accountable is Neighbor Lauren. This is Neighbor Jan, who will activate sleep serum but only when necessary. What is the problem, neighbor?” The puppy’s at my heels. She growls.

“My Dad is in the yard and he’s trying to hurt me.” The puppy barks. I know I can’t say monster because they won’t believe me.

“Your Dad? I see. Neighbor Lauren, please pull up the information we have on this house.”

Neighbor Lauren takes out a remote then clicks a yellow button which shoots out blue light with information into the air between us.

“Residence held by Beatriz Fallon of MA-13. Cynthia Ernez, life taken by Gabriel Ernez on October 21^st, ten years and two months ago. Ernez has been residing in the Hills for 10 years. Are you Marisol?”

“Yes.”

“It says it’s your birthday, Marisol.”

“Yes.”

Neighbor Jan adjusts his backpack of tranquilizers and seems to pick his wedgie. This is who is who is supposed to help? 

“Really exciting time. Do you know what –”

“Not now, Jan.”

“Sorry.”

“Where did you say you saw your father?”

I bring them to the yard. The puppy follows at my heels.  They turn on their flashlights and the light washes over our yard.

“I don’t see anybody here.”

“Neighbor Gary is not believing Marisol, the neighbor who pressed the green button.” Neighbor Lauren speaks into a recorder.

“I’m just stating facts, Neighbor Lauren. There is nobody here.”

“Neighbor Gary must take all measures to see if Neighbor Marisol is safe.”

Neighbor Jan pets the puppy’s stomach and smiles.  She rolls on her back with her tongue out, legs wiggling in the air.

“Cute dog! What’s her name?”

“No name,” I scoop her up and hold her to my chest. I’m surprised at how protective I am of her.

“I had a dog once. But unfortunately –”

“Jesus.” Neighbor Gary shines his light on the lettuce patch.  “These are some good heads of lettuce here. Really round. Do you have a secret for planting them? Ours always get worms.”

Suddenly I feel stupid for pressing the green button. I should’ve just gone back to sleep. These people can’t fucking help me. I’m a stupid idiot girl with an active imagination. Neighbor Gary searches the length of the yard. He walks towards the corner of the garden.

“What do we have here? Oh, no. I’ve been hearing reports about these little guys.” Neighbor Gary is holding up a cat’s head by the ears. Then he gasps. In this moment, I hate that I’m right. A yellow claw shoots out of Gary’s stomach and pulls back, squirting blood everywhere. Neighbor Gary grabs at the insides spilling out of him as blood dribbles from his mouth. The monster knocks it to the ground and begins to feed. I want to move but I can’t. I want to scream but I can’t. Neighbor Jan shakily takes out the tranquilizers but drops them. She faints. Neighbor Lauren drops to her knees and vomits, spewing her delivered harvest onto the grass. Her screams drill into my ears and I see my father again, wailing on the floor next to my mother’s lifeless body. I see my Aunt Beatrice throwing my father’s things into the fire. I see the wooden box that held my mother, being lowered in the grass by the gardens as we said the words from Ruth, where her body would eventually feed the soil which would birth fruit which go later in our mouths. I know it’s wrong to think of people as innocent or not innocent. Neighbor Gary is innocent. Was innocent. He’s dying, anyway. He’s dying and it’s my fault. I hold the puppy to me as she barks and barks.

“S-s-top,” I say, to Puppy and to the monster, pathetically.

What’s eating Gary is enormous. It’s hair bristles, almost jiggles. It’s fly-eyes flick red and in all directions. Hard nails sprout from ten, human-like fingers,  protected by a brush of fur. I don’t know why it has to survive this way; feeding like it never will again. I hear a final “Please,” from Neighbor Gary, and then his hands fall slack behind him. The hard fear on his face fades slowly, an old photograph, as the monster gnaws away at the meat of his neck, snapping his head off like a button. The monster lets out a growl and then a huff. This is it. This is how it ends. Neighbor Lauren backs away on her hands, standing up and stumbling again, dragging Jan by the collar. “Get up!” she says, “Get up!” What have I done?  I’m thinking that the lettuce will surely be ruined now when I hear another yell. An other-worldly scream. It’s Aunt Beatrice, running, flying practically, with her axe. She hacks into him.

“Damn you!” she says, shrieking, the blood showering her, “Damn you, damn you!” I’ve never seen her more alive sinking the axe into the monster’s neck.  The monster’s caught off-guard. The monster had no idea what was coming.

 The jiggling stops. The bug-eyes flutter close, blankets in the wind. It crashes to the ground and stays there. I wait for it to turn into a man, somebody I know, but it doesn’t. Its mouth is open the way Tootsie’s was, pink, wet, gaping. It licks its lips and wheezes. If it weren’t right before me, if I was all alone outside in the woods and could sense something close to me, I would’ve thought it was crying.

I’m told they brought the body into the medic quarters. That they sliced it open at the navel. They pulled out organs that resembled ours: a stomach, a heart, a loopy intestinal track. They peeled back its eyes and stuck a tube down it’s throat. I’m told they have never seen anything like it before. They asked me if I wanted to have a look; I caught it, after all, or rather, I was the one who pressed the green button. I didn’t want to. It was enough to know that I was right. And besides, I wasn’t raised to take credit for anything. I’m told that somebody, probably someone new to the job, wrapped the monster’s body in cloth and then set fire to it, waited for it to turn to ash, that there’s an ongoing investigation with the Department. Our district hasn’t seen an animal head in over a year. Everybody is as safe as they’ve ever been. Aunt Beatrice never really talked to me about that night. She wasn’t really mediating an argument in Education, she was grabbing a bell from another district for my bike, for me, as a present. The bell was golden and when you flicked it, the noise wasn’t shrill or abrasive, but light and pleasant, like it was saying good morning instead of saying get out of my way. She gave it to me wordlessly, in a small pink cup. She isn’t one for gifts because she thinks they make us forget our commitments to one another, but I think sometimes they’re for helping us remember someone when they’re gone. When she arrived her instincts simply set in, and after she was done killing it, she dropped the axe and held on to me in a way she never had before, like she was trying to squeeze all the bad out of me. Later, I told her my secret theory, the one about how it was the monster who killed my mother all those years ago.

“That’s certainly a theory,” she tells me.

“But don’t you think it’s weird, that I was the only one finding the heads? And that my mother died in a similar way? I mean, what if Dad was framed—“

“Similar? Your mother’s head wasn’t missing, Marisol. Let’s talk about this another time. I’m tired.”

“And then there’s the thing about the red eyes. The picture I have of my father -”

“Marisol, that’s how pictures used to be. It’s a trick of the light.”

“You never want to hear what I have to say! I was right about the monster. Why can’t I be right about this?” Aunt Beatrice sprays the counters again, even though they looked clean to me.

“Get the mop,” she says, not looking at me.

“Why don’t you talk to me?”

“Get the mop,” she repeats. She fills up a bucket with water and adds two drops of apple cider vinegar and soap she had made earlier that week. I shove the mop in and think about how it looks like a woman upside-down, drowning. I dance the upside-down woman all over the kitchen floor while she dusts the cabinets. She opens them up and wipes down our dish ware, the two plates we share between each other. The sun goes down so I go outside and gather some blue flowers that have just started blooming. I cut them swiftly with scissors and place them in a jar of water. I set them on the kitchen table, where Aunt Beatrice is polishing the silverware. I think I see her bottom lip trembling, little flecks of water hitting the spoons.

Puppy got bigger and she stays by my side. It’s taken me a while to go back to the Halls. An entire year. In the year my hair has grown a little longer. Linda’s ankle never improved but I bring Puppy over to her every day and she teaches her simple commands: paw, sit, play dead.  I’ve ignored incoming calls from my father. Eva started working there, as an intake specialist. I never apologized to her about freaking out over the phone, but we are close enough that some things are understood, and then they fade. I think it’s a good job for her. Today’s my birthday again. Nineteen. Tomorrow I start with the mechanics. I am not self-conscious anymore.  I take my bike to the Hills as I did only a year ago.  I lock my bike in the pod again. I open the door again but this time it’s Eva sitting there. I don’t know what happened with the girl who writes the plays. Maybe I’ll be listening to the radio sometime and recognize her voice, and it will be like our secret, because I knew her before she was good.

 Eva sits with me before I see him. Eva moves her foot around in a circle. Her ankle is brown, bony, and tender. She bumps her shoulder on mine, to tell me that she is there.

My dad is right where I left him, a year ago, as if only seconds passed since I ran away. For me the year was filled with movement, the puppy’s running into a full grown dog, the leaves shaking yellow then dying beautifully, then blooming green again, my hairs branching apart at the ends, but how does he tell time? What changes in the Halls?  I never want to wait like this. I never want to be this still. Seeing the back of his head, shaved and grey, sends something down my spine again, a messenger, maybe, a person with a bag full of letters all screaming HELP. The dog’s by my heels, panting. We walk to him together. My hands shake. I take a seat next to him, at a white table that is just starting to rust.

It’s strange seeing my father like this.  Like somebody stuck him through some vat of aging juice and he came out on the other side. I guess that’s time. I guess we’re on the other side before we even know it. He is only feet away from me. It’s the closest I’ve been to him since that night. I forgot that his eyes are like mine: a deep brown. A deer’s eyes.

“Marisol,” he says. “My Marisol.” He stands up, the chairs squeaking away from him. I see the therapist stand up from another table, just in case he tries anything. You are never really alone here. My face is wet. He opens his arms and I find myself in them. My dad. One half of all of me. He lets out a low moan that almost sounds like a laugh and my heart is wrapped tightly in string and desperately yanked. We pull a part. I wipe my face and he wipes his. \ 

“And who is this?” he says, looking down at the dog.

“That’s the dog.” Puppy has her tongue out in a smile. He sticks his hand down and she runs to it, sniffing. He picks her up with ease, not even thinking about it. He is smiling in a way I’ve seen myself smile, in pictures, as if he just drank a bunch of water and is about to laugh. I am caught up in this moment. It bursts away from the circumstance it was born from, it stands alone and shivers. I want to hold it forever and keep it warm. But there’s a reason I came here.

“Dad, I need to ask you something.” He’s holding the dog like a baby, patting her back as she licks his face. He laughs at her touch.

“Yes, my love. Ask me anything.”

“Did you hear about the monster who was taking heads of animals and um, people sometimes?”

“I think so. There was something about it in the weekly briefings. Why?”

“Well, I don’t know if you know this, but I caught it, technically.”

“Did you? I’m very proud of you, sweetie.”

“Yes, um. So, something else I wanted to bring up is—” The puppy licks my father’s face wildly. He seems so happy. So happy that he isn’t even paying attention to me. I clear my throat.

“Something else is, um, I just think it’s funny, or, it’s interesting, I think it’s interesting that …that it’s similar to… well, the monster. I sort of think… I sort of think the monster killed mom that night.” The smile on my father’s face falls. He gently brings the dog down.

“Mari.”

“The monster that overtook you that night. Or the government implanted something in specific groups of people to turn them against one another so that we would never rise up again.” My heart is racing.

He lets out a deep breath of air. He scratches his head. The dog’s still at his ankles, begging to be picked up again. I make kissing sounds at her. She whimpers.  He looks away from me and closes his eyes. My father’s hands, two rakes, scratch the dog’s thin neck as an instinct. He sees me watching so he takes his hands away, folds his fingers gently together in his lap. I cross and uncross my legs, the chair making a little squeaking sound as I do. He inhales. I exhale. He looks at me again with his deer-eyes that are mine. There are stretches of land between us, an abandoned, sloping highway we’d sled down in the winter on garbage pails. The dog barks.

“Come here, baby,” I say to the dog, holding out my hand, making little kissing sounds. She looks up at me and then at my dad and then back at me again, tongue out, smiling.  “Come here,” I say.

Excerpted from Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House 2025)

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!</i> by Melissa Lozada-Oliva appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From Not Today, Satan by Samantha Joyce

I’m destined to rule the damned… not fall for one.

By Samantha Joyce

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Published on October 16, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Not Today, Satan by Samantha Joyce, a young adult fantasy out from Entangled: Teen on November 4.

Plucking another folder from the stack beside me, I flip it open and call to the line without looking up, “Next!”

“Uh, I think that’s me. But there’s been a mistake.”

“Seriously?” I rub my temples as the pressure in my head builds. “Did you not hear the dude in front of you? We don’t make mistakes here.”

I scan the information provided in the report with bleary vision.

Why do I keep getting the complainers? I should pawn them off to my coworker, Ferus. He may be the worst demon who ever demoned and he hates humans more than I do, but he has a way with them. By the end, they think he’s doing them a favor by sending them off to their lot.

“You don’t understand,” the voice persists. “I really don’t belong here. I did nothing wrong.”

I study the report. An elderly lady with white hair and glasses smiles at me from the attached photo Father used for judgment. Funny, the voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to a senior citizen.

I raise my eyes and frown.

The boy before me bears no resemblance to the woman in the photo. His eyes are the kind of blue I’ve seen only in pictures Father’s shown me of oceans on Earth. Their depth makes me shiver.

Father warned me that oceans are as dangerous as shadelings. They may appear calm and beautiful on the surface, but monsters lurk below.

A lock of sandy-brown hair falls in front of his right eye. He’s young, maybe my age. Too young to be standing in front of me. Usually, humans his age go to the in-between until they earn their way up or down.

He’s done something awful to be standing in front of me.

“You don’t look like an Ethel Tofflemeyer,” I say, reading the name typed beneath the old woman’s photo.

“I get that a lot.” He lets out a low chuckle.

I narrow my eyes. “You know where you are, right?”

“Let’s see, fire…brimstone… creepy-ass demons… I’m going to take a guess and say it’s not Disneyland,” he says. “This place does not scream, ‘The Happiest Place on Earth.’”

His sideways grin throws me. Not only because I can’t remember the last time a shadeling smiled at me, but because, for some reason, my heart picks up speed when his smile reaches his eyes.

I swallow.

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Not Today, Satan

Samantha Joyce

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Not Today, Satan

Samantha Joyce

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Something’s definitely defective in this one. No wonder he’s here.

“I’ve never been to Disneyland,” I say, my gaze locked with his. “But that’s not our motto.”

An agonized cry bursts from one of the shadelings in the boat to our right, and all traces of humor drain from his face. “I’m getting that.”

“What have you done with Ethel Tofflemeyer?”

“Who?”

I hold up the photo of the elderly woman, and his eyes widen with recognition.

“Oh, her! She was in front of me. She saw I was upset and offered me her place in line. Then she gave me a stale butterscotch candy and disappeared.” He holds up a gold wrapper and rubs his chin. “Huh. I guess you can take it with you.”

Closing the file, I sigh, then scrawl an X across the front in black marker and toss it on top of a pile marked “Last-minute Ascensions.”

This happens sometimes. Someone who’s on the cusp of making it to Paradise earns their way up. It’s not a common occurrence, because humans, but I’ve seen it once or twice.

I pull the stack of folders I haven’t gotten to yet toward me and wade through them. “What’s your name?”

“Reynolds,” he says, peering at me over the files. “Nate Reynolds. Err… Nathan, I guess.”

“Mr. Reynolds, can I see the stamp on your wrist?”

“What stamp? I don’t—” He squints at his inner arm and gasps when he spots the mark etched into his skin. He opens his mouth to say something, but, for the first time since he’s joined my line, Nathan Reynolds appears to be speechless.

I hold out my hand, but he remains frozen, his gaze on his wrist.

I’ve seen this before, too. Shadelings so surprised about being here that they cease to function. I bite the inside of my cheek. So much for getting out of here early today. At this rate, I’ll be doing overtime.

I lift my butt out of my chair and grab his wrist. He jumps at my touch, and I gasp. I’ve forgotten how cold their flesh is compared to my own. His skin is smooth as ivory, soft as velvet. I clear my throat and scribble the numbers onto a blank sheet of paper.

He snatches his hand back the moment I loosen my grip.

My face must betray my surprise, because he mutters an apology and holds his wrist out again. It trembles visibly in the dim lighting of the Welcome Hall. “Did you get it?”

“Yeah, hang on. Let me find your file.” I scan his papers for a long time. I’d been right about us being the same age. Nathan Reynolds is—was—seventeen. An orphan from Los Angeles whose parents died in a car accident when he was only six. He’d spent most of his life trekking from foster home to foster home.

Until today. The day he killed his foster dad.

Police found him standing over the body, clutching the murder weapon. When he didn’t respond to their pleas to drop the gun, they shot him. He died before he made it to the hospital.

I study Nathan Reynolds from behind the folder. It’s hard to believe that those eyes that crinkle when he smiles conceal the mind of a murderer. But I know better.

My home is proof that humans are capable of awful things. Especially those you least suspect. It’s why the line in front of me never ends. Humans don’t know how to be good.

“Well?” he asks, hope blooming across his features like a fire rose bursting through the dirt in Father’s garden.

“Yup, you definitely belong here,” I say, sliding an icy tone beneath my words. “You’re a murderer.”

“That’s not what happened.” He leans forward and I force myself to maintain his gaze, despite every instinct to look away. “I was framed.”

“Look,” I say. “I have nothing to do with this. Pleading with me won’t help. I check you in, and off you go. You’ve already been judged, and it seems you were judged correctly.” I toss a jumpsuit onto the desk. “Here are your new clothes. You’ll be in Lot Thirteen, with the other murderers.”

His fingers curl around my wrist, and I gasp at the contact. I took his arm earlier, but shadelings aren’t ever supposed to touch me. Not that it’s usually a problem. Most of them are too scared to try.

“Let go of me,” I growl.

“Sorry.” He drops my wrist and wrings his fingers. “I didn’t mean to do that. I hope I didn’t hurt you. I… Please, you need to help me. I don’t belong here.”

“Is there a problem?” Neither of us noticed Nefas approach, and we both jump at his appearance at my desk.

All color drains from Nathan Reynolds’s face, and I almost feel sorry for him.

Almost.

“No problem, Nefas. Mr. Reynolds here was about to get on your boat to Lot Thirteen. You should help him find his way.”

I watch as Nefas escorts Nathan Reynolds toward the river that leads out of Dominus, the capital, and into the cities of sin, and the human gives me one last pleading glance over his shoulder.

An ache blooms in my chest.

Lot Thirteen is a horrid place. One of the worst. Joke Boy’s not going to do well there.

Not that I care. He deserves what he gets.

They all do.

Copyright © 2025 by Samantha Joyce. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

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Excerpts fantasy

Read an Excerpt From Fallen City by Adrienne Young

When a legionnaire falls in love with a Magistrate’s daughter, their love will threaten the fate of a city and the will of the gods.

By Adrienne Young

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Published on October 15, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Fallen City by Adrienne Young, a new fantasy novel out from Saturday Books on November 4.

CHAPTER  1

NOW: LUCA

There were no gods left to pray to.

The short sword glimmered as I tilted its edge against the sharpening stone, the metal warm against my cal­loused fingers. A line of recruits watched in a kind of daze, their focus trained on my grip as the high-pitched vibration drowned out the sounds of early morning in the camp.

Sharpening your blade correctly is a means of survival, I’d told them. As necessary as cleaning your armor or fastening your boots before battle. What I didn’t tell them was that there are times when none of those things matter. That no amount of preparation could prevent the kind of death many of them would meet.

The motion of the wheel sank deep into my hands as I leaned my weight into the sword, turning it again at just the right angle until it held steady against the stone with almost no sound at all.

“Give it a try.” I handed the sword to the man beside me.

The unsteady look in his eye did little to reassure me. If l had to guess, I would say he had once been a mason or one of the labor­ers who maintained the city walls. He didn’t look as if he’d ever swung a sword in his life.

He was at least ten years my senior, but he gave me an obedi­ent nod and took the sword, eyeing the blade. It was a humble weapon, the iron a flat gray and missing the faint shimmer of the swords that had been forged and strengthened with godsblood. With the right blow, the metal would fail him.

He got to work, stepping into my place so he could position its edge against the wheel as it cranked back to life. The sound of metal on stone filled the tent, and I watched his eyes focus, his strong hands turning the sword a bit clumsily until it slipped, sending an eruption of sparks into the air. He caught it by the handle before it fell to the cobblestones underfoot, eyes wide as he looked up at me.

I motioned for him to try again, and when he set the blade to the wheel this time, it took only seconds before he had the feel of it. The medallion that hung around his neck signified him as a citizen of Isara, but I paid no mind to the family name engraved on it. These recruits weren’t the apathetic privilege-born legion­naires I’d sparred with in the training ring. The ones who grew up in the Citadel District, enlisting for their parents’ political gain. They weren’t the zealous, hot-blooded youths I’d fought beside when the first breath of rebellion flooded the streets, either. These were dwindling remnants of the Lower City. Broken pieces of lost family lines who’d joined up for the rations and the protection of the New Legion. I’d stopped looking at their faces months ago, eager to keep myself from recognizing them when we pulled the arrow-pierced bodies from the streets. But the questions still hung in my mind as I drew the smell of the hot metal into my lungs. How many children did this man have? How many would miss him once he was gone?

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Fallen City

Adrienne Young

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Fallen City

Adrienne Young

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He lifted the blade from the wheel, and when I gave him a nod of approval, he stepped back in line.

“Next.”

I gestured to the man behind him, an old Isarian with a white beard and sun-worn skin that sagged. As soon as he drew his sword, I exhaled a little. He had strong hands and arms. That, at least, was something. But that meager sense of hope withered when I saw the talisman that hung alongside his medallion. The braided cord lay beneath the opening of his tunic, a sign that this was a man who believed the gods would protect him.

He tried to be discreet when he glanced up over my head, but then forced his eyes down with a look of shame. He wasn’t the only one in the group I’d caught staring at the mark. That was something I hadn’t gotten used to. I didn’t think I ever would.

It had been almost six months since the gods had marked me, placing a faint circlet of light over my head. It wasn’t as visible in the glare of the sun, but in dim, shadowed light like this, it glim­mered just enough to catch the eye.

The scrape of the wheel sounded in fits and starts as the man got started, and I tilted my hand in the air silently, showing him the correct angle. He made the adjustment, giving me a grateful nod, but my attention was slowly drawn to the opening of the tent, where I could hear the low hum of voices. Dust had been stirred into the air.

My brow creased, my arms falling from where they were crossed over my chest, and I watched the light outside change just a little. Far beyond the walls of the city, the sun was just rising over the horizon, but the stillness of the camp had shifted somehow. I could feel it.

One by one, the recruits were sensing it, too. They looked up, faces turning toward the sunlight, and the man lifted the sword from the wheel, waiting.

“Every blade,” I ordered, leaving them.

I pushed outside, expecting to find my tribune waiting, but he was gone. The moment the Centurion’s medals had been placed on my chest, I’d been assigned a handpicked legionnaire honored for his talents in battle. A tribune’s only job was to protect the highest­ ranking soldiers, and in the last three months alone, I’d watched two of them die. This one would be the third.

I looked up and down the street, trying to spot him. I hadn’t been able to shake him from my shadow for more than an hour at a time. So, where was he?

The Loyal Legion’s barricades were erected along the river­ front, where the soldiers who’d been our brothers-in-arms less than a year ago were hunkered down and waiting for the end we all knew was coming. They’d chosen their side, just like we had. And most of the time, I could hardly blame them for it. The only question was how much blood would be spilled before it was finally over.

Our sprawling camp marked the hard-won front line, flank­ ing the opposite edge of the river that cut the walled city of Isara in two unequal parts. The first was the Citadel District, where the Citadel sat on a hill, encircled by the villas of the Consul, Magistrates, and other highborn families. It was still dark, save for the lights of the Forum’s great dome, the streets empty. The commotion wasn’t coming from there.

Behind me was the Lower City, ten times the size of the dis­trict and filled with everyone else. It had taken months to fight our way through the compact maze of streets and buildings all the way to the edge of the Sophanes River, and for twelve nights, we’d held what was left of the Consul’s Loyal Legion on the other side. It, too, was quiet. Just beginning to stir as the temperature warmed.

It took a few seconds for me to realize what was off. It was the camp itself. By this time each morning, there were already legionnaires going about their daily tasks, and in preparation for what lay ahead, there was more than enough work to be done. We outnumbered what was left of the Loyal Legion, but the last stand in the district would be a bloody one. In a matter of days, we’d be crossing the river.

I took a step forward, where the tents opened up enough to see past the camp. It was all but empty now, a stream of red tunics spilling down the bank of the river. Except for one. My tribune appeared, pushing through the legionnaires in the opposite direc­tion. As soon as he saw me, his pace quickened. He had one hand clenched to the hilt of his sword.

“What the hell is going on?” I snapped, eyes scanning the growing crowd in the distance.

“It’s the south bridge, Centurion.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, my gut twisted.

For the first time, I looked the tribune in the eye. His dark irises were sharply focused on me, the set of his jaw firm. There wasn’t so much as a ripple of unsteadiness there, but I could sense the faint shadow of something else.

My feet were moving before he could fall into step beside me.

“Three bodies this time—Magistrates.” He kept his voice low, confirming what I already knew.

It wasn’t the first time dawn had broken over the hanging corpses of Magistrates and their families on the south bridge. They were the reason this war had started, the wielders of the judgment stones that controlled the fate of the city. But now they were being hunted one by one, emboldening the soldiers of the New Legion with the promise of an empty Forum once we crossed the river.

“Are there any women?” I rasped, throat tight.

“Sir?”

“Women.” I could barely get the word out. “Are any of them women?”

“Yes. Two women and one man.”

My pulse was racing so fast now that it felt like my heart would stop altogether. More legionnaires ran past us, everyone headed to the bridge, and I pushed into the crowd as panic flooded my veins. I could see the pillars of the stone archway ahead, but there were too many people. I couldn’t get a view of the water.

The tribune stayed close to my side, one arm shoving into the bodies before us to create a path. But it took only a moment for the legionnaires to recognize me, a collective hush falling over them. They parted until the street was open before me, and their gazes drifted above my head to the mark, a look of reverence falling over their faces.

I ignored them, taking advantage of the opportunity to get to the railing at the river’s edge. Once I could see the bank, I strug­gled to keep my steps steady until I reached it.

Not her. Please, gods, don’t let it be her.

“Centurion.”

My tribune’s voice faded away behind me, my heart turning into a knot wedged between my collarbones. I couldn’t breathe for the several seconds it took for my eyes to find them. Three bodies were hung from the bottom of the bridge, their forms limp and heavy. The river ran below their feet, the water white­ capped and quick as it traveled from one side of the city to the other.

The dead man’s face was turned up to the sky, his neck grue­somely broken, and his bulging red eyes open and empty. He had a crescent ring of hair that crested his balding head and a bloom of dark blood stained the front of his fine white tunic. It looked as if he’d soiled himself, too.

I nearly lost my balance, catching the railing as my vision fo­cused on the pale blond braids of the woman who hung beside him. She was missing a sandal, her bare foot blue and misshapen, as if it had been crushed.

Not her.

But the third body was turning slowly in the air, the face hid­den by a curtain of dark hair. My hand tightened on the railing, slick with sweat. My chest felt like it was caving in, my whole body bracing for what I was about to see. The green silk chiton fluttered in the breeze, gently caressing the pale hands that hung limp in the air, her skin almost completely drained of its color. The tassels of the belt at her waist were caked in mud, the ties un­raveling, as if she’d been dragged through the streets. A shaking breath escaped my lips as the glint of a gold ring caught the light.

I swallowed down the urge to retch, as slowly, the body con­tinued to turn on the rope. The wind picked up, blowing the length of hair across her face, and by the time I could see it, black was pushing in along the edges of my vision.

It wasn’t her.

The image of the woman suspended from the bridge was in­stantly replaced by my memory of another, which was cast across my dreams each night. Salt water dripping from her hair, the sound of her laugh. The shape of her body beneath the wet silk as she waded out into the sea. The memory flashed in my mind, flick­ering in and out until the blue-tinged face of the dead woman finally came back into focus.

Not her. Not her.

A sharp, tingling feeling spiraled from the center of my belly as I finally inhaled, and then I was pushing back into the gathered legionnaires, away from the river.

“Centurion?”

The tribune followed at my back, but I kept my eyes on the cobblestones until I reached the edge of the crowd, certain that I was going to pass out. I barely made it to the corner of the building across the street, my legs threatening to give out beneath me with every step. I caught my balance on the stone just as I vom­ited, and I was only half aware of the tribune taking position be­hind me to hide me from view.

I retched until my stomach was empty, the rush of blood in my head making me dizzy. By the time I was steady on my feet again, my tribune was waiting, discreetly holding a cloth be­tween us. I took it, trying to catch my breath.

“Are you alright, sir?” he said, eyes still fixed to the street. He’d been like a splinter beneath my skin for weeks, but he at least did me the courtesy of not watching as I wiped the vomit from my mouth.

The crowd at the bridge had multiplied now, and the sound of cheering had begun to fill the air. The collective chant took shape slowly, growing louder as more voices joined in.

“Thirty-three! Thirty-three! Thirty-three!”

The number changed every time a Magistrate’s body was hung from the bridge—it was the number of them left in the Citadel.

“Centurion Roskia,” my tribune murmured.

I wiped the sweat from my brow, trying to breathe through the sick feeling still gripping my gut. I knew he was right. The Centurion Roskia and his cohort of forty-eight legionnaires were some of the best soldiers we had, and there was no doubt that they were one of the reasons we’d managed to push the front all the way to the Sophanes River. But he was also the most bru­tal and barbaric Isarian in our ranks, and he’d made a name for himself by hunting down and killing every Magistrate who at­tempted to flee the city. After more than two dozen unsanctioned skirmishes and executions, he’d been relegated to the gates in an effort to contain him until we crossed the bridge. But that hadn’t kept him and his legionnaires at bay.

“Thirty-three! Thirty-three!” The sound of the words warped in my mind.

The seats in the Forum were now half empty. And it was only a matter of time until I saw Maris Casperia hanging from one of those ropes. And when that happened, it wouldn’t just be the end of me. It would be the end of everything.

I pushed off the wall, stalking back toward the camp, where the smoke from the temple fire was still rising from the Illyrium. I glanced back one more time at the crowd, at the fists lifting into the air, the sound of a bright, fragile hope in their voices.

Traitors, they’d called us, when we first revolted. Defectors and rebels. When the first arrows flew over the Forum. When the first barricades went up. But it wasn’t until I saw the bodies in the streets that I realized what we’d done. And for that, I didn’t know if there was a name.

Excerpted from Fallen City, copyright © 2025 by Adrienne Young.

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Excerpts military fantasy

Read an Excerpt From Lies Weeping by Glen Cook

From the godfather of grimdark himself comes the first book in a new arc of his groundbreaking Chronicles of the Black Company…

By Glen Cook

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Published on October 14, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Lies Weeping by Glen Cook, the first book in A Pitiless Rain— a brand new arc in the Chronicles of the Black Company—publishing with Tor Books on November 4.

Arkana’s View

That airheaded, freckle-faced bimbo Shukrat wanted to start our Book with: “So there I was… and yada yada… and alcohol may have been involved.” Yeah. That girl has no sense of dignity. Although I think that opening would have worked for about half of the episodes that Pop recorded in his Books, you want to know the truth. But that does not fit this time.

Sorry, Shukrat.

So, anyway, all right, I will do the writing thing, just to have something to do, until I can figure out how I can get myself back home. If home is still there. The news from over there is never good.

You would think I would have learned that that dream is really a nightmare.

We need to get more serious, both of us girls. We need to start where it all started. Only trouble is, some parts started in fifty different places, even some of them back before anybody’s parents were born. So, I figure that I will start where this started for us. When we took over writing the Annals for Pop. Not even a little bit enthusiastically. Like, Pop bugged me and bugged me and I managed to stay away from it until he ascended, but, then, nobody else wanted the job and then… Lady says, “Why don’t you girls take care of it? You should do something more around here than just hang out, turning chow into crap and distracting the soldiers.” I mean, what is that? And… I hate her. She is looking gooder than me, lately, only nobody notices that but me.

Anyway, after Pop ascended to god status… I guess that is an exaggeration, but it is all the same to me. Whatever it was. Me and Shukrat finally gave in and started keeping these Annals.

So, the Book of Arkana and Shukrat Voroshk: In those days the Black Company was in service to no one. In those days the Company was a nation unto itself.

So, there we were…

We—meaning the Black Company, in which I include myself because I seem to be serving a life sentence here for my sins—were retreating from one world, across the plain of glittering stone, toward a shadowgate that would let us trade the dangers of the plain for the questionable safety of the Company’s onetime haven, Hsien, in the world we called the Land of Unknown Shadows, a realm that Shukrat and I do not know because we came to the Company while it was headed the other direction, mad-bound to reconquer a whole lot of crazy that they helped create before they ever made the Hsien-ward journey the first time. Behind us lay the great fortress with no name where Croaker became the Steadfast Guardian and whence, at the very last minute before we left out of that place, Lady, finally recovered from an almost crippling bout of depression, decided to bring out her daughter Booboo, that Croaker had put into the frozen storage down under, after she died. Which was kind of good for her because she never got any older while she was down there, dead, but, somehow, not permanently. Shivetya must have done something, maybe as part of his deal with Croaker. Maybe he did something about Lady’s head, too, and that was why she was all get-up-and-go again.

I do not understand Lady’s thinking on Booboo. Booboo could only get older and die again eventually if she was out in the Land of Unknown Shadows. But Lady was Lady and not even the Captain or Croaker could get her to do something that she did not want to do.

Anyway, Shukrat and I only knew about Hsien through hearsay— and what we had heard did not make us look forward to the Hsienish experience. They told us that things could be even weirder over there than anything we saw in the world that we just left. Where we had to leave so many Company people in the ground, all because of stuff that I still did not understand.

Suvrin is Captain now. I feel sorry for him sometimes. I never met anybody so sure that he was unfit for the job that he had been chosen to do: to be Lord Commander of an army of eleven thousand unruly, bitter combat veterans.

Only reason I am here is, I got stupid. I let my dumbass cousin Gromovol talk me into believing that if we got in with some outsiders who were raiding our world, which they called Khatovar, when they were hunting for some old enemy, we could go with them to some other world where we could take over and make us an empire of our own, and not have to put up with any more crap from the old men of the Voroshk. There were six of us to start but Aijee chickened out before we got started and Daiskei stayed with her even though he was as hot for the scheme as Gromovol was. Daiskei was just hotter for Aijee. Shukrat had already been captured by Pop and Lady, then. Us other four were, too, before we got a real handle on what our situation really was.

Looking back from today I have to admit that Gromovol had to have been the most blind-ass arrogantly overconfident, stupid! Voroshk that I ever knew.

Shukrat’s View

Do not sell yourself short, Cousin. Gromo was not unique. And the Annals of the Black Company are not all about you. We are supposed to be recording Company history as it happens. And we are supposed to study the stuff that people like Croaker wrote in the past so we can advise decision-makers about pitfalls run into before. And, so, we can know what kind of stuff we should put down to be remembered.

And, bimbo? It is not me that is shaking her oversize fat bags in Suvrin’s face every chance she gets. You really think you are going to get something going for you by vamping that guy? You are fooling yourself, Cousin.

Anyway, so, we came to the shadowgate to Hsien. A lot of our soldiers came from Hsien originally. Most of the rest were from the world we were fleeing. They were all different crazy religions. The Company saw a lot of fighting back there so a lot of the Hsien guys were not coming home. And some women, too.

My main job these days, when I am not writing stuff down, is looking after Howler and Croaker’s main squeeze, Lady. And Tobo, heh, but that is not hardly the same bucket of monkey guts, as Croaker might have said. And, lately, Howler takes care of himself. And Lady’s trouble is really all inside her head.

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Lies Weeping

Glen Cook

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Lies Weeping

Glen Cook

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Arkana calls me an airhead but tell me this! Which one of Croaker’s Voroshk girls has studied enough to be able to read some of the old Annals, the books that he and Lady and Murgen wrote? That is a couple different languages right there and neither one of them is used by any of these other thousands of people. The answer would be me. Shukrat Voroshk. Who is cuter than Arkana, too!

Aw, garbage! I can feel Croaker looking over my shoulder and grumbling about, “The Annals ain’t no gods-be-damned diary, cuter daughter. It is not about you, either!” The same trash I yell at Arkana about all the time.

Anyway, so now we have come off the glittering stone. We have come to a place called An Abode of Ravens, which was the Company base before. I have not seen a lot of crows yet but the name sounds almost musical in the local language. There was a lot of excitement at first because the first thing anybody saw, after we came off of the plain, was this drooping, totally-ugly-shade-of-mustard banner that had Hsien-style ideographic characters on it that Tobo claims said, “We, too, have died.”

What the heck did that mean?

Nobody could even come up with a guess.

And that was just the first weird thing. Next thing was, we found a horde of squatters in the town. There had been some big social upheaval while the Company was gone. The ethnic group that had held most of the temporal power, who called themselves the Children of the Dead and made up such power centers as the Noble Judges, the File of Nine, and the Court of All Seasons, had been overthrown. In some places they had been the victims of genocide. The squatters were refugees.

The File of Nine still existed—with all new members. The same was true for the Court of All Seasons. Referring to “the Children of the Dead,” apparently, could get someone into big trouble, anymore.

All too complicated for this airhead. The way it sounded, though, Tobo, his mom, and Lady had worked some stunt back in the day in order to steal the secret of how to repair a damaged shadowgate. In the process they unmasked some secret master types belonging to the File of Nine. An uprising eventually happened. Chaos ruled. And refugees fled the chaos.

More than usual business in the Land of Unknown Shadows.

Croaker might have said, “Boys will be boys.” Meaning that, in the main, people are idiots.

So, we could expect complications at An Abode of Ravens because, when the Company left, back when, nobody thought to leave anybody to run things on this side. Nobody thought they would be coming back, except the local guys.

Suvrin was a total softie. He did not kill even one squatter. He never even ran them off. He just put them to work. Best they would have got from me would have been a running head start. But like the Captain says, I do not really know how they do things around these parts.

Suvrin told those people that they were welcome to stay—but now they would work the Company farms and pastures. In return, they would get a more than fair share of the produce.

I expect that he will be sorry.

Shivetya’s View

as recorded by Dikken, later

He warned me.

I maybe conned myself.

I did not want to listen. I did not want to hear it. I did not want to look. I did not want to see it.

I saw and heard only what two-thirds of a century of obsession left me wanting to see and hear.

I would be a god! There would be no more unknowns! No more secrets, no more hidden things. Nothing would escape my all-seeing eye! No whisper would evade my all-hearing ear!

Right!

Have a care what you wish for.

It was there. Everything that I ever wanted, information-wise. Almost. Except the all-hearing.

All at once. In a grand drowning deluge. A flash flood of scriptural scale, of ten million tangled threads of doom.

My dearest enemy kept me from drowning, that blessed devil driven by an implacable, determined selfishness of her own.

I could see myself from outside. Me devil, great ugly demon form slumped on an ancient wooden throne, a litter of silver daggers at my feet. And one ragged-ass white crow clawing my left shoulder and cawing into my left ear, speaking words I did not understand and do not remember, in a language I never learned but might know now could I but grasp an island of peace in which to think. Words of power, for sure, because the I that was me asserted itself against the torrent. I flailed to the surface, gasping, managing long enough for my dear hated one to toss me a lifeline in hopes of someday saving her own gorgeous but deadly wicked self.

I should have insisted on an apprenticeship.

The scruffy white crow laughed. “Shoulda woulda, lover. You were having none of that.” A different language this time, Jewel Cities trader pidgin, from our earliest days. “One taste and you were hooked worse than an opium addict.”

Despite the pressure of all the pasts and presents of sixteen worlds crushing in I found myself fascinated by the crow’s vocabulary and flawless diction—almost long enough to slip my grasp on the moment. The now that I had for so long shared with my contemporaries as the reality.

The crow said, “I wish I could deal you some real pain. Pain can be quite useful as a tool for enforcing focus.”

I had a notion that her being able to torture me might not be a bad thing. At that moment, mind briefly unclouded, I was stricken terrified by what I had done to myself. When I took the plunge, truly, I’d had no idea how easily I might drown, how quickly I could become but one more drop lost in an ocean.

“Well?”

Thank you. For being so stubbornly selfish.

“Ha!”

That was gospel. The soul of that tramp crow was the tramp incarnation of chaotic wicked mischief-making beauty, Soulcatcher, great sorceress and deposed Protector of Taglios—and, these days, entirely dependent upon me for her future, should she hope to have one. She was a prisoner in a cavern below my throne, frozen, able to go on only so long as the new god of the glittering stone carried on. She might be able to rise up and go out to torment the world again, one day, should I choose to set her free.

A reversal of once-upon-a-time roles. A situation we both found provocatively tasty.

The woman had failed to seduce me when we were free-range live people. How could she win me now that we were both creatures of twilight?

As ever she had, despite our altered circumstances, she read my mind. “I am in no hurry. We have all the time in time, now. Don’t we?”

She’d had practice at this. I was a relative newbie, with only one tour in the grave on my résumé.

I felt my grip slip. The torrent cared nothing for seduction. I was pure, raw, raping power. You have to keep me afloat until I learn how to swim, that’s for sure.

Mocking laughter, but rather strained.

She might want to make light but for her the stakes were mortal. Life itself was the bet she had on the table. Me, I had only my I to lose.

And then?

What of the glittering stone? What of the great fortress with no name and all its never-aging prisoners? Those things were now mine to mind and maintain and, in some cases, cherish.

What of them if I let the current sweep me away?

Beloved enemy, hold me close!

Excerpted from Lies Weeping, copyright © 2025 by Glen Cook.

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Excerpts Horror

Read an Excerpt From Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Sometimes you think you can see things behind the fence. Bad things. So it’s better not to look…

By Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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Published on October 9, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Darker Days, a new horror novel by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, out from Harper on October 28.

RALPH

The Sick Woman. The Good Samaritans of Bird Street. There’s No Place Like Home.

3 NOVEMBER

The woman looked like she wanted to die. She looked like she was going to die anyway, even if they didn’t help her this afternoon. But here she was, in the hands of the Bird Street neighbours, as they took her into the woods.

Her name was Ann Olsen Dickinson and the most important thing, according to Ralph Lewis, was that she seemed at peace. There had been plenty of conversations between Ralph, his neighbour Elizabeth Aikman and Mrs Olsen Dickinson over the past few weeks, but Ralph knew that most people’s true motivations wouldn’t be apparent until the final hour. Sometimes they felt they were a burden to their families. Especially the elderly and chronically ill. If their eyes revealed anything but self-determination, Ralph would deem the operation ethically flawed and call the whole thing off. Last-minute if he had to. He was a judge for the King County Superior Court in Seattle, but you didn’t have to be a judge to see it. You had to be human.

Ann Olsen Dickinson’s case was clear as day: she was ready. The proof was not just in the ravages of her devastating disease – the white fuzz on her scalp, her scrawny claw-like hands or her shrivelled, sunken face, submerged in her woollen scarf like a deflated moon. As they carried her palanquin between the larches in the pouring rain, Mrs Olsen Dickinson was in a state of bliss.

She couldn’t stop talking. ‘Oh, would you look at that,’ she said, her voice a crow’s. ‘All those lights. And music! Did you do all this for me?’

Elizabeth smiled from beneath her dripping yellow hood. ‘Of course, Ann. Everything has to be absolutely perfect. We wouldn’t settle for anything less.’

‘It’s wonderful.’ Ann took a wheezing breath which erupted into coughing. Elizabeth put a hand on her back, waiting for the fit to subside, then poured hot tea into a thermos cap and handed it to her. The sick woman brought it to her mouth and managed to slurp some of it down. ‘You’re an angel,’ she rasped. ‘You’re good Samaritans, all of you.’

Ralph’s scalp itched, a juncture of nerves sending vibrations of unease through his body. Yes, everything had to be perfect. Elizabeth hadn’t lied about that. They wanted to offer those they took into the woods a final flash of transcendence.

This part of Snoqualmie National Forest – the reserve bordering Lock Haven, Washington, which was surrounded by a tall, overgrown chain-link fence and property of the McKinley clan – spanned miles of the western Cascade Mountains. There was only a single trail in, known locally as the South Sunday Trail. It started on the far side of the McKinley estate, behind a rusty iron gate in the wall that was locked year-round. Last week, Graham McKinley Jr and his brother Maurice (‘Ugh, such dicks’, was Luana’s usual reaction to hearing their names, and Ralph fully agreed with his wife) had unwound giant reels of power cable from the generator shed at the gate, hiding them in bushes along the trail. Marc Wachowski, from across the street, helped decorate. Some three hundred LED lights were strategically placed on either side of the trail, gently glowing and dimming to the rhythm of meditative soundscapes played by dozens of speakers in weatherproof casings. They had systematically worked their way into the woods from the gate to the Quiet Place (which Maurice McKinley insisted on calling the Execution Place—‘One of the reasons,’ Luana would say, ‘though certainly not the only one, for his dickishness.’) And finally, they had suspended over twelve hundred clustered electric jar lights from the trees. The result was magical: spanning its entire two-mile length, the South Sunday Trail was a journey amid enchanting lights, pulsating pink, blue and green to the music. If you shut your eyes, you could imagine yourself walking down a tunnel of will-o’-the-wisps.

Ralph found that so many twinkly lights together fooled the senses.

You could almost unhear the pouring rain.

You could almost unsee the grim, stark November branches swaying like skeletal arms on the edge of your vision, or what scurried beyond it.

You could almost ignore the stench of undergrowth and underground.

* * *

They were a procession of six.

Ralph and Harry Aikman lugged the palanquin between them, with its covered seat carrying Mrs Olsen Dickinson. Harry at the front, Ralph at the back. It wasn’t heavy – the woman was skin and bones – but it was an uphill trek, and Ralph’s hands were numb from the rain. Harry’s wife Elizabeth scampered alongside the sick woman like a faithful Pomeranian, but the narrow trail forced her to swerve around trees or go knee-deep through the bracken and she had slipped more than once. Juliette McKinley, the intolerable McKinley brothers’ tolerable sister, led the way with a lantern. Her wife Olivia Davis was last in line and Ralph could hear her nervous breathing. This was Olivia’s third year on Bird Street, and she was obviously ill at ease. No blame there.

Ann Olsen Dickinson had been a healthy woman in her sixties when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2019. Surgery and subsequent radio-and chemotherapy did what they were supposed to, and Ann was given two relatively good years, albeit within the limitations of the pandemic. But last September, the doctors had discovered metastases in her lungs and lymph glands and told her further treatment would only alleviate the symptoms. Extend her time a little.

The Bird Street residents knew this because Elizabeth Aikman was her voluntary homecare-giver, assigned by the University of Washington Medical Center. She had administered the morphine that, besides freeing her from pain, had also removed any inhibitions. In Elizabeth, Ann had found a ready ear.

‘Stanley found out I inquired after the DWDA. And guess what? Damn idiot had me certified incompetent! Can you believe it? Forty-one years of marriage, and that’s what you get! Just because we go to the same church as that turd of a doctor!’

Buy the Book

Darker Days

Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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Darker Days

Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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Oh, the band of neighbours knew a thing or two about Washington State’s Death with Dignity Act. So they understood how Ann’s husband, so overwhelmed with grief he had sought counsel from God instead of his wife, had expertly used the law to cut off her path to a dignified, self-elected end.

‘And he isn’t even there. He takes these long walks, all the way to the Sound, because he can’t handle it. Poor man, I feel so sorry for him. But I don’t want to wait until it crawls inside my bones. Until my body cannibalizes itself, screaming in pain. What kind of a life is that?’

No kind of a life, Elizabeth had agreed.

But maybe she could help.

* * *

Now Mrs Olsen Dickinson was so high on morphine she felt no pain at all. As the neighbours led her away from civilization, she gleefully regaled them with her life story. Elizabeth did the ooohs and the aaahs. Ralph sympathized, more than he would care to, but his position behind the palanquin made him focus on the physical exertion rather than the emotional, allowing his mind to drift.

He thought of whales. Of the orcas and humpbacks they and the children had seen romping around Puget Sound, three weeks ago. Talk about ooohs and aaahs. That was on one of the many Sunday trips he and Luana planned every October with nearly grim determination. Others took them to the High Trek Adventure zipline park near Paine Field, the MoPOP and Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle, the Washington Serpentarium in Monroe, and the Mini Mountain Indoor Ski Center in Bellevue. At ten, Django still thought everything was dope, especially the iguana they’d let him hold in Monroe: ‘Maybe it will poop on me!’

For Kaila at fifteen, however, it meant suppressing catastrophic boredom. She argued that the mandatory family outings distracted her from her routine at the King County Aquatic Center. Kaila Lewis da Silva was a platform diver. Her coaches were prepping her for the ’24 Paris Olympics, and right now all the stars seemed to be aligning for her to qualify.

‘And besides,’ she said one October night, ‘you’re just trying to buy off your guilt, and I have no intention of catering to that.’

Kaila was an angel, an absolute wonder of a child, but even in her good times she could still be a brutally blunt teen. Luana had raised her voice and sent her to her room.

‘Fine!’ Kaila yelled. ‘I was going there anyway!’ Slamming the door behind her.

It was Django who broke the silence. ‘Crazy, huh?’

But Kaila was right. Weren’t the family outings a rather corny effort to redeem the unredeemable? An afternoon of whale-spotting or snowboarding on a rolling carpet did little to alleviate the memory of the Crisis Ward at Fairfax, the Psych Ward at the Seattle Children’s Hospital, or the three weeks in Stillwater, two years ago.

Duh, Kaila would say.

After a brief time-out, Ralph had gone upstairs.

‘I don’t want to go back into lockdown,’ she told him as they sat on her bed. ‘Not when my friends don’t have to, for a change.’

‘I know, honey. But we’ll get through it. Like we always do. Know why?’

‘Because we love each other. Blah blah.’

‘Exactly. And hey, you can’t let your brother zip down those lines all by himself. He won’t shut up about them for the rest of the week.’

‘He’ll probably write a song about them. Shoo-ba-dee Zipline.’

‘Bebop Parkour Blues,’ Ralph agreed. They laughed. ‘What do you say? Should we start upping your lithium a little?’

Kaila had nodded dejectedly.

The compromise was that she could bring her boyfriend, Jackson. Kaila could often be swayed eventually. Sometimes because of Jax. But mostly, Ralph suspected, because she knew that after this, there was only Halloween. Their last chance for some fun.

After Halloween, all the kids on Bird Street went into lockdown.

Then came November.

Ralph listened to the rain pattering on the hood of his poncho. The vibration of unease on his scalp now crawled down his back. The Darker Days were upon them.

Each time, you think you can escape it. Each time, you think it won’t be so bad. But it always is. And now it’s too late to brace yourself. It’s started. God help us.

Suddenly, he had an almost painful desire to be home. Hunker down, play Ticket to Ride with the kids, munching on nachos supreme and Luana’s pão de queijo behind the shutters that locked out the rain and the Snoqualmie Woods and everything that dwelled there.

Juliette McKinley stopped, and the procession came to a halt.

On the trail before them was a pile of branches.

It blocked their way.

‘Can we go around, with her?’ Elizabeth asked. When she glanced back, Ralph saw that her face was ashen. Harry tilted his head, giving her a clear were-you-born-stupid look.

‘We ’ll leave the trail,’ Olivia decided. She strode past the palanquin and grabbed Juliette ’s free hand, pulling her away from the heap and looking for a place to deviate. The left embankment was too steep. The right wasn’t much better, with gnarls of slippery larch roots, but there was no other option.

‘Is everything all right?’ Ann Olsen Dickinson asked when Harry followed Juliette, tipping the palanquin backwards. He slipped on a root, but Olivia caught him, and Ralph braced himself when most of the weight was suddenly on him. The sick woman cried out, then roared with laughter. ‘What are you doing to me! Wouldn’t it be easier just to remove the branches? There aren’t that many.’

‘There’s an easy detour right here,’ Juliette lied.

‘My, my, so much trouble… sweethearts, you really don’t have to do this.’

‘Yes, we do,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You’ll see why in a moment.’

‘And in such weather!’ The woman wheezed. ‘I’ve seen my share of heavy rains at Olympia and Pacific Rim, but boy, is it coming down here!’

‘It’ll be all right, Mrs Dickinson.’ That was Olivia. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Worry? What’s the worst that could happen? I fall and die?’

Most of them joined her laughter, but Ralph thought, No, it can be worse.

They passed the pile, circling the first row of larches then returning to the trail. Mrs Olsen Dickinson was right: it would have been easier to remove the branches. The stack was only knee-high. But none of them had wanted to. There seemed purpose in the way they were piled across the trail, too artificial to be a work of nature. But none of them had put them there.

And they hadn’t been there this morning.

* * *

Ten minutes later, they reached the Quiet Place. Elizabeth Aikman pressed her hands against her lower back and said, ‘Look, Ann. Why the trouble, you ask? Here’s why.’

It was a clearing underneath a cluster of tall hemlocks and maples. Here, music relegated the sound of the rain to the background. Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’. And believe it or not, it was dry. Upon closer inspection, you could spot the tarp Marc Wachowski and the McKinley brothers had spanned between the treetops, but in the twilight of the woods the eye was drawn instead to the hundreds of atmospheric lights, twinkling like a starry sky. Lower down, fires burned in braziers. A large projection screen showed a portrait of a married couple with three daughters. Ralph recognized a younger, much healthier Ann Olsen Dickinson.

Amid it all stood a splendid, bright white canopy bed.

Mrs Olsen Dickinson cupped her hands over her mouth, and even though Ralph could only see her back, he knew she was crying.

‘Oh, this is wonderful…’ she whispered as they slowly carried her inside the circle of braziers. ‘The bed… and Ella!’ In a surprisingly clear voice, good enough to be a variety singer’s if it wasn’t for the cancer, she began to sing along the part about the canvas sky and the muslin tree, and how it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me.

Ralph and Harry stopped at the silk curtains draping from the canopy’s frame, where Juliette and Olivia were waiting like gatekeepers. Elizabeth supported the sick woman as she disembarked, even though it was evident she was able to stand on her own. Sunken in her robe she had looked like a mouse skeleton wrapped in napkins, but Ralph could tell she wasn’t so close to the edge yet that her body had given up. Annie Dickinson simply had no intention of letting it get that far.

They lowered the palanquin. Ralph, rolling his shoulders, joined the others around the bed, where Elizabeth helped Ann take off her robe and settle under the down comforters.

‘This is lovely, guys,’ she said. ‘So beautiful. How can I ever thank you all?’

‘Gratitude is the last thing we need, Ann,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We ’re happy we can do this for you. Is there anything you need?’

‘I could do with some more tea.’

‘I have something better,’ Juliette said. From a storage trunk next to the bed she retrieved a tray, upon which she displayed six small shooters and a bottle of crème de cassis.

‘No, a Gabriel Boudier!’ Ann clapped her hands. ‘For our honeymoon, Stanley had booked a chateau overlooking the Saône River in France, and that’s what we drank every night! Just like Hercule Poirot, he’d say. He was so sexy in his suit, my Stanley…’ Worried, she looked up from the memory. ‘But I’m not supposed to drink any more, am I?’

Now everyone laughed, even Olivia. ‘If there ever was a time to ignore doctors’ advice, this is it, don’t you think?’

She did. Juliette poured and made her rounds with the tray. Ralph’s mouth went dry when she reached him. Juliette saw his hesitation, but insisted. As soon as he smelled the alcohol, saliva flooded the corners of his mouth.

Ann raised her shooter to the good Samaritans of Bird Street. ‘Well, cheers, then. To life.’

They clinked glasses. Ralph felt a droplet trickling down his temple – not rain this time. If he drank now, he’d go home, straight to the garage, and sit in the Forester’s driver’s seat. He’d fish up the bottle of Smirnoff and the glass hidden underneath. The glass was superstition: Ralph didn’t drink from the bottle. Fuck ice, fuck lime. Hell, fuck tonic… but you didn’t drink from the bottle.

Ralph Lewis was prepared to swear under oath that he wasn’t an alcoholic, and he’d be telling the truth. But it was November. Everything changed in November.

After downing one glass tonight, another would follow. There would be no Ticket to Ride. No munchies, no warmth or homeliness with the kids. They would fight.

Suddenly, he upended the glass over the forest floor.

He had resisted.

This time.

* * *

‘I didn’t expect to be afraid,’ Ann said. The rasp was back in her voice, and Ralph had to strain to hear her. ‘But I am.’

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Ann,’ Elizabeth said.

Ralph shot her a glance. Then he knelt beside the bed and took one of Ann’s bony hands in his. ‘You know you can always change your mind.’

She waved his words away, as if that wasn’t the point. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

That question came sooner or later, and they were prepared. ‘Because there are plenty of cases in which the DWDA doesn’t cut it,’ Harry said. ‘Look at yourself. You suffer, and the last thing you are is incompetent. But they only give you two options: either you wait out the ride, which is bound to be agonizing, or you hurl yourself off it.’

‘You mean eat a bullet,’ Ann said matter-of-factly. ‘Stanley keeps a gun in his safe upstairs. I’ve never cared much for guns, but if I hadn’t met Elizabeth, I’d probably have used it.’

‘See? We think that’s wrong. We feel that patients should have another way out. A more peaceful way.’

‘But enough about us,’ Elizabeth intervened, clapping her hands. ‘We have another surprise for you.’

The slideshow. ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ made way for ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’, and with one push on her clicker, Elizabeth started a photo carousel of Ann’s life. Ralph felt a sudden wave of razor-sharp anger blowing through him like a cold wind. She’s going too fast, he thought. She’s not listening to her any more.

Had it been any other month, mere annoyance would have been all it was, but now he felt actual, unfettered anger that turned outwards, shocking him with its intensity. Oh, the Darker Days… they spread like a virus, unnoticed, but since everyone was going around with the same red spots, you never realized how they got a hold on you. And you resisted them a little less each time. The Darker Days were what made Elizabeth push Ann, and the Darker Days were what fuelled Ralph’s heated response.

Already.

Ralph stepped away from the circle of fires and closed his eyes. Counted to ten. When he opened them again, he felt a bit calmer. Elizabeth had taken Ann’s hand. There was real compassion in that gesture, making Ralph a little ashamed of his reaction. Elizabeth was under the same influence as he was – that shouldn’t be ignored.

The screen now showed Ann’s three daughters on swings. A young Ann looking across her shoulder, luxurious hair spilling like sunlight. The chateau in France, and yes, her Stanley had been easy on the eyes. If she hadn’t been so enchanted, Ann might have asked how they’d gotten these photos, but she wouldn’t. They never did.

Ralph listened to the rustling beyond the first row of hemlocks, deliberate enough to be heard over Ella and the rain. Here, outside the circle of light and practically in the cold, wet forest, Ralph felt vulnerable. He quickly rejoined the others and pretended he hadn’t heard a thing.

* * *

Ann was crying again, and now Olivia was the one who held her hand. For the first time, Ralph saw real sadness in the woman’s eyes. ‘Stanley must be so worried…’

Yes. Even if his walk had taken him all the way to the Sound today, Stanley would likely be back home in Mill Creek right about now and find his terminally ill wife missing. He had probably called their daughters by now, and the police, and yes, he would be deeply worried.

Once it was over, they had told Ann, they would leave her in the same strip of woodland where, several hours earlier, wrapped in her cloak and hunched over her walker, she had gotten into the anonymous car waiting for her beyond the eye of the neighbourhood’s CCTV. They had promised to leave her in the middle of the track, so she’d soon be found. Stubborn as she was, she must have gone for a stroll, which Stanley had expressly forbidden. In her state, a fall would soon lead to hypothermia and death. What about the meds? Don’t worry, Ann. Chances of an autopsy, with her condition, were close to zero. Especially if the narrative was so clear.

‘I feel so bad it has to be this way,’ Ann had said. ‘But with Stanley set in his ways, what is one to expect?’

Now, in the hour of her death, Olivia comforted her. Then Elizabeth approached the bed, carrying a red satin pillow. On it were two hypodermic needles.

‘This is it, Ann. This one’s the sedative, and this is the muscle relaxant. You won’t feel a thing. You’ll fall asleep in seconds, just like any other time, and then you won’t wake up.’

For a long while, Ann gazed at the needles.

‘I’m almost afraid to say this,’ she finally said, her voice unsteady.

‘What, Ann?’ Olivia asked.

‘I keep thinking about our honeymoon. The chateau had a courtyard, where the guests would wine and dine. There was a chansonnier singing songs, and a pianist who was older than I am today. And you know what Stanley did? He took me by the arm, pulled me from my chair and danced with me, all around the courtyard. Everyone was laughing and applauding. I was so embarrassed! But not Stanley. He was like that. All he had to do was look at me, and I felt at ease.’

‘That’s lovely, Ann,’ Olivia said.

‘I remember we saw The Wizard of Oz at the Pacific Crest Theater, before they tore it down. When Judy Garland said, “There’s no place like home”, I knew I’d be with Stanley for the rest of my life.’ Teary-eyed, she looked at each of the good Samaritans of Bird Street individually, pushing the satin pillow away. ‘Stanley’s my home. I don’t think I want to do this, guys.’

There was a strange, charged moment, and Ralph could feel the implications of Ann’s words hanging almost palpably between them. It lasted but a second, but still Ralph pictured a grotesque image: Elizabeth snatching the first hypo from the pillow and cramming it straight into the sick woman’s sleeve, ignoring her panicked screaming.

Instead, Elizabeth stepped back and put the pillow on the storage trunk. ‘Ann, darling, but of course,’ she said. ‘This is entirely, unconditionally, explicitly your choice.’

‘I’m terribly sorry…’

‘Hang on,’ Juliette spoke up suddenly. ‘We ’ve come this far. Are we really sure this is for the best?’ She saw Olivia’s face and added, ‘For her, I mean?’

‘Mrs Olsen Dickinson knows what’s best for her,’ Ralph said, turning to the sick woman. ‘And there’s no need to feel sorry.’

‘But look at the effort you’ve put in. The risks you’ve taken! And who will take all this down?’ She hoisted herself up as if she wanted to do it herself. But she moved too fast, provoking another coughing fit.

When it was over, Harry said, ‘Don’t you worry about a thing, Mrs Dickinson. We ’ll take care of it.’

‘Can I at least give you something? For your trouble?’

Elizabeth leaned in and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘No, Ann. We won’t accept it. We ’re doing this for you, and for you only. And that’s why I must ask you this.’ She exchanged a glance with Ralph, who was too late to intervene. ‘Are you absolutely sure? Because Juliette has a point. You know the reason you’re here. You know what’s coming if you abandon this.’

‘I know, sweetheart,’ Ann answered. ‘But I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life. I’ll be able to face it, with Stanley by my side. I want to see the daffodils bloom one more time, and if I do, I’ll have you people to thank for it.’

Harry put his left hand on his wife’s back and his right hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m so happy we were able to help you find your way back into the light, Mrs Dickinson.’

It wasn’t that he pulled his wife away from the bed, Ralph thought, but it was close.

As for Ralph… was he relieved?

He didn’t know. But he was suddenly beyond tired.

* * *

In February, Elizabeth would receive an anonymous postcard that they’d recognize immediately. That turd of a doctor gave me six weeks, but I lived long enough to see the daffodils! Though I do feel the end is near now. Thank you all for the time you have given me.

Now, as they prepared her for the hike out of the woods, Ann Olsen Dickinson said, ‘It bears repeating. You are good Samaritans. All of you.’

Ralph got his phone out. There was a message from Luana. How did it go? Love you. He sent a reply. Bailed. Can’t wait to see you. And the kids. Home soon.

None of the neighbours worried that late afternoon.

There were always other takers.

And they still had time.

They did then.

Excerpted from Darker Days, copyright © 2025 by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Darker Days</i> by Thomas Olde Heuvelt appeared first on Reactor.

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Read an Excerpt From Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Goss

This themed collection of imaginary places, with three new stories, recalls Susanna Clarke’s alternate Europe and the surreal metafictions of Borges.

By Theodora Goss

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Published on October 8, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Letters from an Imaginary Country, a new short story collection by Theodora Goss, out from Tachyon Publications on November 11.

Dora/Dóra: An Autobiography

Dóra Muszbek was born on September 30, 1968 in Budapest, Hungary. I know because I have her birth certificate. It’s on thick beige paper, with designs and letters in green ink, and folds like a booklet. On the front it says “Születési Anyakönyvi Kivonat,” above a ten-forint stamp. Inside, the green lines are filled with information in fountain pen. Her birthplace is listed as Budapest, her father as Dr. Muszbek, her mother under her maiden name although she is married and a doctor as well. Inside the booklet, on both sides, is an escutcheon in green ink: the Hungarian flag, with sheaves of wheat on either side, topped by a Soviet star.

What I know about her early years comes from black-and-white photographs. Here she is in a cotton romper and bonnet, looking at the camera and laughing. Here in an inflatable swimming ring, floating just off a wooden platform on Lake Balaton. Here she is walking down a street in Budapest, holding her father’s hand, perhaps on her way to the swings in the park. That must have been before the divorce. Here she is in her grandparents’ apartment, sitting on the sofa next to her mother, with one arm around her mother’s neck and the other holding a stuffed bear. That must have been after, when her mother had moved back in with her parents.

Their apartment was on Múzeum utca, across the street from the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, the museum of Hungarian history. Her grandparents had moved there after the war, into a building that had once been the city palace of an aristocratic family but had long ago been divided into flats. The building was arranged around a central courtyard, where carriages had driven in and out. Their apartment was on the second floor, up a stone staircase. You opened the front door with an ancient key and walked down a hallway to the living room, one half of what had been a double parlor divided by a set of doors with panes of pebbled glass. The ceiling was eighteen feet high; the tall windows looked down onto the park that surrounded the museum. The other half of the parlor was her grandparents’ bedroom. Dóra and her mother slept in the living room on beds that during the day became sofas. Both rooms were heated by ceramic stoves that had to be fed with coal kept in the building’s cellars. Off the hall were a bathroom, a WC, and a small kitchen with a pantry where Dóra’s grandmother stored preserved plums and cherries. The stove had to be lit with a match, a procedure that always scared Dóra a little. I have a photograph of her at Christmas, beside a tree on which real candles are burning. There is a bucket by the tree, just in case.

Those photographs are all I have left of her, except a few children’s books with titles like Kisgyermekek Nagy Mesekönyve and the stuffed bear, named Dani. He is almost as old as I am, and has lost much of his fur.

After that, the photographs are in color, and no longer in Hungary. Here is one of her at the zoo in Brussels, with an elephant. Another of her eating ice cream in front of the Atomium. By that point, her mother had moved to Brussels, leaving on a visa that allowed her to visit for two weeks, with a suitcase, a small child, and the equivalent of twenty dollars in foreign currency. The visa expired, but by then she had found work as a doctor. I have been told that when he realized she was gone, her father searched for Dóra frantically, banging on her grandparents’ apartment door, petitioning the Red Cross. But I don’t know. So much has been lost, to secrecy and the inevitable passage of time, to forgetfulness and lies.

In Brussels she learned to speak French and brush her teeth twice a day. She had not realized the importance of toothbrushing, but in school all the children were asked to form three lines: those who did not brush their teeth, those who brushed their teeth once a day, and those who brushed their teeth twice. Having gone to the middle line, she quickly realized her mistake: good Belgian children brush their teeth both in the morning and at night. Perhaps that is why, after all these years, I am so attentive to my teeth, going to the dentist twice a year, flossing before I go to sleep every night. When the dentist tells me how clean my teeth are, I feel a small moment of triumph at being in the right line.

It was in Brussels that Dóra first lost herself. I have a certificate of name change, Dóra Muszbek to Dora Méliès. Why Méliès, I once asked her mother. “I wanted to be French,” she said. “There was no point in being Hungarian, not then.” Years later she added, “The Embassy kept calling, telling me that I should go back, that I was a traitor to my country. But I did not want to go back. There was nothing for me there. So I changed our names and telephone number. At the time, I thought we were going to stay in Belgium.” Sometimes conversations such as this one will go on for years, punctuated by long silences. By the time they resume, I will have forgotten what question her mother is answering.

Despite half a lifetime in the United States, her mother still speaks with a strong Hungarian accent. She still exhibits the tendency I have noticed, in Hungarian and Chinese speakers, to confuse gender—he for she and vice versa. Hungarian has no gender—male or female, you are ő. This has not resulted in any greater equality between the sexes.

So Dóra became Dora. She brushed her teeth twice a day, spoke French, and wore sweaters knitted by her mother in red or brown wool. From that time, I remember only three things: the toothbrushing line, the sweaters because they itched, and walking down the street in a blue-and-white checked dress that Dora’s mother had sewn for her, an exact copy of the dress she was wearing. A policeman who passed them asked if they were sisters, smiling, flirting with her mother, whom Dora thought was the prettiest woman in the world.

And then, the lights of New York through a circular plane window. Her mother had received an offer to continue her medical research at the National Institutes of Health, and who could pass up an opportunity like that? Her daughter would be American.

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Letters from an Imaginary Country

Theodora Goss

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Letters from an Imaginary Country

Theodora Goss

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In the United States of America, the 1970s meant Wonder Bread, bell-bottom jeans, and watching Speed Racer on Saturday morning television. Dora developed a crush on the mysterious Racer X. She had to repeat first grade, because her English was not yet fluent enough for second. Then she skipped second grade and went directly into third. She had a green girls’ bike, a Ballerina Barbie, and a friend named Angela, one grade ahead of her, whose father kept Playboy magazines under his bed. She wore bell-bottom jeans and sweaters knitted by her mother, which she would stuff into her backpack as soon as she was out of sight because they itched, and anyway they were stupid. No one wore handmade clothes.

By that time, Dóra—no, Dora—had no idea who she was anymore. She would dream that she was trying to speak, but no one could understand her. Even she did not understand the language she was speaking.

They lived in a house with a yard in which there was a pine tree taller than the house itself. Throughout elementary school, Dora would climb the pine tree up to a place where three branches made a sort of floor. That was her nest. She would live there, the Dora-bird, the girl with wings. When she was a bird, she would speak bird language, which all the birds understood. Birds can fly anywhere. They can see anything. She would be able to as well. She never thought of flying back to Hungary, because it was lost forever behind a curtain of iron, like a country in a fairy tale. Once you left, you could never go back.

Every once in a while, she received letters from her grandmother in stilted, textbook English. She would have to write back. “Write back to your grandmother,” her mother would say, “but remember that the Secret Police will read it.”

What could she write? “Dear Nagymama: Today I was a bird. I have a crush on Racer X, who is secretly Speed Racer’s brother. I have forgotten how to speak Hungarian.”

In school, she committed two crimes that she would remember for the rest of her life. In first grade, she stole a sticker from another girl’s locker, and in third grade she plagiarized a story for a writing assignment. Both times she was caught, and the humiliation of the experience, of being “talked to” by a teacher, made her particularly cautious not only to do no wrong, but to be perceived as doing no wrong. She reformed, and became both Student Council secretary and a patrol, with a badge on an orange plastic belt. At lunchtime, she and the other patrols would escort kindergarteners home after their half day. If a car had come careening down the road, threatening to run over one of her charges, she would have leaped in front of it, putting herself in danger, like Robin Hood in the Disney animated version, or Nancy Drew.

For she was Responsible. Every day, after school, she walked home and let herself in by the key that hung on a string around her neck. She got herself a snack and did homework until her mother came home. Sometimes her mother would tell her to come directly to the NIH, so she would walk up the broad avenue to the main research building and take the elevator up to her mother’s laboratory. In those days, you could still play with the lab animals: rats and rabbits and mice, all bred specifically for experiments, soft and inquisitive and ticklish, smelling of their feed, and poop, and the wood shavings that lined their plastic bins. Sometimes she was allowed to give them more of the thick green pellets they fed on, or change their water. But most days she just waited, sitting at her mother’s desk, turning around and around in the revolving chair. She came to recognize the distinctive smell of laboratories.

She made a friend named Amy, the best friend she’d ever had. Amy’s parents were also divorced. After school, the two of them liked to go to the playground, sit on the swings, and talk about the books they were reading: mostly Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series. Someday, a dragonrider would appear in the sky and touch down near the kickball field. He would take them to Pern, where they would become dragonriders as well. It seemed a more logical ambition than being a doctor or lawyer. But she lost Amy forever when her mother decided to repeat her residency so she could practice medicine in America. They moved to a school district in another state.

One day Dora, now in middle school in Virginia and exceptionally lonely, found a letter from her grandmother that had fallen behind a bookshelf. What was she looking for? I suspect the big book of Indian art that had explicit pictures in it. That and Judy Blume novels, passed around in school, carefully hidden in lockers and under desks, the important pages turned down at the corners, were her introductions to human sexuality, for the Playboy magazines had been less than instructive. The letter was in Hungarian of course, so she could not read it, having lost that part of herself entirely. But tucked into the envelope was a photograph—of her grandmother, with a tall girl in a school uniform standing behind her. On the back of the photograph was written “Nagymama és Dóra.”

Dora knew at once what had happened. When her mother had taken her from Hungary, she had left Dóra behind. Not her twin—she had no twin, she knew that perfect well. No, the part of herself that had been Dóra had somehow been left behind. While she was growing up in the United States, trying to persuade her mother to buy her designer jeans, Dóra was growing up in Hungary.

She did not ask her mother about Dóra. She had learned early on that when she asked her mother questions, her mother responded with answers that were only partly true. Dora could not always tell which part.

“Why did you divorce my father?”

“Because he expected me to iron his underwear.”

“Why did we leave Hungary?”

“Because I wanted to give you the opportunities I never had.”

“Why can’t I wear earrings?”

“Because you will look like a gypsy.”

“What does that word mean? The one you say when you’re angry.”

“It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t repeat it to anyone who speaks Hungarian.”

She imagined asking her mother, “Why is Dóra still living in Hungary?”

Her mother would say, in her heavy accent, “Don’t be ridiculous.” She would roll her r’s: r-r-ridiculous. So instead, Dora imagined what life would be like for Dóra, living with her grandparents in a Communist state. Growing up in the 1970s in America, here are the things she knew about Communism:

1. Communists were not allowed to practice their religion. Dóra had been baptized in a Catholic church. Did she ever sneak into a church service? Did she, secretly, surreptitiously, take communion? In moments of stress and confusion, did she, like Dora, say a Hail Mary—although her mother had told her, in no uncertain terms, that religion was the opiate of the masses?
2. Communists owned no property. Her grandparents’ apartment, where Dóra presumably lived, was owned by the state. Dóra would sleep in the living room, on one of the beds that were sofas during the day. In the morning, she would be woken by the light that came through the tall windows facing the park and a cacophony of song from the birds in the linden trees. Then she would have breakfast in the tiny kitchen.
3. What would she eat? Communists were poor and had to wait in long lines. Her grandmother would wait in line for food, first for bread at the baker’s, then for vegetables at the market, then sausages… For breakfast, Dóra would have bread and butter, a tomato with salt, and slices of ham. Then she would go into the ancient bathroom and put on her school uniform.
4. Communists wore red kerchiefs and addressed each other as Comrade. Dóra would tie a red kerchief around her neck and go to school, where she would be called Comrade Muszbek. Did she ever see her father? Perhaps on holidays. Once, when Dora had asked about him, her mother had said, “He has remarried. His second wife is a schoolteacher. He has two other daughters now.” So he would not have much time for his first daughter. Anyway, he had become a professor at the University of Debrecen, in the medical school. Would Dóra sometimes go there during the holidays, to spend time with her sisters? Did she even think of them as her sisters?
5. Subversive literature was banned. But knowing Dóra, she probably wrote subversive literature. After all, Dora wrote, so Dóra probably wrote as well—subversive poetry. It was subversive because it did not glorify the state. Rather, it was about a young girl’s search for herself, her thoughts on life, the world… She kept it in a notebook under the mattress of her bed, which was also a sofa. If her grandmother had ever found it, she had never said so.
6. She also read banned literature. Her copy of 1984 was hidden inside the dust jacket of an edition of Grimm’s fairy tales that had been destroyed when she dropped it into the bathtub.
7. Like all Communists, Dóra would do anything for a pair of American jeans.

Dora wished she could send Dóra a pair of her own American jeans, not bell-bottoms now but straight, and so tight at the waist that she had to lie back on her bed to zip them—or just talk to her. But if she sent a letter, the Secret Police would see it, and what then? Perhaps the Secret Police would send agents for Dóra, and even for Dora sitting comfortably watching television in her American living room. They would both be put in a prison, perhaps in the same cell. Dora wondered what sort of conversations they would have.

Dóra would tell her about school, which her mother had assured her was much more difficult than an American school, and about writing poetry, like an ancestor who had been a famous Hungarian poet. She would talk about going to Lake Balaton for vacations, about swimming in the muddy water among the reeds, sleeping in the house her grandfather had built after the war, watching her grandmother paint the shifting light on the lake from her upstairs studio. She would talk about eating fried fogas, a fish that lived only in the lake.

“And what is it like when you meet our father for ice cream in Budapest?” Dora would ask. “Do you like our sisters? Do you wish you had American jeans? Or your own bedroom? Are you popular in school?”

Dora would tell her about being in the Gifted and Talented Program, and definitely not popular. About reading novels and trying to write them, and never being satisfied with what she had written. “For vacation we go to Ocean City, on the Atlantic Ocean, and eat crabs in a restaurant where you have to break the shells and take out the meat yourself,” she would say. Dóra would want to know whether she listened to Michael Jackson, what Americans thought of Hungarians (“They mostly don’t,” Dora would have to admit), what it was like to grow up with a mother.

Would they be executed? If so, they could stand in front of the firing squad together, holding hands.

By the time Dora went to high school, her mother was no longer at the National Institutes of Health. Now she was in private practice as a physician. When Dora said she felt sick, her mother would say, “You’re not sick. Get up and go to school.” Except the one time she had appendicitis and her mother drove her to the hospital for an appendectomy. Ever after, she knew there were two responses to feeling sick: either you were on your way to the emergency room, or you were not sick and it was time to get up.

In high school, Dora was on the Honors track, which was essentially the same as the Gifted and Talented Program—fifteen students who spent the entire day, except homeroom and gym, going from class to class together. She tried to wear what the popular girls were wearing, the ones who were on the cheerleading squad and made homecoming court, but her mother did not think clothes were important. What you had in your head was important: it was the only thing you could take with you when the Russians invaded. Did Dora think it couldn’t happen here? Then Dora was naïve.

Perhaps that is why I have always assumed that everything can be destroyed in a moment. Perhaps that is why my basic attitude toward life has always been fear.

Dora rebelled by painting her room cherry blossom pink and hanging lace curtains over her bed. She read Barbara Cartland and Willa Cather and ElfQuest. She dated high school boys, and even one college freshman, partly to feel wanted, partly to feel that something in her life could be other than ordinary. It took years for her to realize that boys were actually quite ordinary—not that different from other human beings. At the time, they seemed to her like a fascinating alien species. She was always in love, sometimes with one of the boys, but more usually a film or literary character. Her most serious crushes were Sherlock Holmes, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Disney animated fox Robin Hood. She tried to smoke clove cigarettes, but never quite learned to inhale. She drank peach wine coolers that her friend Susan stole from her parents’ basement refrigerator. One day, she pierced her own ears with ice and a safety pin. Once they healed, she wore silver hoops. When she shook her head, she could feel them swinging against her cheeks. This was her Rebellious phase.

Meanwhile, in Budapest, Dóra was writing poetry. She wrote it in secret, and when it was published, it was in an underground literary journal, mimeographed and handed around the secondary school. She had fallen in love with a teacher at her school who had once been a poet, but who had been labeled subversive and sent to a prison camp. After such restrictions eased, he was released and assigned a job as a teacher of literature. In his teaching, he was always careful to be correct. He taught Hungarian translations of The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle, denouncing the evils of capitalism. But it was he who had started the school’s underground literary journal. Sometimes when he read Dóra’s poetry, he told her that she was a genius. He wore a sweater with a hole in the elbow and smoked Sobranie cigarettes, which she could smell in her hair. They met in his apartment, a single room in a building on Rákóczi út, to talk about poetry and make love, or what Dóra assumed was love. It was very much how the popular novels described—filled with endearments and recriminations. “You are so beautiful, little bird,” he would tell her. “Someday, you will fly away and leave me forever.” Then he would become moody and pace around the apartment, as though he were still in prison.

Sometimes, walking home from his apartment, she would stop for ice cream, csokoládé és citrom, and feel guilty that she was enjoying walking along Üllői út licking ice cream as much as she had enjoyed being with him.

Her grandmother still made all her dresses, except her school uniform, following patterns that had been popular in the 1960s. Only the wealthiest girls in school had clothes from Austria or Italy. She still slept in the living room of the apartment on Múzeum utca and did not imagine that would change, unless someday she got married and her husband requested an apartment. But she did not know if she would ever marry—look at her stepmother, who complained about being the wife of a university professor in a provincial city like Debrecen. Women had to put up with a great deal, in marriage. No, she was going to university, to study literature. Her grandfather did not want her to go—his daughter, Dóra’s mother, had gone, and look at what had happened! She had left her husband, her daughter for them to take care of… and for what? So she could boast about her big house in America? Who was going to take care of them in their old age? But her grandmother said that nowadays girls must become educated. And as a professor, Dóra could travel to international conferences. Her father did that all the time, spending more time out of the country than in it. Perhaps someday, she could go to America and meet her mother.

She was not surprised that her mother wrote so rarely. After all, she had Dora, her American child. And her father had his two younger daughters. She was the one who had been abandoned, who had been left in Budapest with her grandparents. Of course, once she was a famous poet, they would realize that they should never have forgotten about her. That’s who she was: the forgotten one. She wrote a poem with that title, and it won first prize in the school poetry competition. The prize was a medal, which her grandmother hung in the glass cabinet where she kept her most precious possessions, including the miniature of an ancestress who had been a noblewomen and hosted Napoleon at her country house. In America, Dora entered an essay contest. She submitted an essay about leaving Hungary and coming to America, about losing herself. When she won and the essay was reprinted in the local paper, her mother told her that she had put them both in danger: the Secret Police might read it, find them, and take them back to Hungary. There were things her mother told her that Dora no longer believed: that wearing makeup made you look like a prostitute, that politicians were always corrupt, that American children were spoiled and ungrateful. She seriously doubted that the Secret Police read the Loudoun County Gazette.

Dóra’s examination scores were good enough to get her into Eötvös Loránd University. She would still be living with her grandparents, but now she would be a university student. In high school, she had studied English, German, French, and of course Russian. I have noticed that in Hungary, although everyone over a certain age took compulsory Russian in high school, no one admits to speaking Russian. Everyone says, “Oh, of course I took Russian—it was compulsory. But I don’t remember any of it.” It’s a sort of linguistic amnesia. Dora had studied French and Latin so she could do well on the SAT. When she opened her acceptance letter from the University of Virginia, she was both delighted and relieved. Yes, that was where she would go. For one thing, it was in-state and she would not have to take out loans. For another, she had been to visit, and fallen in love with its red brick, white columns, and green lawns. It was one of the oldest universities in the country—the oldest part of the university had been designed by Thomas Jefferson himself. She had only recently become a naturalized citizen. Maybe going to UVA would make her feel American, as though she belonged. And it had a good English department. She could study literature, maybe even go on to get her PhD.

At the university, Dóra studied Faulkner, Proust, and Hesse in the original languages. She read Chekhov, remembering Russian for the sole purpose of studying literature. (“I can’t speak conversational Russian, of course,” she would say. “I’ve forgotten it all.”) Every morning, she would wake up, make herself breakfast—muesli and yogurt because she had become a vegetarian, which her grandmother insisted would cause her to die of starvation. She would get dressed, walk down the stone stairs of the apartment building, and cross Kálvin tér. Then it was only a few blocks to the main university building. She would take classes, meet with her professors. For lunch she would go out with her friends or eat brown bread, curls of smoked cheese, and slices of tomato in the park, under the linden trees. She no longer saw the literature teacher. She assumed he had taken on another student, female of course, as his acolyte.

Six years of university, and she would have a Master’s degree. Then she would teach or go on to get her PhD. The laws were so much more permissive now that she might even be able to teach elsewhere, in Austria perhaps, where you could make more money. Her father had been permitted to form a private consulting company, and her sisters Judit and Eszter were going to Vienna regularly to buy clothes. Dóra could not afford such luxuries, but went to the secondhand stores that students frequented on Rákóczi út. There she could find jeans and sweaters, and if they were a bit torn, that only made them more fashionable. She wore bright red lipstick and Chanel No. 5, from a bottle her father had given her after a conference in Paris. They were her trademark, you could say. She had cut her hair short and looked a little, she thought, like Claudette Colbert.

Dora wore pearls to class. She had a set of pearls that her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday. They were supposed to be for special occasions, but the other girls wore pearls to class, so she did as well, with ripped jeans, a twinset, and ballet flats. She wore pink lip gloss, and Charlie on her neck and the insides of her wrists. Every morning she would put her hair in hot rollers so it fell in curls down her back, then hairspray it so it would stay curled. She took classes on the history of English literature, from Chaucer to Joyce, and one on magical realism in which the professor introduced the students to Allende and Márquez. After class, she would go back to the French House, where she had a room so small there was space only for a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, and a square patch of carpet on which she could turn around and get dressed. She would eat with the other students in the communal dining room (French was compulsory), then go to a meeting of the literary and debating society she had joined. She still wanted to study literature, and maybe someday be a writer, although she scarcely understood what that meant. But it had been decided, mostly by her mother, that after college she should go to law school.

Her mother had taught her three things:

1. Life is hard.
2. People are out to get you.
3. Literature and art are fine as hobbies, but you need a real profession. Like law.

In the summer of 1990, Dora sat on the floor of her boyfriend’s apartment, in front of the television, watching German teenagers break off and carry away pieces of the Berlin Wall. They had met a few months ago, through a mutual friend. On their first date, he had taken her to his parents’ house in the hills above Charlottesville—horse country. The house was old, surrounded by a hundred acres of pasture merging into forest. They walked out to the barn, saddled the horses, rode along a forest path. It had been years since her brief experience with riding lessons—nothing, like riding or violin or ballet, had lasted long. Her mother would move, or money would run out. Writing was the only thing she had been able to keep up, all that time. Would she have married him if he had taken her to the movies rather than to such an obvious symbol of the stability and wealth she had never experienced in her life? One of his ancestors had fought with Washington at Valley Forge. Three years later, when she walked down the aisle of the Episcopal church in her white silk Laura Ashley wedding dress, she wondered if now, finally, she was becoming a real American.

Dóra watched the wall coming down on her boyfriend’s television as well. He was an East German studying in Hungary, and eventually, although he did not know it then, he would have a German passport and travel freely throughout the EU as a financier. Dóra would see his name long after in a newspaper article covering his indictment for fraud, but she would have lost touch with him by then. She had decided that she would never marry, after seeing her best friend Ildikó finish her graduate degree, marry a dentist, immediately get pregnant, and take a government job that offered two years of maternity leave. Now when Dóra visited her suburban house, all she did was complain about her swollen ankles. Her other best friend Anna was going to be an actress, and they had decided together over the Tokaji served at Ildikó’s wedding that they would never get married, never put husbands ahead of their ambitions or careers.

Her first year at Harvard Law School, during the misery of a long-distance relationship and the realization that she hated law the way she hated calculus, although calculus had a moral purity that the study of law lacked, Dora received a letter:

It took Dora three days to write back.

Every couple of months, Dora would get a letter on thin blue airmail paper. Every couple of months, Dóra would receive the same. Dora would sit at her desk in the Cambridge apartment she shared with a roommate, and then in her apartment in Brooklyn, New York, with a cat on her lap. Dóra would sit at the kitchen table in the Budapest apartment, and then on the sofa in her own tiny apartment in the same building. And they would read…

I wondered what would happen when Dora and Dóra met for the first time. Would it be like a science fiction movie? Would they merge into one another, or create some sort of space-time anomaly, or combust? I was apprehensive.

But no. They just went out for ice cream.

Dora’s Lufthansa flight landed at Budapest Ferihegy International Airport, which was so small that passengers walked from the landing strip to the terminal. She went through customs, showing her American passport almost with a sense of shame, and announced the reason for her visit: tourist. Then, as Dóra had told her, she took the airport shuttle into the city, to Kálvin tér. She pulled her wheeled suitcase over the cobbled intersection to Múzeum utca, found the apartment building, and rang the bell for her grandmother’s apartment. When she heard the front door buzz, she pushed it open: it was a small door cut into the larger one that had once opened to admit carriages into the building’s central courtyard.

Budapest was changing. On the streets, in the late 90s, you could see Mercedes and Peugeots, but still some Trabants, looking like toy cars next to the French and German models. Slowly, building by building, the soot of the Communist era was disappearing, although some of it remains even now, a reminder of the past. Buildings were being repainted in the distinctive colors of Budapest: lemon yellow, pale rose, pistachio, burnt umber. The old Hungarian flag, with the crown of Szent István at its center, was flying again. There were beggars on the streets, and rich Russians and Germans going to the casinos that had sprung up and would be gone by the end of the decade. The buildings on Kálvin tér were being either restored or replaced by modern contraptions of steel and glass. Soon, next to the bakery and antiques store selling Zsolnay and Herend, there would be an international hotel. Soon, not too soon but in the foreseeable future, Hungary would join the European Union. There would be a California Coffee Company on the corner of Múzeum utca, selling Italian coffee, a Hungarian interpretation of American sandwiches, and sour cherry brownies. But that was in the future for Dora and Dóra. That is in the future you and I know.

“Hello!” Dóra called out, standing by the apartment door, as Dora made her way up the stairs. “Do you need help with your luggage?”

“No, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Did you have a good flight?”

“Yes, but I think Frankfurt airport is the most confusing place in the world.” Their voices echoed off the stone walls.

Dora reached the second-floor landing. This is when I might have expected a combustion, a space-time vortex, or something equally spectacular. Instead, there was the awkward dance of an American who goes in for a hug and a Hungarian who tries to kiss you on both cheeks—like two people waltzing who are both trying to lead.

Dóra helped Dora with her suitcase. For the first time since she was a child, Dora walked down the hallway of her grandmother’s apartment. It had not changed. The ceilings were still high, although not as impossibly high as they had once been. The walls were still painted a pale yellow, faded now. They were still covered with her grandmother’s paintings of flowers, boats on Lake Balaton, a few friends. The tall windows still opened onto the park around the museum.

“Ah, Dóra! Nagyon szép vagy!” Her grandmother was several inches shorter than her, with white hair in a sensible cut, wearing a housecoat. What would it have been like growing up here, in an apartment with furniture that had no doubt been bought cheaply in the 1950s and was beginning to fall apart, and doilies crocheted by her grandmother on every surface, and the clear light of Budapest coming through the windows? What would it have been like growing up with a woman who called her nagyon szép, very pretty? Well, she had only to ask Dóra.

“Would you like something to eat? Nagyi is making dinner, but perhaps I can give you a little something beforehand. Do you like pogácsa?” Dora nodded. For parties, her mother had made the small biscuits, spreading butter on the dough, folding it over, letting it rise, rolling it and spreading butter and folding again. Dóra put several on a small plate.

She looked curiously at her American self, the one who had gone away and grown up across the ocean. Dora was the same height, but a little heavier than she was, almost chubby. Her hair was longer, lighter in color. In a letter, she had mentioned getting “highlights.” She wore makeup, but it was less visible, unless you knew how to look for it: the colors more natural, the application subtler. Her clothes were newer, more fashionable, and her suitcase was heavy. What did she have in there? (A curling iron, among other things.) Also she seemed more confident than Dóra, as though she wore invisible armor that she never took off.

They sat in the living room, which had once been Dóra’s bedroom as well. Their grandmother had gone into the kitchen to finish cooking dinner, but she had left old family photographs. Dóra explained who they were, the men in wool suits, the women in silk dresses trimmed with lace, the babies of either gender in christening gowns of white lawn. “Your grandfather’s father was a schoolteacher. And here is his wife, your great-grandmother, holding your grandfather.” How strange that this toddler, looking distinctly feminine in an embroidered cap, would grow up to become an engineer, and live through the Second World War, and finally forget the life he had known, dying in a home for old men, most of them veterans. Dora felt time pressing down on her, time and tragedy, the way she never did in America, where even the air seemed new. Time and tragedy were, she would discover, as much a part of Budapest as the sunlight and the ice cream vendors. “And there is the home that our grandmother grew up in. It was a farm, a very large farm, owned by the church, and her father was the… manager, you say? Or supervisor? It was a hereditary position, but he had no son, and anyway the Communists took it. Now it is a museum. Our grandmother went to art school in Szeged, and that is where she met our grandfather.”

Dóra wanted to talk about more than the past, more than black-and-white photographs. But now was not the time, and anyway dinner was ready. They ate at the kitchen table: a pörkölt with noodles and cucumber salad. Dora realized that all the dishes her mother had made, her signature dishes at dinner parties, had been only an imitation of Hungarian food, like a ghost. This was the real thing, with the right ingredients: beef from the local butcher, paprika grown in Szeged or Kalocsa. It was like the Hungarian language, both familiar and utterly alien. She felt a sense of dislocation that had nothing to do with the food or jet lag. When she had last tasted these flavors, she had been a child.

“Nagyi, that is what I call her, like grandma, it is an affectionate term. She says that she missed very much seeing you grow up. She says you are very tall and pretty, like me. These plums came from our house in Lake Balaton. Perhaps you would like to go down there? During the summer we go down almost every weekend to pick the plums. There is a train that takes us to Szántód, that is where the house is located. She says she will do a painting of you. After dinner, she wants to show you all her paintings, but perhaps you would like to go for a walk and see Budapest? We could get ice cream.”

Dora nodded and smiled at the little old woman who was nodding and smiling at her, talking in rapid Hungarian. She was sure Dóra was not translating, could not translate, it all—and it was coming back to her, just a little. No, Dóra was saying, I will not tell her again how sorry you are that you do not speak English. She knows. She already knows. Dóra felt the strange irritation of being in two worlds, translating between her grandmother and her American self. Why could Dora not have learned Hungarian? Then they could all speak comfortably, but here she was, trying to think in two languages at once. She saw something in Dora, an unconscious arrogance in how she carried herself, that she both disliked and envied. Dora ate the pörkölt and noodles—called nokedli—and cucumber salad as though she would never taste them again, as though that particular complexity, the hot sweetness of paprika, the coolness of cucumber in vinegar and sour cream, would once again be lost to her. Was she really here? She swallowed the last bite of pörkölt and wished she could lick her plate clean.

After dinner, Dóra washed the dishes and Dora dried. Then Dora put on a jacket, for it was growing chilly—the evenings are often chilly even in summer, said Dóra. Be careful, be careful, said their grandmother behind them, as though they were still children. Together they walked down to Kálvin tér, then turned left onto Vámház körút, a large commercial street that led toward the river. “I’ll take you to Váci utca,” said Dóra. “There are many places on Váci utca to eat ice cream.” They passed a pharmacy, clothing stores, restaurants with signs that said “Traditional Hungarian Dinner 2500 Ft.” And there was the Nagy Vásárcsarnok, the Central Market Hall that had been built a hundred years before, where the tourist buses stopped and their grandmother liked to buy vegetables, doing her marketing each day with a string bag. Across the street was Váci utca, and yes, right there in the square was an ice cream vendor.

If you want to know what Hungarian ice cream tastes like, from any ordinary street vendor in Budapest, go to the best Italian gelato shop you can find in New York City. That’s what it tastes like, except some of the flavors are distinctly Hungarian, like somlói galuska, which is the ice cream version of a Hungarian dessert that involves sponge cake, raisins, and walnuts soaked in a chocolate rum sauce.

Dóra asked for scoops of chocolate and citron, Dora asked for scoops of hazelnut and raspberry. Dora insisted on paying. “Would you like to walk down Váci utca?” asked Dóra.

But across the square…

“Is that—” said Dora.

“Yes, that is the Duna,” said Dóra.

There it was, the river over which so many armies have fought, down which so many ships have sailed: the Danube. They walked to the embankment and stood looking over the railing at the stone steps that went down into the water. It was as green as jade. Dora vaguely remembered a Hungarian swinging song in which someone was thrown into a river. “Hinta palinta,” it started, but she could not remember the rest. She felt like crying. Instead, she bit into her ice cream cone.

Dóra looked down at the river she had seen so many times, crossed so many times in her life. Attila’s apartment was on the other side. Usually, she took the trolley over. For the first time, she saw it as something immensely old, immensely powerful, and she wondered if she would ever get away from it. Perhaps she ought to marry Attila and move to Germany? Or even France? But then what about Nagyi? For a moment, she hated Dora, who would stay for a month in a city she obviously thought was magical, eating magical food, going to all the museums, trying her best to speak the language, laughing when she could not wrap her tongue around it. And then she would fly away on an airplane, waving a passport with an American flag on the cover. That was another kind of magic. Dora thought she had never had such good ice cream in her life. She was beginning to feel better: perhaps it was the air? It seemed so light, not like the heavy air of Boston. She finished the bottom of her cone, into which she had pushed the last of the raspberry with her tongue.

There we stood, the one or two or three of us: Dora, Dóra, and Dora/Dóra, separately and together, looking down into the jade-green water of the Danube as it flows through Budapest.

There were things neither Dora nor Dóra knew, but I will tell you. Dora did not know that she would have a child, a red-haired girl named Cordelia with eyes blue and green and gray as the Atlantic, who would never wonder whether she was truly American. She did not know that she would get divorced or become a professor at a university, although it would take her longer than she wanted or had planned. Dóra did not know that Attila was already having an affair with a model, and that he would move to France without her. Before she was entirely over that betrayal, she would meet an Englishman who was teaching at the International School. With him she would move to England, and it would all be easier than she imagined because Hungary had joined the EU, and also because Nagyi had died at the respectable age of ninety-six. The apartment was left empty, with paintings curling on the walls and dust gathering on the furniture, although she would try to go back as often as she could. But by then she was doing a graduate degree at Oxford, and also she would have a little boy named after his father, although she and Arthur would never marry, because who got married anymore? They were committed to each other—that was enough.

Dora and Dóra kept in touch by email, and they became Facebook friends. They “liked” and commented on each other’s posts. When Dora was going through the divorce, it was Dóra she turned to. When Dóra lost the second baby and learned she could not have another, she texted Dora and they talked for hours, despite the time difference. Dora traveled to England. Dóra traveled to the United States. Their children got into a fight about which Doctor Who was the real one, the ninth or tenth.

One summer, they both returned to Budapest, to the apartment. They were in their forties now. Dora was a college professor, in a beige linen Ralph Lauren skirt she had bought at a thrift store, which she liked to wear when she traveled because no one expected linen to be ironed, right? And a black t-shirt, a scarf with large orange poppies. The days of ripped jeans were long behind her. Coincidentally, Dóra was also wearing a black t-shirt, but with black leggings and a long cardigan. She had brought three pairs of leggings, three t-shirts, and two cardigans that could be combined into various outfits. Whenever she could, she avoided checking luggage on Ryanair because it cost so much, and it was so much of a hassle waiting afterward at the carousel. Anyway, nowadays she could buy almost anything she needed in Budapest.

“I think Mom doesn’t want to take care of the apartment anymore,” said Dora. “The heater in one of the rooms needs to be repaired—honestly, I think it hasn’t been serviced since it was converted to gas. The bathtub needs to be replaced, and really the whole bathroom needs to be updated. It’s got to be forty years old. The problem is, I was hired full-time in September—finally! It’s great—I’m tenure-track, I get health insurance, a whole benefits package. But I have almost no savings. This apartment is worth what, probably around $80,000?”

“But you said she was willing to work out a payment plan? I don’t have that sort of money either—Arthur and I can barely afford to live in London. Thank goodness Artie can go to the school where he teaches for free. But working for a university press—I don’t know, perhaps it was a mistake. I’ve thought about moving back to Budapest, but Arthur wants Artie to grow up in England.” Dóra pushed her hair behind one ear. Sitting cross-legged on the sofa, she certainly didn’t look forty-six. Dora would have to ask about her face cream. “I don’t know why I keep writing poetry. It’s not as though I’m ever going to make money at it. I’m invited to these conferences—come to Finland, they say. Do a reading, speak on a panel. We will pay your registration fee. But I still have to pay the travel and hotel. I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

“When is your book coming out?” Dora put her plate on the table. When Dóra had arrived from the airport, she had fixed them a snack: bread and körözött, since Dóra was still vegetarian. Her own book, the second to be published, was coming out in September, just in time for their forty-seventh birthday. Her first book, a short-story collection, had been published ten years ago, to good reviews. But the publisher had gone out of business during the recession, and it had fallen out of print. There were still copies floating around on Amazon and ebay. It felt so late to be publishing her second book—and first novel. She should have done it years ago, but there had been her daughter to raise, and a graduate degree to finish, and Jeff had made so little during the long years of a cardiology fellowship with a specialty in heart surgery that she had gotten good at mending the holes in her underclothes so she would not have to buy new ones. And then trying to find a full-time teaching job, and the divorce. I am, she reminded herself, doing the best I can. Now, for the first time in a long time, the ground seemed solid under her feet.

“Next month,” said Dóra. “I’m pleased with it, but who will read it? So few people read poetry nowadays. I have to beg for reviews!”

“But you win prizes. Actual important ones.”

Dóra shrugged. “At any rate, the problem is that neither of us have much money. How much would she be willing to take a month in a payment plan?”

“Three hundred. Dollars. I don’t know what that is in pounds, but I could google it on my phone. I have an international data plan. Could you afford half? And then we could fix it up, little by little. Kicsi by kicsi! I swear, that Hungarian class is going to kill me.” She had been in Budapest for two weeks, and would be here another two, taking intensive Hungarian. So far she had figured out that Hungarian was the complete opposite of English, and that it made her brain hurt. “But honestly, I think my pronunciation is pretty good. I’m going to set the second book in the series here in Budapest. Monsters in Budapest!”

“See, you will have readers. That is what people want nowadays, an adventure story to read on an airplane or at the beach. No one wants poetry.”

“They mostly watch videos on airplanes.” On the Swissair flight, Dora had watched John Carter with Chinese subtitles because she had not known how to turn them off, a British comedy starring Judy Dench, and a Bollywood musical. “I think I could afford one fifty. But I don’t know, do we even want to own an apartment together?”

“Yes,” said Dóra. “Yes, we do. We spent our childhoods here, remember? Me more than you, of course, but there are so many memories here. It will be about a hundred pounds a month—I can afford that. And I would like Artie and Cordelia to have this, someday.” She put her plate down and wiped her mouth with the paper napkin. “We should buy a washing machine…”

Dora put their dishes in the sink, and then they walked around the apartment, talking about paint colors and how to clean out the pantry, which still had jars of lekvár in it put up twenty years ago. Dora had long hair in a braid, darker now that she was dyeing it. Dóra had short hair, going gray, in a bob that swung around her chin. They were both on diets because, as Dora said, as soon as you set foot in the US or UK after having been in continental Europe, you gain five pounds. Dóra sometimes went to church, to Catholic Mass—more often since this new Pope, who seemed more liberal and enlightened than his predecessors (just look at his encyclical on climate change). Dora was vaguely spiritual in a way that combined mindfulness and pop quantum mechanics. She thought of herself as a pantheist: surely spirit was everywhere, in everything? Also, string theory. Both of them believed, more than anything else, in the power of the written word, in the sacredness of literature. Both were afraid of growing old. Dora was afraid of growing old alone. Dóra sometimes felt as though her relationship with Arthur was a miracle. At other times, when she saw that he had left the breakfast dishes on the table for her to clean up, she imagined different ways she could murder him without being caught. Perhaps, instead of poetry, she should write murder mysteries?

“We’ll have to replace most of the furniture,” said Dora. “At least everything is cheap here, since the recession. I think we should make it look the way it’s supposed to, nothing modern. As though it were still a palace, filled with antiques.”

“Then I think we’ve made a decision,” said Dóra. “We can call our mother later. Right now, I would like to go for a walk. I have been on the tube, and then an airplane, and then the shuttle bus all day!”

“I need to buy vegetables at the Nagy Vásárcsarnok. See, isn’t my pronunciation good? Let me get the shopping bag.”

They walked down the stone stairs, out the passageway and into the light of the summer afternoon. The linden trees were in flower and releasing their fragrance. They passed the California Coffee Company and the Hotel Mercure Korona, then headed down Vámház körút toward the river.

I’m not sure who said it, Dora or Dóra: “Fagylalt!” It could have been either of them, calling for ice cream.

“There’s a new ice cream place called Levendula, right across from the Nagy Vásárcsarnok,” said Dora. “I pass it every morning on my way to the language school. It has all sorts of unusual flavors, and the cutest shop. Painted lavender!”

They stopped for ice cream: one cone of lavender citron and chili dark chocolate, one cone of pear ginger and caramelized fig. Then, carrying their cones, they walked down to the Liberty Bridge—the Szabadság híd, Dora reminded herself—which had recently been repainted, and looked over the railing at the river, as they had twenty years before. It was a darker jade now: to their right, the sun was beginning to set, sending fingers of pink and orange over the water.

“It’s so different, and so much the same,” said Dóra.

Up the river, they could see Castle Hill, that palimpsest of historical periods and styles, going back a thousand years. It was already lit up for the night. Downriver, to their left, were new apartment and office buildings, many unoccupied because the effects of the recession still lingered. This was a Budapest with no Trabants in it, with Tescos on the street corners, where Dora could withdraw money at the OTP Bank out of her American bank account using an ATM that told her the exchange rate. Of gay pride parades and right-wing political parties that talked about a Greater Hungary. Tomorrow morning, Dóra would go to the California Coffee Company, order a kicsi latte, and find a quiet corner where she could use the free Wi-Fi to Skype with Arthur and Artie.

And yet here was the Danube, flowing as it had flowed when Szent István was crowned the first king of Hungary in 1000 AD. With embankments and bridges, but the same river.

“Váci utca?” said Dora, finishing the bottom of her ice cream cone, into which she had pushed the last of the pear ginger with her tongue. “You know, I think Budapest has the most beautiful light in the world. Van Gogh would have loved it here.”

“Yes, I need to find some perfume,” said Dóra. “I hope the perfume shop is still there. Everything changes so quickly nowadays.”

Twenty years earlier, she had turned to Dora and said, “Would you like me to show you Café Gerbeaud? It is a very famous coffeehouse, dating from the nineteenth century. It’s a little bit of a walk to Vörösmarty tér, but I think perhaps you would like to walk after being on an airplane.” She and Dora had walked slowly up Váci utca, going into the antique stores, agreeing that they both preferred Zsolnay to Herend, which they found a little kitschy. Agreeing that they did not like the shops that catered to tourists, discovering they shared a taste for the desert called madártej, that their favorite holiday was Christmas—Karácsony in Hungarian. Becoming friends.

They would not always like each other, they would not always agree—Dora said it was stupid not to have a clothes dryer and Dóra maintained that air-dried clothes smelled better, and also Americans were spoiled. But in years after, whether they were twenty-six or forty-six, when either of them felt that sick sense of darkness and despair that comes upon you at 3 a.m. or in the middle of a cocktail party, they would call or email or text. And the sense we get, that we are after all alone in the world, would go away, for they were not alone—they had each other.

I cannot tell you any more of this story, for I do not know it myself. I am Dora and Dóra, not a fortune-teller. The future is always a series of threads that we cast ahead of us, with only partial control over how they are woven. Our lives are a collaboration with fate, and the best we can hope for is a hand to hold in the darkness, a voice on the other side of uncertainty—another who, when called, will answer “I am here.”

Excerpted from Letters from an Imaginary Country, copyright © 2025 by Theodora Goss.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Letters from an Imaginary Country</i> by Theodora Goss appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From Blood & Breath by Qurratulayn

Born into the persecuted Magi class, Evan Wilde keeps her true identity under wraps…

By Qurratulayn

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Published on October 7, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Blood & Breath by Qurratulayn, a new young adult fantasy publishing with Page Street YA on October 7th.

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Girl

“Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

My head snapped up, and I met Mrs. Thorne’s suspicious, thin-lipped gaze.

I wasn’t sure why that saying had emerged unbidden in the forefront of my mind. My mother had always told me it every time she gave me a lesson on how to summon devils. I didn’t know if it was a saying that every child learned or if it was only said because we were Magi, and people like us weren’t allowed to summon devils at all.

At the breakfast table, there were only two plate settings, and I looked around in confusion. “Where’s Theo?”

When I first arrived at Mrs. Thorne’s Boarding House for Respectable Ladies, there had been six girls living here including myself, but within eight months, it had whittled down to two girls as Mrs. Thorne found fault with the tiniest infraction.

Mrs. Thorne’s lips pinched even further—if that was possible. “I found a salacious jazz record in Theodora’s room, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before she started keeping all sorts of company in there.” Her gaze settled upon me. “I trust you’re not hiding anything in that room of yours, Evelyn.”

“No, Mrs. Thorne,” I said into my respectable bowl of oatmeal. “I just had trouble sleeping.”

Mrs. Thorne nodded once, though her gaze still harbored a thread of suspicion. “Good. I was beginning to wonder if there was any hope for your generation, all the wild dances you youths come up with. That’s why we Dun will never gain the respectability Necros have.”

I said nothing as Mrs. Thorne talked on. I had thought that I would be able to save up enough money within a year to get a place of my own, but with Theo gone, I would need to move faster. The other girls had shielded me from Mrs. Thorne’s attention, but now I was all she had to focus on, and it was only a matter of time before she discovered that I wasn’t Dun.

I grabbed my necklace, running the green stone charm back and forth along the gold chain. It was the only thing I had left of my parents, and I wore it always.

I hurried off to work before Mrs. Thorne found some excuse to do an inspection. I had more pressing issues on my mind than whether or not my room was respectable. I had picked up an extra shift at the Red Emporium, and with Theo gone, I was definitely going to need the money.

As I moved away from the boarding house, the buildings in the surrounding area slowly changed from sooty homes that huddled together for warmth to new brick buildings bright with electricity.

“Evan Wilde, I’m so glad you could make it,” the owner, Mrs. Blackwell, said as she stood outside the entrance. “You poor thing; I’m getting cold just looking at you.” She wrapped soft arms around me, and I wanted to lean in and never let go, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t afford to trust anyone.

I dropped my gaze and nodded before hurrying to my station. I avoided everyone’s eyes, staring down at the surface of my desk until I was sure the colors of my own eyes had steadied and wouldn’t reveal what I was. The full moon was tonight.

Everyone who worked at the Red Emporium was Dun, as were most of the customers. Thirty years before, it had been illegal for anyone other than Necros to call down a devil; only Necros had the knowledge and skills to do so. But now, after a growing movement for equity between the classes, Dun were allowed to as well.

Places like the Red Emporium had popped up rapidly, fulfilling a growing demand for contracts that called down devils to perform small tasks. Contracts like those required a steady hand, an artistic flair, and a vast knowledge of devils and their duties. We were only allowed to draw contracts based on the Book of Known Devils. It was supposed to be safer that way, but I still knew the contracts my mother taught me, which were completely different from the standard method we were to follow.

Using contracts, Necros had been the first to rise up against devils hundreds of years ago. They’d freed everyone from the devils’ cruel rule and banished nearly every devil back into their realm. Dun were the ordinary humans they had freed and protected. And Magi… depending on the rumors, we were part devil ourselves, easily possessed and eager to corrupt and destroy the noble world the Necros had created and return everyone back to the subjugation of devils.

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Blood & Breath

Qurratulayn

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Blood & Breath

Qurratulayn

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That was the excuse Necros used to raid the community I’d lived in all those years ago, torching homes orange against a midnight sky, circling until my parents and I were trapped.

I sat beside Jo, who also worked on contracts. She had her bobbed hair tucked behind her ears, and the tip of her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth as she painted the fluid wave pattern of a contract for safe voyage.

Her eyes lit up when she saw me. “Do you have anything planned for tonight?” she asked as she continued drawing her contract.

It was a generic contract with a basic glyph, perfect for someone looking for simple protection before their journey. Only a few drops of a person’s blood were required. Jo could make those in her sleep.

“Not really,” I mumbled as I unrolled my brushes, selecting one before setting the rest beside my ink-stone and stick. I planned to stay home, like I always did when the moon was full. It made the strangeness of my eyes more prominent, and people would know what that meant.

“Perfect,” she said. But before she could say anything more, a customer walked in, distracting her and saving me.

There were three types of contracts.

A full contract was what Vayyu and a group of one hundred Necros had done to save the world three hundred years ago. It was the ultimate self-sacrifice. It called the best of devils, and anything was possible. It was uncommon, rarely done, and I had only witnessed it once.

And for those whose ambitions seeped past the bounds of morality, there were unwilling contracts. An unwilling contract was like a full contract, except someone other than the user was the victim. Though it called the best of devils, it lacked the power of a full contract, and its scope was limited.

I curled my hands into fists. Unwilling contracts had been made illegal decades ago, but that didn’t stop everyone, and rumors always swirled around anyone with a suspiciously fast rise to power.

The Red Emporium sold half contracts, the most common, which only required a few drops of blood and covered small tasks.

In this city, I was the only Magi I knew who drew contracts. My mother had done so openly, teaching anyone who wished it no matter how much my father grew concerned. And they’d punished her for it.

I gripped the edge of the desk, the tips of my fingers turning white from the pressure. I needed to start drafting a few basic contracts and get prepared for the day, but I could barely look at the paper in front of me.

Jo always drew customers; with her bright hair and cheerful personality, she could make anyone feel right at home while she created a love charm for them and wished them the best of luck with it.

It was not that I didn’t like people. People were fine. It was the stuff they did that was not, and my changing eyes marked me as Magi, and Magi blood made for powerful contracts, further solidifying the rumor that we were all part devil.

Jo was already working with a customer when the bell above the door jangled, so I took a deep breath and looked up with my best smile. “Welcome to the Red Emporium. We make the best contracts in the city.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “Is that official?” He had thick brows and narrow eyes. Coupled with his strong nose and cheekbones, it would have made his expression look harsh, but a full mouth softened his overall countenance. He looked about my age, around seventeen, which was unusual. Most of the patrons of the Red Emporium were middle-aged or older, with a few here and there in their twenties.

“You made it here,” I said. “That means you’ve heard of us, and nothing’s more official than word of mouth.”

The corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile. “I suppose. Rumor has it, I can find someone reputable for a decent price, and they won’t let me walk out with junk like this.”

He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a square of paper before handing it to me. Our fingers touched briefly, his long and tapered, mine sporting several hangnails where the skin had split from the dry winter air.

The note was folded in fourths, and when I finally opened it, I just stared. “What is this?” The words came unbidden.

“I knew it.” He dragged his hands through his hair, clutching at the strands. “It’s a piece of junk, isn’t it?”

I rotated the paper left and right, canting my head to the side as I tried to decipher what the contract could have been for. It looked like a mess of swirls resembling half a dozen possible contracts.

I looked from the sheet of paper to him. “It’s supposed to be a contract for… ?”

He lowered his hands, black strands of hair sticking up in all directions. “It’s supposed to be a luck sacrifice.”

I glanced at the paper again. I would have never guessed. “General or specific? A general contract is much cheaper, but there’s more of a gamble, as it gives a devil more room to interpret it how they please since there aren’t any time constraints. It’s also open to a random selection of devils.”

A flush appeared on his face, and he peeked at Jo, who was focused on her own work and not listening to our conversation at all.

I continued. “A specific contract means that I’ll include the name of the devil best suited for the task and will write down exactly what you want done.”

“Specific. Not for me,” he hastily clarified. “For someone else.” He leaned forward. “Gambling.”

“Ah.” No one liked a cheat. “We do not sell those types of contracts here.”

“I know. I figured. I bought another sacrifice—a different one. I don’t think it worked, and the guy I bought it from disappeared.” He sighed. “Great.”

He turned to go.

“Hey.” I stopped him. Tucking my necklace into my shirt, I leaned over the paper and drew out a quick glyph. “All luck contracts start with this basic symbol.” I turned the paper around so that it faced him, glistening ink on white. “If you do not see it, then it’s not a luck contract.”

He stared down at the paper, biting his lower lip. He seemed to be battling an idea in his mind before he finally looked up.

“What about protection sacrifices?” he wanted to know. “Do you make those?”

“General or specific?” My voice was a whisper, and I hastily cleared my throat.

“Specific.” If anything, he looked even more wary than he had when he mentioned the gambling contract. “I want a protection sacrifice against devils.”

I closed my eyes, remembering the night our house was surrounded by yelling men with torches, the orange flames reflecting the malice in their eyes.

“We—” My throat was closing. I cleared it and tried again. “A half sacrifice would not make for a strong enough contract. They’d just take your blood and run.”

I kept staring into his eyes, the color of cognac, trying to see if they’d change to green, purple, black, trying to guess if he was like me. A rare Magi stumbling across another, pretending to be Dun, lying low, trying to survive. His arms were bare of tattoos, so I was certain he wasn’t a Necro, not that I’d ever seen a Necro come into the store. I assumed they made their own contracts instead of buying ready-made like the common folk.

I wanted to ask—I opened my mouth to ask, but old habits die hard, and instead what came out of my mouth was: “I can draw a contract of protection that will warn you if a devil is about to harm you.” My grip on the brush was white-knuckle tight. I slowly loosened it. “It’s not ideal; there’s not much you can do if someone sent a devil after you, but at least you’ll know. And you can try.”

“Something.” His voice was low.

I was selling horribly. I was supposed to inject him with some hope, which was probably what the other guy with horrible contract skills had done. But I could not. I knew what it was like to constantly look over your shoulder and try to be brave only to have it all come to nothing because of a stupid mistake.

“You want a premium contract.” I added a few drops of water to the ink-stone and picked up my half-worn ink-stick. “It’ll cost more than a basic contract, but my blood will be mixed with the ink. Once you add your blood to the contract and burn it, it’ll call up a high class of devil—well, as high as a half sacrifice will allow.” I gently rubbed the stick back and forth against the ink-stone.

“Good devils for protection are Abidugun, Vernon, and Amal. I prefer Amal; she’s a bit friendlier than the others. Her hair is black and gold, occasionally in flames.” Some contractors didn’t share devils’ names with the customer in an effort to keep trade secrets. I told them because that was how my mother always did it, to ensure that I knew exactly which devil I was supposed to expect. Though they had been defeated and were only allowed into our world with strict conditions, she’d said we were always to treat devils with caution.

Once I had enough ink in the well, I wiped my hands and pulled out a candle and a box of lucifers. The matches caught in one strike, and I grabbed a needle, passing it three times over the candle flame. The fire was to sterilize it; passing the needle over the flame three times was merely an extra piece of showmanship.

My fingertips were freckled with needle marks, faded brown stippling the pads of my fingers. When I’d first arrived, Jo had shared, with great relish, the story of one young man who had accidentally pierced his own nail. I was not sure how much of her story was true; in fact, I was certain it was all lies. Still, ever since then, I was careful as I pricked my finger and allowed a few drops of blood to land on the ink-stone.

Blood and ink swirled beneath my brush; then I took a deep breath and started to draw.

The base of the contract was protection, but I blended the lines into a glyph of warning, specifying that it was against devils that wished to do harm. I added a request for Amal, placing her glyph in the far right corner, and stipulated that the warning come at least an hour before he was attacked. Devils were tricky, and this contract would be worthless if Amal only warned him a few seconds before a devil came after him.

When I was done, the contract filled the whole page and glistened wetly under the light.

I reached for the blotter. “After you offer your blood and burn the contract, you’ll feel a little light-headed and breathless. That’s normal. Devils always take before they deliver; that’s why your contract needs to be tight.”

Since my blood was in the ink, it would affect me as well, hence why we were only allowed to draw five premium contracts a month.

“This is a half sacrifice,” I reminded him as I handed him the contract neatly folded into an envelope. “Amal will only warn you once.”

He nodded. “I know.” He looked grim.

I held onto the envelope a little longer than necessary. I wanted to ask him so badly if he was Magi, but I did not know how to do it without exposing both of us.

He handed me several bills, and the moment was gone.

I kept my head down as I made change, urging myself to say something, anything, but I was mute as I handed him his coins.

He pressed a square of cloth into my hand, a handkerchief, and I looked up in surprise.

“For your finger,” he said. He shrugged apologetically. “It’s the least I can do.”

He turned before I could do more than nod my thanks and headed out into the cold.

The handkerchief was made out of silk. It stood out given his plain clothes, and in the corners were the initials JB.

The marks on my fingers were small and would never bleed for long, but I wrapped the handkerchief around my finger anyway.

Beside me, Jo leaned over her station until she was as close to mine as possible without falling out of her chair.

“So,” she began in a leading tone. “Who’s that?”

I stifled the urge to laugh. “I have no idea.”

She sat back, her chair landing on all four legs with a thump. “I forget. You never ask their names. Pity, he seems fun. I was going to see if I could get him to convince you to go dancing with me. I’ll teach you the shimmy.”

“I’m not a dancer,” I mumbled, looking down at my desk once more. “You’d have a terrible time.”

That wasn’t true; I loved dancing. But the full moon was tonight, and I couldn’t risk my eyes changing and everyone discovering that I wasn’t Dun like them. People like me had been fired from their jobs or worse because they were Magi, and I didn’t want to risk it.

Jo let out an exasperated huff of air. “It’s not about being a dancer; it’s about having fun. Surely it won’t kill you to have fun for a day.”

I was about to protest, but she was right. I was tired of constantly looking over my shoulder and fearing that someone would find out who I was. But there was a full moon out tonight, and I was already being risky going to work where someone could notice how different my eyes looked from normal. At nighttime the iridescence would be even worse.

“How about next time?” I said, offering a tentative middle ground.

Jo let out a little groan. “I’m going to hold you to that. You’re not allowed to say no.”

Suddenly it felt like all the breath had been pulled from my lungs, taking with it sight and sound. Vertigo hit me, and I grabbed the edge of my station to keep from falling. My ink-stone clattered to the floor, black ink staining my stockings.

Jo had stood up halfway as I blinked my vision clear, her brow knitted in concern.

I tried out a few experimental breaths. That was the most powerful reaction I’d ever gotten from a premium contract, and it had come so soon too. Most people waited until they got home before they burned their contracts, giving me a couple of hours.

I stared at the door, wishing I had found some way to reveal that I was Magi, and that if he was like me, he was not alone. Devils were after him, and he only had a piece of paper to keep him safe.

I spent the rest of the day only drawing basic contracts and allowing myself to recover.

He was still on my mind once the evening rolled around, and I ran my hand over the square of silk in my pocket wondering if I would ever see him again.

It was snowing, and soft flakes brushed against my cheeks as I left. I stared up boldly at the sky, at the betraying moon, slowly turning Magi eyes from normal human browns and greens and grays to strange, iridescent colors mimicking the warped seam where devils had ripped their way into this world.

Footsteps approached, and I quickly looked back down, hoping that no one noticed my odd behavior. I held my breath until the footsteps passed. The streets were mostly empty as the snow deepened, and anyone who was still outside tucked themselves into their coats and rushed home.

The snow fell soft against my face and hair, and I stuffed my hands deep into my pockets, wishing I hadn’t forgotten my gloves. I could already feel my fingers growing stiff and clumsy.

I turned the corner and nearly crashed into two people but righted myself just in time.

“Sorry,” I mumbled as I stared down at their feet. I hurried past them before they could respond. I couldn’t wait to get home; the longer I was outside, the more anxious I was becoming.

“We have to do it already.”

I could barely process the sentence, barely wade my way through the muck of confusion, when I was hit on the back of the head.

I collapsed.

Blood poured from my head as shards of ice and snow cut into my skin, blinding me.

“Wh—” I barely got out the word; it was a huff, a single syllable offered alongside a begging, upraised hand before I was hit again.

Someone grabbed my legs and started to drag me into the alley. Fear blasted its way through the confusion, and seventeen years of survival crystallized into a single shard of certainty.

If I did not escape, I would be sacrificed.

No.

I kicked and scrambled and clawed at the ice and snow. It didn’t matter that I could barely see; it didn’t matter that it was two against one and I was sorely, dreadfully disadvantaged.

It didn’t matter.

No.

Hands pressed me down into snow, and the overwhelming scent of a masculine cologne filled my senses. My shoulder screamed as my arms were wrenched behind my back and held tight, keeping me in place.

The cold bit into my cheek and the snow flooded my nose, melting with each frantic exhale.

“Hurry, I think someone’s coming.”

I felt them fumble above me and then saw the glint of a razor as it fell into the snow.

A pale hand snatched it up, the arm wrapped in burgundy tattoos, and my dread was complete.

No.

Whoever had found me was Necro. Necros called down devils whenever they pleased, using whomever they pleased.

Cold metal bit into warm flesh.

I heard them swear as blood gushed from my throat, but I barely registered it. All I could hear was the frantic pounding of my heartbeat rapidly descending towards death.

My necklace fell out onto the snow, the gold chain broken and the charm covered in blood.

Suddenly the weight pinning me down disappeared, and panicked footsteps dashed past my bleeding form.

They were gone. Something had scared them off.

With a groan, I tried to glance toward the mouth of the alley. I could vaguely make out a figure.

I started to call out and then stopped myself.

I made for the perfect sacrifice. I was already bleeding. Already incapacitated. There was nothing to stop anyone from finishing what had already been started.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. I did everything right. I was good, I was quiet, I did nothing to draw attention. And yet… and yet…

I let out a single sob as flurries of snow fell from the night sky. The ice–cold flakes burned my hand as I dragged clumsy fingers through the drifts, smearing my blood into a half-legible contract.

This was dangerous. Contracts had to be meticulous; a shaky hand, a wobble, could turn a love charm into a poison curse, or give a devil just enough wiggle room to leave you half-drained of blood and breathless.

I knew this. And yet, seeing my life spilling out red into a lonely alley, and the cold settling its ache deep into my bones, I tossed every warning aside and drew a contract.

I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting back tears as I pressed a hand to the gash in my throat.

“I offer a contract of blood and breath.” I wet my lips. They stung from when I had bitten into them during the struggle.

“Of blood and breath,” I repeated.

Tears spilled from my eyes, melting the snow that clung to my face.

My words were an exhale. “Of blood and breath.”

Silence.

My heart beat sluggishly, fighting a losing battle. The spaces between each beat grew longer until it was barely pumping at all.

“Evan Wilde.” The voice sounded amused as it mentioned my name. My shadow stretched and darkened as it became a distorted version of itself.

It rose from the ground, reaching for the sky as though it had finally awakened from a long slumber.

Feather-soft fingers brushed against my cheek. “You called.”

A light touch across my lips. I sucked in the last breath I would ever call my own and sealed my contract with one word.

“Revenge.”

Excerpted from Blood & Breath, copyright © 2025 by Qurratulayn.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Blood & Breath</i> by Qurratulayn appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Alix E. Harrow

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: Chapters 2 and 3

The lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent through time to ensure she plays her part…

By Alix E. Harrow

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Published on October 14, 2025

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Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs…

Join us every Tuesday through October 28th for an extended preview of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part—even if it breaks his heart. The Everlasting publishes on October 28th with Tor Books. Find additional excerpts here.

Chapter 2

I was born not quite ten centuries after your death; the first time you saved my life, I was nine.

It was between the wars, when my father and I lived in a narrow gray row house in the narrow gray village of Queenswald, in the part of the country that had once been a fathomless green wood but was now nothing but bald hills and pit mines.

I woke that morning and listened, as I did every morning, for the gentle engine of my father’s snoring. The house was silent, so I laced up my boots and slipped out the door.

It wasn’t far to the tavern, but it was dark and cold, and I did not like the dark or the cold. I also did not like locked doors, large dogs, the sound of gunfire, or the sight of blood. I was aware that these were girlish, humiliating tendencies that made the other boys laugh at me, but they would have laughed anyway, I think. Partly it was my looks—my hair and eyes were nearly black, and my skin had a suspiciously Hinterlander undercurrent, beery gold even in winter—and partly it was everything else about me.

I had slim shoulders, thick spectacles, a fine singing voice, neat handwriting, a subscription to the lending library, and the best marks in class; my shins were always a little too long for my trousers and I cried easily, sometimes for no reason. I was a walking flinch. An open invitation for other boys—bolder, louder boys, with ruddy pink cheeks and trousers that fit—to knock their shoulders purposefully against mine as they passed.

But those boys were still sleeping at this hour. Everyone was, save the barkeep, and she was inexplicably fond of my father and me. By the time I knocked she was wiping down tables with her youngest daughter propped on one hip.

“By the fire,” she said, and I nodded.

My father was slumped over the hearth like laundry that had fallen from the drying rack. It took several minutes to get him conscious, and another several to get him vertical. He mumbled things to me as we navigated the empty chairs, nice things, like there’s my boy and thank you and sorry, sorry. I knew my father often behaved shamefully—knew he drank too much and said too much and refused to sing the anthem on national holidays—but he was never unkind, so I’d decided I didn’t mind the rest.

The barkeep set a basket on the counter as we passed. She was always slipping me things, leftover pies and hand-me-down sweaters. I knew this, too, was shameful, but her pies were very good and my father was always between jobs or about to be, so I’d decided it was another thing I didn’t mind.

I took the basket. My father stumbled.

The barkeep’s daughter looked at him with her big blue eyes and her perfect yellow curls—like an advertisement for Dominion’s Own soap, like my exact opposite—and said, with the eerie mimicry of a child repeating words they’ve heard but don’t understand, “Fucking coward.”

I’d heard it before, along with words like turncoat, traitor, and sometimes deserter, although Queenswald was awfully far from the desert.

But that morning I felt my father cringe away from the word and understood for the first time that it was true. That my father was something even more shameful than being a drunk or a radical, something so awful that the stink of it followed him everywhere and sank into everything he loved, including—and this I saw in the mute pity of the barkeep’s face, the way she scolded her daughter—me.

And so I left my father there in the tavern, still drunk, still saying nice things, and ran away.

It still wasn’t fully light, and the muddy streets had frozen overnight into alien figurations, which reached for my ankles and twisted. I tripped and crashed into a woman wearing a fine wool coat. She was very nice about it, bending to help gather the scattered contents of the barkeep’s basket while I fumbled for my spectacles. She smelled like summer, sweet and flowery.

“Poor thing,” she said, as she handed me back the basket, and I thanked her, hot-faced with shame.

Running away, I decided, was more of a spiritual state than a specific speed, so I walked. I walked until the hunched shoulders of the houses gave way to sheepfolds and frostbitten hills, and the street became a narrow track that became nothing at all.

I walked until I reached the grove.

No one much liked the grove. Later I would learn that it was the last remnant of the Queen’s Wood, the great green shroud that had once run all the way to the sea. But most of the trees had been turned into ships a century ago, the last time we’d gone to war against the Hinterlands, and now all that remained were a few ghostly acres.

It seemed larger, to me. The air beneath the trees was very still, and the branches seemed to catch all the ordinary sounds of Queenswald—the coal trains and carts, the lambs and schoolchildren and the bitter wet wind that blew all winter—and turn them away, so that stepping into the woods was like slipping under the surface of a lake.

Every now and then someone would announce that it was high time they cleared the land, and the young men would be hassled outside with axes and saws. They only ever made it through the slender new growth at the edges; any farther and the men would begin to complain that their blades, freshly sharpened, were going dull, and their good ash handles were turning spongy with rot. They would return home, defeated, and no one would mention the woods again for a year or two.

For this, I was grateful. Everywhere I went I was plagued by the sweaty sense that I was in the way or underfoot, unwanted, ill-fitting, missish—but not here. Here, I was neither my father’s son nor a foreigner but only myself.

The only other person I’d ever met in the woods was a girl a little older than me, a proud and feral creature I’d met one day after I’d fallen and scraped both knees bloody. She was my superior in every subject that mattered—climbing, running, spitting, rock-throwing, fighting with sticks—but I didn’t mind. She liked to win, and I liked to watch her, and afterward I liked to lie next to her among the tiny white flowers that covered the grove every summer.

Last winter she’d stopped coming. I asked after her everywhere, but no one seemed to know where she’d gone, or even to have heard of a girl by the name of [REDACTED] and eventually I had concluded, with a new and grown-up sadness, that I’d made her up.

I headed now to the very middle of the woods. She used to wait for me there, beneath an old yew so vast and so misshapen it no longer looked much like a tree, but like some secret organ of the earth itself, exposed. We liked to find patterns in the grain of the trunk: a dragon, a crown, a woman’s tortured face. In spring the sap would run from her eyes like tears.

It was even quieter than usual, beneath the yew. So quiet I thought maybe I wouldn’t run away, after all. Maybe I would just tuck myself down among the roots, cradled by dead needles and worms, and disappear.

They wouldn’t look for me for very long. My father would want to, but he wouldn’t go this far into the grove, being a fucking coward, and in a few months those little white flowers would cover me over, and the name Owen Mallory would be wiped clean from the world, as if it had never been.

That sounded rather grand and tragic, so I settled myself between the roots and waited to disappear.

It was hungry work, I found. By the time the sun had fully risen I’d decided maybe I ought to eat whatever the barkeep had slipped me, as a last meal. I opened the basket.

That’s when I first saw the book.

Not the book, of course, but a book: thin pages, already brittle; a cloth cover, moth-chewed; illustrations printed so cheaply the colors didn’t line up properly with the drawings, so that each figure appeared to be haunted by his own merry ghost. None of the barkeep’s baskets had ever included a book before.

The title was written in an elaborate, curlicued font that was supposed to look medieval: The Legend of Una Everlasting. And then, in smaller serif print: A Children’s Retelling of the Classic Tragedy! And, even smaller: Look inside for a complete listing of titles in the Little Soldiers National Heritage Series.

I sat there beneath the yew and read your story for the first time.

It was not, I would realize only when I was much older, a particularly good adaptation. The author had sprinkled thous and forsooths with a criminal disregard for syntax, and the illustrator had an unwholesome fascination with decapitation. All the messy loose ends of the Everlasting Cycle—the result of centuries of iterations and variations—had been pruned away in favor of a morality tale with all the subtlety and nuance of a nursery rhyme.

But the story itself shone through the prose like sunlight: a nameless child who became a knight; a knight who went to war and became a champion; a champion who slew the last dragon and found the lost grail and became a legend. It was a story of chivalry and courage, where good and evil were neatly labeled, and one always vanquished the other.

And when I turned the final page, there you were: Sir Una Everlasting.

They’d laid you out in full armor but for a helm, mailed fists still curled around your hilt, as if you kept some vigil even in death. Your hair was a startling, fluorescent yellow, which spilled like melted butter over the edge of your bier, and your face was the pure white of the page beneath. There were flowers tucked all around you: tiny, colorless roses, I thought, though the artist had no particular botanical skill.

I thought you were the saddest and most beautiful thing I had ever seen, like a dead angel. I looked for a long time at the bright line of the sword along your sternum, at the solemn shape of your mouth.

I looked at you for so long and so well that I felt something inside me shifting, irrevocably. It was like dying or being born, or being hit very hard on the head. It was like falling in love. (This was another thing I would only realize when I was much older.)

The longer I looked, the more ashamed I felt.

Sir Una Everlasting—you—had never run from anything. You hadn’t disappeared from the world—you had burned your name into its surface, carved it so deeply into the stone of history that it was still legible a thousand years later. You had died, yes, but only because you had found something worth dying for. You had been born poor, but no one had ever called you a poor thing.

If I turned the book sideways, I could read the letters inscribed on your blade: Erxa Dominus.

For Dominion.

Perhaps if my father had read your stories as a boy, he would not have grown up to be a traitor and a turncoat; perhaps he would have served with honor and come home with a pension instead of just a bad hip and a motherless child.

And perhaps—despite my reservations about gunfire and bloodshed—it was not too late for me.

Here I was visited by a somewhat confused daydream of myself returning to Queenswald in triumph—being swept up, adored, admired. The ruddy-cheeked boys would clap me on the back and my father would sober up and you would be there, somehow, glowing faintly with holy light. You would take my hand and guide me down to lie beside you on your bier.

I repacked the basket, fingers clumsy with cold, and went straight home.

My father didn’t even look up when the door closed behind me. He behaved, in fact, as if no time had passed at all, as if the whole world had held its breath while I sat beneath the yew in the heart of the grove that was all that was left of the deep wild woods.

I lingered, wanting him to ask where I’d gone and why I’d come back. If he had, I would have answered, somewhat theatrically: For Dominion.

But I would have meant: For you.

* * *

The second time you saved me, I was twenty-three, and we were losing the war.

The Sunday papers printed fresh maps each week, with squiggly red lines to show how far our troops had retreated, how much territory was still held by the Hinterlanders. They used to list the casualties by name over the wireless, but they’d stopped after a group of dissidents broke into Chancellor Gladwell’s bedroom and wrote the names of the dead on his walls in gory red paint (I’d told myself the red spatters on my father’s cuffs were coincidental).

Now the evening radio hour was reserved for the Minister of War. Every night she addressed the nation, begging every concerned citizen to tighten their belts, every able hand to take up arms. She recalled our past triumphs against worse odds: Were we not the sons and daughters of Queen Yvanne the First, who united the whole of Dominion and brought the Savior’s light to every hollow and dale? Had we not stood against the Hinterlands for centuries, bloodied but never beaten? Surely our nerve would not fail now, on the very cusp of peace?

There had been murmurs and jokes and a run of extremely nasty cartoons when the Chancellor had named a woman as Minister of War, but her speeches were very good, and they left me restless and guilty.

Now, as I walked toward campus, I caught edged looks and suspicious glances, blond heads bent together, muttering. People wondered, perhaps, where I had gotten my dark eyes and hair, and why I hadn’t been detained with the other enemy aliens and foreign suspects. Or perhaps they only wondered why a healthy young man was walking down the street with library books tucked under one arm while their own sons were bleeding or killing or rotting in the Hinterlands.

I wanted to point at my spectacles, which were so thick the lenses had to be specially ordered; I wanted to tell them I was from Queenswald, actually, and did not have to register as an alien; I wanted to wave my transcript at them, which had earned me a fellowship at Cantford College and an exemption from the draft; I wanted, with a dispassionate sincerity I hadn’t felt since I was nine years old, to disappear.

I turned down an alley, hunched with loathing—and there you were again.

For one wild moment I felt everything shift around me, the city street dissolving into moss, the chill gray light going softly green. My mouth was full of the clean taste of winter and my heart was, for some reason, breaking.

Then I blinked and discovered that I was staring at a poster pasted to the alley wall.

The poster version of you was similar to the one in The Legend of Una Everlasting. You were still armored, and your hair was still an unlikely, over-saturated yellow. But you were alive now, caught mid-battle, an angel gone to war. Valiance—the sword you pulled from the yew, the blade that built Dominion—was held dead level in your hands, pointing straight out at my chest. Behind you, legions of Hinterlanders skulked in the shadows. Their faces—leering, animal-like, with eyes so dark they appeared to have no sclera at all—bore no resemblance to my own, or to any human face I have ever seen.

Neither did you, really: Your features were perfectly symmetrical, your cheeks marked by two circles of maidenly pink. Your cloak swirled Dominion-red behind you, and there was a faint halo around your head.

Only your eyes seemed real. The expression in them was exactly right, I thought: grave and proud, faintly contemptuous, as if you were asking for help but very much expecting to do everything yourself. Just their color, a floral and frivolous blue, was incorrect.

The caption read: DOMINION NEEDS YOU!

I looked at the poster for a long time. At you, who were everything I wasn’t and everything I wanted.

Then I turned around and walked straight to the recruitment office. I cheated on the eye exam, lied baldly about my exercise regimen, signed several forms, shook two hands, and then I was an enlisted man.

Three weeks later I was at the front. I’d had to return my library books by mail, at a cost I didn’t like to contemplate.

* * *

The third time you saved me, I was twenty-six, and we were winning the war.

It was harder to tell the difference between winning and losing, from the front. I had found that both states involved an enormous amount of marching and suffering, endless days spent eating shitty tins of beans, and endless nights spent praying to God you got to eat one more shitty tin of beans and wishing you’d said a proper goodbye to your father.

I hadn’t even spoken to him before I shipped out. I’d posted a brief, slightly nasty letter explaining that my country called in her hour of need and that I, unlike certain others, was not afraid to do my duty (I was). In reply I had received a single telegram which read, when decoded: WOULD PREFER TO DISOWN YOU IN PERSON SO DONT DIE LOVE DAD.

I hadn’t died.

True, the first time we charged enemy lines I had puked from sheer terror, and when it was over, I had wept, helplessly and hard, like a child—

But I hadn’t died.

After the weeping had subsided to irregular hiccups, Colonel Drayton had taken me aside. “It’s like swimming,” he’d said, with the pride of someone delivering a line they’ve written themselves. “You drown, the first time. But the next one will be easier.”

The next one had not been easier.

It had in fact been infinitely harder because I knew then how a bullet sounds when it hits bone, how intestines feel beneath a boot, how desperately and cravenly I did not want to die, no matter how noble the cause.

I had begun to cry before the order was even given, that time, and survived only because I turned out to be—to the bafflement of my commanding officers, myself, and everyone who’d ever met me—the best shot in the 2nd Battalion.

There was no rational explanation for it. My vision was terrible and my reflexes were worse; at school I had been chosen for teams only when every other option was exhausted, including younger siblings and girls.

And yet: The rifle settled so sweetly to my shoulder, and the revolver lay so tenderly in my palm. The motions of loading, firing, reloading—the fall of the hammer and the kick as the bullet left the barrel—all of it was like a clapping game I’d learned as a child. I’d forgotten the words, but my muscles remembered the rhythm.

I didn’t even have to aim. I only lifted my arm and pulled the trigger and my enemies fell like bottles at a carnival game, and later I would vomit until I couldn’t anymore.

I was not well-liked in the battalion. There had been a rash of ugly jokes early on, which Colonel Drayton quashed, somewhat clumsily. (Drayton was a liberal, which meant he thought boys of every race and class ought to be allowed to die for their country.) Then there had been an awkward encounter on sentry duty, where I’d been obliged to tell another private, politely, that I didn’t fuck men, and he’d said neither do I! with confusing venom. The others had pointedly ignored me, since then.

But after that second battle they regarded me with sullen hostility, as if they suspected me of playing an elaborate trick on them. After the fourth battle, when it was clear the shaking and crying were not an act, they accepted me. Not as a fellow soldier or even, really, a fellow man—but as a sort of embarrassing lucky charm, like an unwashed sock or the foot of a dead animal, which they carried along against their better judgment.

They carried me far—across the whole of the Hinterlands. We waded through waist-deep fields of grain, which we left trampled and soiled, and crossed rivers whose names we changed to make them easier to pronounce. In the papers, the maps turned triumphal red in our wake.

Colonel Drayton’s speeches grew longer and more florid. He discovered at some point that I’d studied history and badgered me for poignant details.

“Boys,” he would begin, and several of the men would pull out their pencils, because there were running bets on the number of times he would address us as boys, my boys, lads, sonny Jims, and buckos.

“Let me tell you of the dark days before Queen Yvanne, back when Dominion was nothing but a hilly backwater ruled by petty kings and squabbling tribes. The Norns of the southern marsh, the savage Hyllmen, the Gallish with their heathen temples all painted up like fast women. All of them mired in filth and darkness, beset by famine and pestilence—even dragons! That’s right, sonny Jims!” (Pencils would scratch.) “The devil’s own creatures, pale as ghosts, huge as houses!

“Yes, nasty business all around, lads.” (More scratching; some soft cursing.) “Until a young girl pulled a sword from a tree. Until a queen rose to power and sent her champion out to bring peace and prosperity to the land. And then there was only one crown, one God, and one nation. And that nation was called Dominion.”

Here he would smile with a sort of rugged paternal pride. “For a thousand years, we’ve held fast. Despite treachery and idolatry, despite foreigners and radicals worrying at our heels. Despite even these damned Hinterlanders— who slew the Virgin Saint herself, who despise our very way of life!” He shook his head, dolefully. “How many times have we gone to war with them, and settled for sniveling treaties, slick promises from soft-handed diplomats? Not this time, buckos! This time let us have victory or death! Let us, gathered here”—I could never tell if he was faking it, or if he was genuinely choking with tears—“Let us be the Last Crusade, my boys! For crown and country!” (There was a separate tally for this phrase, which the Colonel deployed at least once a day despite the fact that no one had actually worn the crown for a century or so, as Dominion was now a republic.)

A beat or two would pass while everyone ran the numbers, followed by perfunctory applause and furtive shuffling, as a great deal of cigarettes and pornography changed hands.

Then we would string up flags and pose for photographs in front of whatever little village we’d liberated for crown and country.

I had formed the idea, from the little newsreels that played before films at the theater, that the new citizens of Dominion would applaud as we passed, weeping with gratitude and tossing fistfuls of poppy petals, but they only watched us, silently, with eyes like thrown stones.

Every now and then they approached me, speaking rapidly in one of the many languages of the Hinterlands: Shvalic in the east or Merrish in the south, or the musical, gapless speech of the Roving Folk, who lived everywhere, on horseback. But I would shake my head—only the Mothertongue was taught in Dominion schools—and they would recoil, as from a stick that had turned out to be a snake.

I wondered if I really looked so much like them. If the mother my father never mentioned had been one of them, some nameless Hinterlander girl he met during the last campaign. If she was even now standing in the crowd, watching me through the gaps between rifles.

I tried not to look at the townspeople, after that.

My sleep suffered. My dreams became torturous circles, looping back over the same battles again and again, with slight, disquieting variations, interrupted only by the anxious grinding of my own molars. In the morning my hands shook so badly that I struggled to tie my own laces or button my own coat, although they were always perfectly steady when I raised my revolver. I thought often of my father, not with my usual pity or disgust, but with a treacherous, wormy sympathy.

“Think of your girl back home,” Colonel Drayton advised, cliché-ly. I thought of flaxen hair, of mailed fists, and eyes like judgment day. My breathing eased.

Drayton clapped me on the back very hard and said, “See, lad? It’s all worth it.”

I found myself repeating those words like a prayer. I believed them, or at least believed that I believed them—until we reached the southern coast.

Our enemies had fallen back and back until there was nowhere else to fall back to. The ones who would surrender had surrendered; what remained were the ones who never would. Who no longer hoped for victory or mercy, but only blood.

They were dug in now among the dunes, waiting for us. We might have starved them out or waited for the fleet to fire on them from the seaward side. But the public was tiring of the war, and Colonel Drayton had been asked to provide a decisive victory. So there we were in the pale dawn: running the leather straps of our holsters over our shoulders, affixing our service knives to our belts, laughing in the urgent, overloud way of young men who can taste their own deaths in the backs of their mouths.

I snapped my revolver into its holster—a Saint Sinclair Mark III, finest product of the finest army in the world, accurate to thirty paces—and looked out at the shadowed figures waiting for us in the dunes. Within an hour or two they’d all be dead, along with most of the men beside me.

I couldn’t see, suddenly, how it could possibly be worth it. How lowering, after all this marching, to discover I was still my father’s son.

They found me six hours later with my throat half cut, so that my breath bubbled obscenely through my trachea. Poor Colonel Drayton lay beside me, service knife still gripped in one cold hand, and a neat black hole burrowed directly between his eyes.

The following week was a grim haze of needles and stitches and medics with distant, resigned expressions. Someone turned on a wireless so we could hear Minister Rolfe’s speech, thanking us for our noble and worthy sacrifices in the name of crown and country. I laughed, and it was such an unpleasant sound that they sedated me. The fever set in some time that night, and I thought, with no small amount of irony, that I might die for my country after all.

And then I dreamed of you.

I’d dreamed of you many times, as a boy and after, but you were always two-dimensional, a character from a storybook rather than a person.

Now you were so real I could see the lines tanned into the corners of your eyes, hear the wet rattle of your breath. Your teeth were filmed with blood.

“Owen,” you said, and your voice was deep and cool as still water, “come back to me.”

Then you said, “Please,” and that cool voice caught and hung on the word, and I thought I would do anything at all—live or die or burn in hell—if you asked it of me.

In the dream, I answered you. The medics told me later it was the first word I’d spoken since the dunes, the first time any of them thought I might live.

I said, “Always.”

* * *

The fever burned out within a week, but the dreams lingered.

They were almost always of you, though you did not speak again. I saw you kneeling, head bowed so that your hair parted in two bright wings around the back of your neck. I saw you astride a rangy blood bay, the two of you moving in eerie, perfect synchrony, like a single animal. I saw you by firelight and leaf-light, moonlight and sunlight and, once, bizarrely, by the spectral, electric blue of a searchlight.

Sometimes, of course, my dreams were merely the senseless, anxious dreams of a coward: looking for my father and not finding him; trying to hold a pen with curled, blackened fingers; calling out the names of two children I’d never met and knowing they wouldn’t answer.

Sometimes, too, I dreamed of home: the long gray summers of Queenswald, when mold bloomed overnight and moss burst green between every cobblestone; the quiet winter evenings with my father, both of us reading, nearly content; those eager spring mornings in the grove, waiting for [REDACTED] beneath the yew.

That’s where I went when they finally let me out of the hospital. I took the train straight from Cavallon to Queenswald. An elderly, jowly man offered me his seat, which puzzled me until I recalled that I was still wearing my red service jacket, with the Everlasting Medal of Honor gleaming dishonestly on my chest. Other passengers regarded me with fond, vaguely paternal expressions, rather like the ones in my childhood vision. I found they made me a little sick, now.

I walked from the station past my father’s house and up into the hills. I went to the place where I first saw you, which was the last place anything had made sense.

But the grove was gone.

During the war the land had finally been cleared, and the entire hilltop given over to pasture. There were a few stumps and thickets left, but of my favorite tree—that great and ancient yew in the heart of the woods— there was nothing at all. Even the roots had been dug out, so that all that remained was an indentation in the earth surrounded by tiny white flowers, like a plundered grave.

For once, I did not weep.

I only knelt for a while in the place where the woods had once been, but were no longer, until I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it, and that there would never be a time when I did not miss it.

Yet still, I lingered. You had come to me three times, I thought; why not a fourth?

I whispered your name; nothing answered me but the bitter wet wind, which blew hard across the bare hills.

I picked a fistful of those little white flowers before I left. Then I stood, damp-kneed and dry-eyed, and went down to the tavern. My father wasn’t there, but the barkeep told me she would save the dragonscales for him.

I asked, “The what?”

She nodded at the flowers hanging limply from my hand. “Dragonscales, my mother always called them.”

“Ah,” I said. I looked them up later; they’re also called ulla flowers, which means many, in Middle Mothertongue, because they’re so common as to be considered weeds.

I tucked the flowers obediently into a little jam jar and thanked the barkeep, who kissed me on the cheek and told me my father had worried himself sick, which I did not imagine was distinguishable from drinking himself sick.

Then I walked to the village post office, where I mailed a letter to my old adviser apologizing for going to war in the middle of term and begging to be readmitted to the Cantford Department of History.

If you would not come to me, I thought, I would go to you.

* * *

Professor Sawbridge’s reply arrived four days later, so heavily redacted that it was mostly prepositions and conjunctions. (Gilda Sawbridge had a low opinion of the government and a high temper, which tended to upset the censors. It also upset the Cantford Board of Fellows, her students, the other faculty, and me, but, as she was the most acclaimed archaeologist of her generation, we all did our best to overlook it.)

Tucked in the envelope alongside the letter was a formal notice of acceptance on school letterhead. At the top, Sawbridge had written: Don’t make me regret it.

I returned to Cantford campus the following week. In our first meeting, I told Professor Sawbridge that I’d chosen a specialization: the folkloric traditions of Middle Dominion.

She propped her glasses on top of her head and gave me her full attention. I’ve never been vivisected, but I imagine it feels very much like receiving Gilda Sawbridge’s full attention.

Eventually she said, without looking away, “Too broad.”

“I intend to focus on the Everlasting Cycle, our founding mythological—”

“It’s played out.”

“It’s patriotic.”

“Please, I’ve just had breakfast,” she said, without inflection.

“I wonder that you, of all people, could fail to appreciate the need for further study of Una Everlasting.” This, I thought, was clever of me: Sawbridge was the only female professor in the whole of Cantford. “Her story tells us that a woman might take up arms as well as a man. That she might fight, even lead—”

“So long as she dies before she starts wondering why she can’t vote, divorce, or open a bank account. Do not patronize me, Mallory.” This, too, was delivered flatly. “Now tell me honestly: Why?”

I answered, softly, “Erxa Dominus, ma’am.”

It was a good line, well delivered, and even a little true. I had failed my country on the field, but still hoped to serve it better on the page. To earn the medal I could hardly stand to look at, to finally become—despite my embarrassing origins and even more embarrassing father—a true son of Dominion. I imagined myself standing proudly behind lecterns and oaken desks, beyond all reproach and suspicion, unassailable at last.

But beneath all that, of course, there was another reason, which I could not say aloud.

Professor Sawbridge looked at me some more. She looked at my hands, which were shaking again, and at my throat, which I kept hidden behind tightly buttoned collars. She looked at my eyes, and perhaps she saw something of that last, unspoken reason there.

She said, on a sigh that made her book towers wobble dangerously, “Good luck.”

I left the office that day feeling like a hound let off the leash, permitted at last to give chase.

In the years that followed, there was nothing but the hunt. I ignored the papers and wireless speeches and my father’s pamphlets. I ignored everything— save you.

You led me into archives and private collections, libraries and museums, ancient ruins and family vaults. I excelled at the chase—I had a better-than-average memory and an eye for detail, and a mind that clicked obediently along like a series of bright brass gears. But it was like hunting in a hall of mirrors; I caught glimpses of bright armor or pale hair, but when I reached out, I touched nothing but glass.

I read and re-read every accounting of your story—Lazamon’s shambling anthology of legends, Marie de Meulan’s romantic verses, Montmer’s Historica—but all of them were third- or fourth-hand, history watered down into mere hearsay. Most of the authors claimed to have based their versions on The Death of Una Everlasting—a true accounting of your adventures as written by an anonymous traveling companion—but, as there was no evidence that such a text had ever existed, most modern historians saw this as a bid for legitimacy rather than a fact.

My undergraduate work was therefore little more than an echo’s echo. My papers were all reinterpretations of reinterpretations, dissections of lines that had already been dissected a hundred times before. It was received well enough—I graduated with the second-highest marks in the history of the department, after Sawbridge herself, and my article on the grail as a metonym for nationhood had been quoted in the Times—but Professor Sawbridge was not fooled. (“You are clever enough to convince the swine that you are giving them pearls,” she observed, idly. “Alas, alack! I am not a pig.”)

My current manuscript—An Everlasting Legacy: A Survey of Modern Translations—was supposed to earn me the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow title, the respect of my peers, and a living wage. But it was so anemic and derivative that even the swine (the other faculty) were beginning to entertain doubts. They muttered often about the benefits of fresh air, and more than once I’d heard the words extended leave floating ghoulishly down the hall. Though I had nowhere else to go—I wasn’t even sure I could crawl back home, after the things my father and I had said to one another during our last fight—I was on the verge of agreeing with them.

Until I received that book in the post, and you saved me for the fourth time.

Chapter 3

I barely touched the book, that first day.

I simply crouched in my flat above the butcher shop and smoked an entire pack of Lucky Stars, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the last. It was a habit I’d picked up during the war and continued on doctor’s orders for my weak disposition, and also because it was the only way to overpower the meaty, battlefield smell of the butcher shop below.

I moved the book from my bedside to the desk and back again. I performed a series of tests—not on the book, but on myself: writing out my whereabouts for the last three days to ensure there were no odd gaps, reciting every monarch of Dominion from Yvanne up to the republic, pinching myself quite hard, et cetera. I had suffered some little disturbances after the war—forgetting things that had happened only the day before, or remembering things which had never happened, or confusing dreams for memories—but my mind seemed to be in perfect order now.

I went to bed early and lay tense and unsleeping for several hours.

At two or three in the morning I said, aloud, “God, enough,” slipped on a pair of cotton gloves, and opened the book. I translated the first sentence:

It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree.

A surprising peace moved through me as I wrote the words, an almost mechanical satisfaction, as of a key turning smoothly in a lock. I returned to bed and slept well. I dreamed, and my dreams were all of you.

The second and third days I spent examining the book as an archaeological object, striving for some semblance of objectivity.

It was not at all uncommon for unscrupulous or excitable persons to “discover” artifacts related to Una Everlasting. Every old tree in every old village was the one from which you first pulled Valiance; every rusted shield was the one you wore on your left arm, a white dragon upon a red field. Just last week Professor Sawbridge had been called away to investigate a vault beneath the ruins of Cavallon Keep, which might have been your final resting place.

I extracted tiny samples of ink and studied the grain of the wood beneath my strongest magnifying glass. I took meticulous, if inconclusive, notes. Ink is oak gall, hand-lettered—rate of decay indicates early period. Pages are wood pulp. Parchment or vellum would have been more typical.

On the fourth day I opened the book again and worked through the first six pages, and forgot all my fussy, doubtful notes. Yes, the paper was anachronistic. Yes, the binding was unusual, perhaps even unique. But the words themselves rang in my head like church bells, and I came to believe that whoever had written them had truly known you, not only as a hero or a saint, but as a living woman.

It was the way he described you, the casual familiarity of it, and the way he sometimes forgot the grander quest in favor of odd, quiet moments of intimacy. But most of all it was the way he mourned you. Grief rose from every page like turpentine, burning the back of my throat.

On the fifth day I made copies of my translated pages and mailed them to Professor Sawbridge, who was still away supervising the excavation of the burial vault.

On the sixth day Professor Sawbridge and I exchanged a series of telegrams, in which she called me a rude name, committed light treason, and cast aspersions on the veracity of the text. I knew she was at least intrigued, however, because she was taking the early train back to campus, and the only thing she hated more than her country was getting out of bed before ten o’clock.

On the seventh day, I went out for cigarettes and milk. The sun was far too hot and the air was far too fresh, moving around me in great unsettling billows, tugging at my sleeves.

When I returned, with relief, to the stale dark of my flat, the book was gone.

In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.

* * *

I had never flourished in a crisis. I was one of God’s natural ditherers, much given to the wringing of hands and the writing of unhelpful lists. Since the war, I had added fits of weeping and melancholic stupors, and every now and then a wave of confused and violent memory that left me curled in a corner, shaking.

I did not dither now, though, nor wring my hands. I did compose a brief and unhelpful list (1. Report the theft of a nonexistent book to the police; 2. Search the room for clues, as they are always doing in novels; 3. Weeping fit??), but I did not even bother to write it down. My body was already moving, as if it had decided on a course of action without me.

I donned my old red service coat, then—after a moment’s sweaty uncertainty—removed the coat, strapped my holstered Sinclair service revolver over my shoulder, and slipped the coat back over it. I tucked two packs of cigarettes into the breast pocket and left the flat with the white card clutched so tightly in my hand that the edges cut into my palm.

I showed the card to the cab driver, who read the address twice, gave me a suspicious, flinty look, then drove in silence to the very heart of Cavallon and deposited me on the steps of a building I’d never seen, but recognized nonetheless, because it was stamped on the back of every coin in the country: the capitol.

I exited the cab clumsily, blinded by the sheer volume of white marble. The air was thick and hot, as if it had been panted from a dog’s mouth; I couldn’t imagine, suddenly, why I’d worn my service jacket.

“Traitors, the lot of you.” It was my driver, leaning one elbow out the window and enunciating very clearly, as if he’d been rehearsing during the drive.

I was not surprised by this statement. The war was over, but the occupation was proving messy and expensive, and there were plenty of people who were thrilled to find someone with brown eyes to blame for it. I also happened to be, by literal and legal definition, a traitor.

But then I saw the crowd gathered at the steps of the capitol, signs and banners waving, and felt a surge of embarrassment instead.

“Oh, no—I’m not with—” But the driver had already slipped back into traffic.

I turned quickly away from the crowd, hunching my shoulders. I comforted myself that treasonous chanting was probably quite diverting, and there was no reason any of them should notice a panicky scholar lurking nearby. And anyway, they might not even be affiliated with my father. Those radical organizations were always dividing and sub-dividing, as if their true purpose was not the downfall of tyranny but the invention of new acronyms.

“Owen? That you?”

I flinched, feeling like a boy caught sneaking out of the house, except that my father had never much cared where I went or when I came back.

I turned, sweating hard, and saw him limping gamely through the crowd, one arm raised.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite propagandist,” my father said, and smiled at me.

It was such a good smile—sincere but a little roguish, the bags beneath his eyes folding up like merry accordions, as if our last fight had never happened or wasn’t worth remembering—that I muttered, “Hello, Dad.” And then, more stiffly, “What’s all this?”

“Ah,” he scoffed, “some friends of mine. Just a little gathering.”

“A gathering with slogans is called a protest, Dad.”

The smile faded. Without it, my father looked more like what he was: old and tired and hungover, probably in a great deal of pain. He’d always been thin, but now he resembled the scraps one might save for a stray, all bone and gristle.

“That bloodthirsty tyrant—”

“Her title is Minister Rolfe, and as our first female Minister of War I think she deserves a certain degree of respect—”

“Oh-ho, does she show respect for the women who’ve died in her munitions factories—which she refuses to investigate, because they’re owned by her nasty industrialist friends?” I often imagined my father would have made a good solicitor, if he hadn’t taken up anarchy instead. “The union girls invited her to speak at one of their meetings and do you know what she called them? Poison!” My father shook his head. “She wants to be Chancellor, if you ask me. Thinks we’ll all just go quietly along with it.”

He added a scornful ha!, but the truth was that I’d spent the last several years going quietly along with it. It wasn’t hard; I simply never read the papers or listened to the wireless or voted. I declined every invitation to veterans clubs and kept my Medal of Valor in my loose change jar. If it wasn’t for the dreams and the shaking fits, I might have been able to pretend I’d had my throat slit in a terrible archival accident.

My father was still talking. “But I can tell you our pamphlet circulation is up two hundred percent! Not everyone wants to see their tax dollars support an illegal occupation. Not everyone was happy to waste their sons on a ridiculous war—”

“Some of us shed a lot of blood for that ridiculous war,” I interrupted, in that especially priggish tone I seemed to reserve solely for my father. “Some of us fought for crown and country—”

“A country with colonies is called an empire, son.”

We regarded one another unhappily for a little while. The chanting continued shamelessly on. The sun shone heartlessly down. I was very conscious of the strap of the holster beneath my coat, and the sheer insanity of bringing a weapon to the capitol of Dominion.

Eventually, my father offered, with gruff resignation, “There’s extra signs, if you’d care to join us.” Behind him two men were unrolling a long banner that read: Veterans against War!

“I thought you were the Veterans for Peace.”

“Don’t you mention the VFP in my presence. Class traitors and sycophants, all of them.” My father softened, leaning close. His breath rose in fumes between us. “What do you say, son?”

I looked at him, with his pinkish-white complexion and his hair the color of underbaked bread, and marveled that he had never truly noticed the difference between us. He didn’t seem to understand that a man like me would never be wholly beyond suspicion, no matter how ardently loyal, while a man like him would never be wholly condemned, no matter how faithless. That I had always hated him, just a little, for the privilege of his deviance.

I answered, in my coldest Cantford drawl, “No, thank you.”

My father would have said something else—I had never in my life gotten the last word—but someone touched my right elbow and said, “This way, sir,” with the professional unobtrusiveness that I associated with spies or very good waiters.

“Excuse me,” I said to my father, and turned away with profound relief.

His voice followed us into the building, asking why I wasn’t angry and how I slept at night, and finally, plaintively, as we approached a nondescript door, “And why the hell are you wearing that coat? It’s hot as the devil out.”

* * *

The spy/waiter led me through the door, where I was handed off to an even more unobtrusive person, who took me through a series of hallways that ended in another door, which was attended by someone so masterfully unobtrusive they seemed to blend into the plaster.

They turned the knob and announced, deferentially, “Corporal Owen Mallory, ma’am.”

I had a fleeting impression of wealth—velvet drapes, waxed parquet— before my eyes landed on a heavy desk and, sitting behind it, a woman.

I’d never seen her before in my life, but I had the brief, disorienting sense that I knew her. I knew the sleek brass of her hair, styled so perfectly it might have been strapped on, like a helmet. I knew the clear blue of her eyes and I knew—I knew—that voice: “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”

It was the thank you that did it. Suddenly I was back in the field hospital after the dunes, listening to that voice thank me for my sacrifice to crown and country.

I froze two steps across the parquet, contorting into a panicked gesture somewhere between a salute and a bow. “Oh my God, ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”

A low laugh, which managed not to be mocking. “Call me Vivian. Sit down.”

I settled myself, carefully not imagining what my father would say if he knew his son was on first-name terms with Vivian Rolfe.

She regarded me across the polished expanse of her desk. She was always perfectly composed in her speeches and appearances, no matter what the opposition said or did.

But now she looked a little harried. Two of her nails had been badly chewed, and the starch had gone out of her collar, so that it lay limp against her collarbones.

She set a slim cigarette between her lips and leaned minutely forward. An awkward beat passed before I fumbled the matchbook from my coat pocket and cupped a flame between us. The light settled in the hollows of her face, finding the skull beneath her skin. I couldn’t tell how old she was.

She exhaled a long white plume and said, pensively, “You’d think it would have been enough. There were losses, to be sure, but we won. Our oldest enemy, thrown down! If I were a man, he’d be crowning me by now.”

“Ma’am?” I offered, intelligently.

She cut me a wry, pitying look. “Chancellor Gladwell has asked for my resignation. I made that boy—does he think he would have been reelected without a war?—but now they’re whining about the budget and the cost of reconstruction, and they’ve found just the woman to blame.”

“Oh,” I said. In the silence, the faint sound of chanting could be heard from the window.

Vivian rubbed her temples. “And those bastards simply refuse to shut up.” I tried not to blink, because I’d read somewhere that blinking was a sign of guilt. She added, wistfully, “I’d have them rounded up like cattle, if I could.”

The dispassion in her voice sent a chill over my scalp. My father had so far suffered no worse than a ritualistic series of arrests and fines, but suddenly I could imagine his body splayed on the capitol steps, the butt of a rifle raised above him. I made a mental note to remind him to start using a more difficult cipher for his letters and pamphlets.

Vivian tapped her cigarette twice on the lip of an ashtray. “But nothing is ever handed to us, is it, Corporal Mallory? This country may not believe in me anymore”—a self-deprecating laugh, only slightly bitter—“but I’ll be damned if I stop believing in it.”

“Ma’am?” I said again.

Vivian rolled her neck from side to side, and when she looked at me again a subtle transformation had taken place. Her spine had stiffened and her shoulders moved back, so that the points of her jacket drew a perfect line in the air. All the irony and weariness had leached from her face and left behind a quiet, earnest zeal. She looked both younger and much older.

When she spoke again, it was in the flowing, modulated voice I heard on the radio. “Our country is at a crossroads. Finally, after centuries of strife, we stand as Yvanne imagined us: a nation united, at peace. But peace is a fragile, fleeting thing. It must be protected, fought for, defended against all threats, native and foreign alike—and I fear we have grown weak.”

I felt I ought to nod, so I did.

“I don’t refer only to the obvious dissidents—at least they care, in their misguided way, about the future of the nation. It’s the disinterested, the doubtful. It’s the empty pews in our churches and the apathy in our schools. The young people who don’t know where we came from or what we fought for. We’ve forgotten—as a nation, as a people—who we are.”

All of these were lines from her speeches, which left me with the sweaty, trapped feeling that I was the only person in the audience of a one-woman play. I wished, passionately, that I’d taken off my coat.

But then Vivian pulled something heavy from a drawer and set in on the desk between us with the muted clack of wood on wood, and I forgot about my coat.

A book. The book. I leaned toward it, pulled by whatever secret gravity had sent it to me in the first place.

“I read your article about the grail. Brilliant work.” (When Professor Sawbridge had read that article, she’d sighed for a long time and said: You may be a patriot or a historian, Mallory, but not both.) “You argued that a nation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole, but only a story we tell about ourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it?” One of Vivian’s fingers, long and delicate, touched the cover. It was not a reverent or thrilled touch, but the casual, possessive gesture of a reader to her favorite book. “Honor. Courage. Tragedy. The villains cast down, the hero triumphant, the rightful queen restored. And yet, it fades. The people forget. It’s time we remind them.”

She traced the circle of the device on the cover and then, abruptly, slid the book several inches toward me. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” She met my eyes and her voice fell nearly to a whisper. “Are you the man who will save it?”

Some latent desire in me—to kneel, to surrender myself to some grander purpose—to erase the ignominy of my origins and earn my place at last in the grand tradition of Dominion—unfurled inside me. Vivian Rolfe looked at me so steadily and for so long that I felt the light contract around us, so that I imagined the shadow of a crown on her brow, felt the phantom weight of a blade on my shoulders.

I nodded, because I had an awful certainty that if I spoke my voice would be choked with tears.

“I knew you were.” The warmth in her voice, the absolute certainty—as if she was not at all surprised by my answer—sent a flush of pleasure through me.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I sounded boyish, overeager. “Who discovered the book.”

She dipped her head in grave approval. “We’ve been excavating the ruins of Cavallon Keep for years now. A few weeks ago, we found a vault, and in the vault was a locked chest, and inside the chest… Well.” I hoped the archaeologist had gotten to say By Jove at least once. Vivian continued, “Can you imagine? People have been searching for centuries, scouring every crypt and castle, and only now—in Dominion’s darkest hour!—does it reveal itself. It’s providence. Fate. The hand of the Savior Himself, I sometimes think.”

“And then you… mailed it to me?”

Her expression turned indulgent. “Forgive my little test. If you had gone to the press, or tried to sell it—but you didn’t. You kept it secret, treasured it, labored over it. That’s how I knew you were the right man to tell Una’s story.”

A new and delicious sense of my own significance filled me. I’d never been picked first for anything in my life, and now the Minister of War—or at least, the former Minister of War—had chosen me to translate the greatest historical artifact in Dominion’s history. Visions of honorary degrees and book tours danced in my head; becoming the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow; Harrison combusting from pure envy; my father clapping me on the back and saying, You’ve changed my mind about everything, I’m so sorry for my decades of embarrassing radicalism.

“I—I’ll try, ma’am.”

“Excellent! Go ahead then, no time like the present. Get in touch when you finish your translation.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the tray and reached for a letter opener, as if our conversation was over.

I stood clumsily, dizzy with awe. “Yes, ma’am.” My hands shook as badly as they had in the war, as if they were approaching a battlefield instead of a book.

The cover was cool and smooth as stone. I felt Vivian’s eyes on me again, perhaps wondering why I lingered. But a strange anxiety gripped me, a sense that some trick was being pulled. I opened the book carefully, praying the college archivist never found out.

And then I went very still. I wet my lips twice before I could speak. “The pages.” I cringed from the hoarse whistle of my voice. “The pages are—”

“Blank? Yes.” Vivian spoke lightly, with humor, twirling the letter opener in her fingers. The point glinted.

I had the sudden, inexplicable urge to hit her. For a moment I saw it so clearly in my mind—saw my knuckles splitting against her perfect white canine, blood overfilling her mouth and sheeting down her chin—that I recoiled from myself.

“Why,” I asked, swallowing, “are they blank?”

She leaned over the desk, smiling peacefully. Beneath the tang of cigarette smoke, I smelled something sweet and a little familiar, like summer flowers. “Because you haven’t written them yet,” she said, and then she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my left hand.

I did not scream. My vocal cords were too knotted and scarred to produce anything louder than an eerie, breathy howl, like the keen of a dog. I tugged dumbly at my hand, but the letter opener had sunk into the pages below, pinning it there.

Vivian leaned closer. Her expression was still peaceful, perhaps even sympathetic. “Your country needs you, Corporal.”

I watched with a sense of unreality as my blood spread over the empty paper like a red map, an empire in bloom. I looked quickly away, but something had gone wrong with my vision.

Everything in the room felt translucent, impermanent, as if the paint of the world was fading and peeling away in great strips.

I closed my eyes. I smelled pine and snow, now, instead of flowers.

Vivian’s voice came to me from very far away, softly urgent. “She needs you, Owen.”

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The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

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The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

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Excerpted from The Everlasting, copyright © 2025 by Alix E. Harrow.

The post <i>The Everlasting</i> by Alix E. Harrow: Chapters 2 and 3 appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Alix E. Harrow

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: Chapters 6 and 7

The lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent through time to ensure she plays her part…

By Alix E. Harrow

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Published on October 28, 2025

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Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs…

Join us every Tuesday through October 28th for an extended preview of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part—even if it breaks his heart. The Everlasting publishes on October 28th with Tor Books. Find additional excerpts here.

Chapter 6

I made a dismaying discovery that day: A journey which takes only a few paragraphs in a book takes considerably longer on horseback. Especially if the horse is old enough to draw a pension, and the woods are thick enough that there are no straight or obvious routes, but only slim game trails that weave and curl among the trees.

After a long day spent either clinging grimly to the horse—who was not actually a horse, but a clever device for flaying the insides of one’s thighs—or limping grimly alongside it, we had not even reached the edge of the Queen’s Wood. I lay on my back that night, shivering and aching beneath my bad- smelling fur, trying not to whimper every time I moved my legs.

You rose before dawn the next morning to saddle the gelding, who scrubbed his jaw affectionately against your shoulder, apparently unboth- ered by a full day’s hard travel bearing two riders. I approached, bowleg- gedly, and did not quite dodge the edge of his hoof as it descended on my left foot. By the time I was done cursing him and all his ancestors in the foulest language of the 2nd Battalion, you were mounted and waiting.

You reached out your hand. I took it. We rode on.

You seemed content to pass the hours in knightly silence, speaking only to suggest one of us walk for a while, but I found myself fidgeting after the first quarter hour. Eventually I gestured down at the gelding. “What’s his name?”

Perhaps I would write it down in the book; perhaps with a little patriotic editing he could be transformed from what he was (a mean fossil) into what he ought to have been (a proud warhorse).

“He’s no pet,” you answered, as if you didn’t feed him grain from your palm every evening. And then, in gruff apology, “He doesn’t mean any real harm.”

“Truly?” I could already feel my left foot ballooning gruesomely in my boot. “I have convincing evidence to the contrary.”

“As do I.” I made a doubtful noise, and felt you shrug behind me. “You’re still breathing.”

“Oh,” I said.

Another hour or two passed. My vertebrae jostled against one another. The trees repeated themselves. I had the slightly hysterical thought that you might be riding in circles, just to torment me.

“How far is it to the Northern Fallows?”

“Far.”

“How far to the edge of the wood?”

“Less far.”

Was it blasphemous, I wondered, to swear at a saint? What if they hadn’t been sainted yet? Instead, I observed, with forced cheer, “I’ve never seen anyone with hair quite like yours. That strange color—where does it come from?”

I felt you stiffen at my back. “Where does your hair come from, madman?”

I flushed. I knew my appearance must be odd to you—this was the old Dominion of Vivian Rolfe’s speeches, free of foreigners—but I’d been hoping you didn’t know what it meant. My answer was a weary one, learned by rote. “My father was born and raised in Dominion, I assure you.”

There followed a somewhat baffled silence. Then: “I meant no offense. The geweth make their homes where they will.”

“The—what?” It was the second time you’d used that word in reference to me.

Your bafflement deepened. “Geweth. Are there no Roving Folk in the future, save you?”

“Oh. No. Or yes, but they keep to the Hinterlands. And I’m not—that is, I suppose my mother may have been, but I never knew—”

You interrupted, mercifully, “I never knew my birth mother, either. And my fathers thought my hair—strange, as well.” God, I was an ass. “Little Dragon, Father Foy called me.”

“What else were you called? Before the queen found you, I mean.”

“I don’t remember,” you answered, coolly, and would answer nothing else the rest of the day.

I spoke to myself, instead, and to your awful horse. I prophesied to him, speaking of the rosy future when everyone would ride streetcars and auto- mobiles instead of horses, and all the nasty oversized nags would be turned into canned meat and boots. Do you know what a knacker is? I asked, and his ears swiveled back and forth, as if I were a gnat.

* * *

We left the Queen’s Wood on the third morning. The sky opened like a cold gray sea around us, so vast that I had the dizzy sensation of falling upward into it. I found myself clutching at the horse’s mane, fighting the sudden conviction that we should turn back. That we should remain forever in the shadow of the wood, safe and secret, rather than take a single step forward.

“Easy,” you said, at my ear, and it was only then that I realized I was breathing in uneven, absurd gusts, that my muscles were seized and shivering. God, I thought, not now.

I said, “S-sorry. It’ll pass.” But if you answered, I couldn’t hear it. My pulse was rushing in my ears as if I were back at the front, as if there were something terrible waiting just over the horizon.

I became aware, distantly, that you had dropped the reins. You bent yourself around me, your arms hard across my chest and ribs, your chin notched over my shoulder, your touch firm but careful, as if I were a cracked glass in danger of shattering. I could feel your heart against my spine. It beat steadily, sanely, a simple lesson mine couldn’t seem to learn.

Another ragged breath, and another, and my muscles began to slacken. Shame arrived, then. That I had disgraced myself so thoroughly before the Drawn Blade of Dominion—that the Virgin Saint had been obliged to hold me so intimately and improperly—even now your left hand was wrapped around my hip, low enough that my pulse picked up for an entirely different and more sordid reason. Your thumb began to move in a manner you must have imagined was soothing.

I flinched upright, flushed and ashamed. “Sorry,” I said.

Perhaps you’d spent enough time at war to see every kind of malady and madness, because you asked no questions. You only cleared your throat and said, “No need,” in a strangely rough voice.

I spent the rest of the morning ridding myself of impious thoughts. It was difficult; in your innocence, you had not realized that your left hand was still on my hip.

* * *

It was colder, beyond the trees.

The wind rushed freely over the heather, landing like an open palm on my cheeks. My blisters wept and froze against my thighs.

You hardly seemed to notice the cold or the terrain or the long days in the saddle. It didn’t strike me as toughness so much as an odd divide be- tween you and your own flesh. As if your body was merely something you owned, like a sharp knife or a good pair of boots, which you might use hard and tend only when it showed signs of weakening.

You commented, irritably, that I was shivering, and I said, “Well, so are you.” After a brief, surprised pause, you wrapped your matted brown cloak around both of us.

That night you made a fire, though the only fuel was willowy green brush. I fell asleep curled around the coals.

I was awoken by your voice. The fire had smoldered down to ash and smoke, and you were visible only by the lunar glow of your hair. You were twitching and thrashing, but I was sure you were still sleeping; awake, you would never have let me hear you weep.

I called your name, softly. You settled.

The second time you woke me, I had to shout before you fell quiet.

The third time, I crawled to your side. Your expression was desperate, so twisted with grief I felt my eyes sting in sympathy.

“Una,” I said, softly.

Your eyes snapped open, wild, unseeing. Before I could say anything else, before I could blink or flinch, your hand was at my throat, thumb pressed into the hollow beneath my jaw, fingers wrapped around my neck.

I went still and oddly slack, as prey animals do in the mouths of wolves. I waited patiently as reason leaked back into your eyes, and your expression soured from grief into guilt, and then bitter fury.

Your hand spasmed away from my skin. You shoved yourself backward, away from me, clutching the cloak to your chest. “I told you not to come near me, boy,” you said, roughly. “I could have killed you.”

I rolled my jaw. I suspected you could have ripped out my trachea bare- handed, but you hadn’t even applied enough pressure to bruise. “You’ve called out twice in your sleep already tonight,” I observed. “You haven’t killed me yet.”

“I still might,” you said, with such sincerity that I retreated to my own side of the fire. Your shoulders unknotted, fractionally.

After a long silence, you said, with effort, “Forgive me. I dream often of things I would rather forget. Old battles. Old wounds.” Then, a little defen- sively, “Many soldiers suffer so.”

It hadn’t been battle you were dreaming of, I was nearly certain. You hadn’t yelled or cursed or screamed in terror. You had begged, in a voice like two halves of a heart scraping together.

But I said, as lightly as I could, “So I’ve heard,” and resettled beneath the furs, head propped on the book.

You looked as if you might say something else, but your eyes fell to the book, and the scars pulled taut across your face. You said, harshly, “Keep to your own side of the fire,” and turned your back to me.

I did as I was bade.

When you called out again—that night and on the nights that followed—I did not go to you. Sometimes I pressed my palms flat to my ears, so that I could not hear the words you said, over and over, in that funeral of a voice: Please, you begged, come back.

* * *

On the sixth day, we passed through our first township.

There had been a few sad clusters of cottages near the edge of the woods, occupied by nothing now but rooks and field mice. When I’d asked, you told me there had once been people who made their livelihood from the forest. Huntsmen and furriers, poor crofters who set their pigs loose in the loam, weavers who gathered woad and rue for their dyes. Even the Roving Folk sometimes summered there, when they were not wandering, trading horses and telling stories.

“But no one lives in the wood now?” I’d asked.

You’d answered, neutrally, “It’s the Queen’s Wood, now, and no one else’s.”

The homes ahead of us were not abandoned. Clean, white woodsmoke unfurled from every chimney, and the hum of human voices buzzed in my ears. I braced myself for gawking and muttering, perhaps worse—

But the town was not the uniform, idyllic portrait of old Dominion that was conjured by columnists and cartoonists. It looked more or less like any modern city, minus the sewer system. Children darted down the streets, laughing and jeering in languages I didn’t know. A well-dressed man with dark skin led a pair of laden mules. There was even a Gallish temple on one corner, with finely painted alcoves for each of their forty gods, although most of the gods had been defaced.

I decided I would not mention any of this in the book. (An acerbic voice in my head noted that I was accumulating quite a list of things I was not mentioning; the voice sounded very much like Professor Sawbridge’s.)

People did gawk—but not at me.

You wore no armor and rode with no complement. You had even covered your shield with old canvas—but still, they knew you. They knew you by your bone-colored hair and your broad shoulders, by the glint of armor in your saddlebags and by Valiance, hanging always at your side.

They knew you, and they watched you. They nudged one another and pointed, twittering like starlings. Except—they were not joyous or reverent. They did not greet you with cheers or thrown flowers or babies in need of blessing, as they would a hero. They did not even greet you with a hot meal or a spare bed, as they would a weary stranger.

They only watched, as if you were a thing apart from them, neither man nor woman but some third chimerical thing, as likely to break bread with them as a dragon or a lion.

You ignored the stares, or seemed to. I felt the way you shrank inward, tucking your elbows and ducking your head in a laughable attempt to make yourself ordinary. When you dismounted to buy grain from a ploughman you spoke softly, with your eyes averted; his hand shook as he took your coin.

When you turned toward a young woman bearing a basket of sooty grid- dle cakes, she backed away, her face so pale her freckles looked like pepper sprinkled on a dish of milk. From the saddle, I saw your shoulders sag.

“Wait, miss,” I said, sliding awkwardly from the horse and stumbling on numb legs. “I’m starving, and she’s a terrible cook.” I could feel your glare on the back of my neck. I held my hand up behind me and, after a disap- proving pause, you placed three small coins in my palm.

I pulled the girl a few steps down the lane, talking and gesturing.

Five minutes later, I returned to you with five griddle cakes and a half- full flagon of wine.

“And,” I announced, in some triumph, “she says there’s a bathhouse two streets north.”

For a moment—during which I discovered how badly I longed for hot water and soap—you looked as if you might refuse. Then, with a short sigh, you tugged the horse north.

The bathhouse was a lime-washed building that smelled of lye and char- coal. The attendants—businesslike women with substantial shoulders and red-raw hands—led us to a low-ceilinged room with a vast tub in the mid- dle. The water was scummy and grayish, tepid at best; I thought I might weep at the sight of it.

The attendants set a crumbly cake of soap on the sill, bobbed in match- ing curtsies, and turned away.

“Uh, pardon me, but where should—” I began, but the door snapped shut behind them.

I heard, at my back, the sound of a belt sliding through a buckle. I stood very still. There was the rush and thud of clothes hitting the floor. Then a faint splash, followed by a sigh of sheer pleasure, half stifled, which made the muscles of my stomach tighten unaccountably. Perhaps your body was not merely a tool, after all.

After a while you asked, in a languorous, amused voice I hardly recog- nized, “Did you seek a bath only for my sake? Was I so rank?”

You were, I reminded myself firmly, the Virgin Saint. You couldn’t un- derstand the temptations and impurities of the less chaste. I kept my back virtuously turned. “Do—do men and women not bathe separately?”

“They do.”

I asked, haltingly but not entirely facetiously, “And are you—not a woman?”

A sharp sound, not quite a laugh. “Turn around and see.” I did not; this, I thought, was the sort of behavior that ought to earn a man a medal.

Eventually you sighed a little. Water splashed. “A woman may not dress as I do, or bear arms, or carry any device that is not her husband’s or fa- ther’s. Yet I do these things, and I am not punished by church or crown— and so it is easier for most people if I am not a woman.”

“Do you mind it?”

More splashing sounds, the rattle of soap on the ledge. “I couldn’t say. Yvanne dresses me in fine gowns sometimes, for holy days and feasts. The first time I tripped over my own hem, and the whole court laughed and laughed. I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.”

A weird shock went through me, as if I’d caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror I hadn’t known was there: I knew what it was, to feel that you were doing a poor impression of what you were. I said, “I would not laugh at you.”

“You would prefer me in a dress, then?” You asked it lightly, as a joke, but there was a bitter edge to your voice that made me turn.

Whatever I meant to say was instantly obliterated by the sight of your bare back: the pale streaks of scars, the ridged muscles on either side of your spine, the shadowed divots behind your shoulders. The white tangle of your hair falling over them, wet and soap-slick. You stretched, carelessly.

I looked away. My mouth was very dry. “I would prefer you—however you chose to be.”

“No one chooses that, boy.” You sounded so sad and so human that I had the wild urge to turn back around, to step closer—but no. You were Saint Una the Everlasting, and I would not profane you.

Instead, I left the room and waited in the hall. I struck up a conversation with one of the attendants, and by the time you emerged—fully dressed once more, no longer talkative or languorous—I had two new tales of the Red Knight to replace the memory of your bare skin.

* * *

I made a habit of collecting stories about you, after that.

I was good at it, talking to strangers, pulling gossip from them like twine from the spool. It was not unlike working in the archives: sifting through the various contradictory accounts, plucking threads from each tale and weaving them into a single whole.

I was less good at talking to you. But I found if I repeated what the villagers told me, you might be provoked into correcting them (I had him disarmed in six moves, not three or, fondly, No, never. I’ d wager Ancel started that rumor himself ), and in this way you, too, told me your story.

You told me of the Brigand Prince and the False Kings, of your first duel and of the happy fortnight you spent in Morvain’s bed, beguiled by nothing other than her dimpled white thighs and clever hands. You were caught together, and Morvain was sent to the convent—where, you had heard, she was not altogether unhappy.

I fell silent for a little while after this last story, thinking of the chastity vows young girls sometimes took in the name of the Virgin Saint, and of the army nurse I’d known who was discharged for possession of unnatural literature, and of Professor Sawbridge’s dictum that if the history you were reading wasn’t filthy then someone had censored the good bits.

Thinking, too, of you: not as a symbol or a saint—pure, inviolate, be- yond both desire and desiring—but as a human, with human appetites. I wondered a little wildly if you enjoyed men at all, or if you were like that army nurse I’d known.

I adjusted my collar, which had grown tight and overwarm, and found you watching me with something like amusement. “Have I shocked you?”

“No,” I lied. “It’s just—well, one expects a certain—from a saint—”

The amusement deepened. You said, “I promise you, I am no saint,” in a low, wry voice which told me Morvain was neither your first nor your last such affair, and which cost me several hours of sleep that night.

The one subject you would not discuss was the Black Bastion. Of that battle—your grandest victory, which won the First Crusade and made Do- minion the greatest nation of your time or mine—you would say nothing at all. You would only tighten your jaw and watch the fire, with something red and awful in your eyes.

I ducked my head and kept writing.

It was difficult work, transmuting all the dull indignities of travel—the gristly dinners and the grueling miles, the blisters and the stiff joints and pissing in ditches—into a tale to lift the hearts and minds of a nation. Line by line I made you—shattered and silent, half blind—into Sir Una Ever- lasting, hero of Dominion.

I could almost see her sometimes, a shining, heroic figure transposed over you. One day, I knew, she would replace you entirely, so that there would be no trace of you left at all.

At this thought I would be overtaken by a wash of inexplicable melan- choly and put my work away.

But then, without the work, troubling thoughts would sometimes come to me. I might wonder if I’d ever return to my own time, or if I was lost here, like an arrow loosed into the past and never recovered. Or if dragons could really breathe fire hot enough to melt plate armor, and if you could truly face one alone.

Or, worse, I might imagine what came after the dragon. What was wait- ing for you at Cavallon Keep, and how you would look laid out on your bier.

At this thought my lungs would refuse to work properly and my hands would shake again, and my ears would fill with a sound like radio static.

You never remarked on such fits. You only folded yourself around me while I shuddered and panted, letting the heat of your skin soak into mine. It was an impersonal courtesy, a service rendered, but still: I lingered longer than I should have, afterward.

Forgive me—a coward so rarely feels safe.

* * *

The farther north we rode, the grayer and more miserable the villages be- came, until they did not resemble villages so much as wild outcroppings of huts, sprouting like pale mushrooms between the rocks. The people were bent and wind wracked, their faces hollowed in a way that made me think of the Hinterlander children who used to steal our empty bean tins in the war, running their fingers around the edges for the last drops of brine.

The whispers grew sharper, more vicious, and the stares grew colder. We did not speak of it, but you began to guide the gelding more often away from the road, along the gorse-eaten slopes and stone ridges.

But we couldn’t avoid every village. In a narrow pass between two peaks, we came upon a place so desperately poor it was difficult to tell if it was a settlement or an encampment. Several of the structures were noth- ing but stacked rocks and goatskins, and the smoke that slunk from their roofs smelled of green wood and animal shit.

We had to lead the horse—blindfolded, to reduce civilian casualties— and pick our way through the churned mud between huts. I’d been plan- ning to trade the fresh hare you’d tied over the saddlebow for some ale and a few more stories, but the expressions of the gathering villagers changed my mind. They did not whisper at all, but only stared, mute and hostile.

A stooped old man spat deliberately on the ground as we passed.

A bony young woman dumped her wash water so that it slopped over your boots, leaving them filmed with lye and grease.

A boy contrived to knock a cart of shriveled swedes directly into the path, so that the horse stumbled.

The villagers watched you avidly, but you did not scowl or recoil, or even break your stride.

They reminded me of the crowd I’d once seen in a lion-tamer’s tent. The lion had been torpid and rheumatic, and the less dangerous it seemed the more vicious the crowd became, as if they were owed blood, and were deter- mined to get it one way or another.

We were at the very edge of the village when a man approached at your back. He was thin and nearly bald, the flesh of his head covered in slick pink scars, as from fire.

The gelding tossed his head as he approached, nostrils wide, but you did not turn. The man spat something in a guttural language I didn’t know, and I understood that he hated you. They all did.

Then he grabbed a fistful of your hair, and I thought, fervently: You should not have done that.

You stopped walking, chin jerked upward by the tug of your scalp.

There was a tiny pause, during which the reins slipped from your hand, and your expression turned remote, as if you had gone away and left your body behind. It was the way you looked when you woke from your bad dreams, reaching for my throat, and I knew that very soon there would be a dead man in the street.

Some dark, subterranean part of me—the part of me that saw those dirty knuckles wrapped in the shine of your hair and wanted to put the entire godforsaken village to the torch and salt the ashes—didn’t really mind.

But I thought you might. I should have grabbed your arm—but I hesi- tated, and then you were moving.

You were so damn fast. You had turned, blade drawn and lifted, already falling downward, by the time I shouted your name. “Una!”

You flinched. Not much, but enough to ruin the perfect arc of the blow. Instead of falling across the man’s neck, Valiance fell at his wrist, with a sound like a hatchet into wet wood.

All of us—you and I, the scarred man, and the straggling villagers be- hind us—looked for a moment at the neat pink meat where his hand had been. The white stubs of his arm bones sheered cleanly away. Then the flood of red, and the wailing.

You watched, impassive, as he collapsed. The gelding reared, blind but bloodthirsty, and you made no move to catch the reins.

I said your name again, and you looked at me in a way that suggested there might still be a dead man in the street soon. Who was I to you, af- ter all? A lost scribe, a slightly-above-average fortune-teller, a stray you dragged reluctantly along with you.

I didn’t blink or step back. I only held your gaze, and held it, my fists clenched so tightly I felt my palm crack and bleed fresh.

Eventually something flickered in the depths of your eyes. Valiance hissed back into its sheath. You caught the gelding and quieted him. A pair of women came running to the man’s side, tears running down their cheeks. One of them reached toward the hand—now sticking upright in the mud, as if someone were reaching up from under the earth—but drew back.

You watched them weeping with no expression at all. Then you turned your back on the village and walked on.

After a mile or so you paused and dropped to one knee, head bowed, hands cupped in the shape of a stirrup. I blinked down at you for several seconds before stepping gingerly into your palms. You lifted me into the saddle without effort but did not swing yourself up behind me. You walked instead, apparently too furious with me to bear my company.

It was a long way before we made camp that night.

Long after dark, after the horse had been rubbed down and fed hot mash, after the fire had worn itself down to shadow and ember, I offered, by way of apology, “Bastard.”

You shrugged without looking at me.

I tried again. “It was—merciful of you. To spare him.”

Your mouth twisted. “You would call it mercy, to take the right hand of the only hale man, in a family already hungry?” You shook your head once, sharply. “The only mercy I have ever shown is that I kill quickly, and I did not even grant him that.”

“He shouldn’t have touched you. None of them should have dared.” The Drawn Blade of Dominion shouldn’t have to hunch and duck among her countrymen, shrinking herself down to mortal proportions. I found myself gesticulating, restless and angry. “They should be grateful. They should be falling to their knees, crawling after you to apologize. They should—”

“Can’t you bind that properly?” You pointed with your chin toward my hand, which was oozing again. “Come here.”

I edged toward you around the fire. You reached out slowly, deliberately, as if giving me time to withdraw. I didn’t.

You turned my wound carefully to the light, the crease deepening be- tween your brows. My hands looked fragile in yours, long boned and ink stained against the cracked callus of your palms. I searched your face for contempt or derision, but found it curiously absent of all expression.

You began to unwind the bandage, with a sound like a boot being drawn out of deep mud. I turned my face hastily away.

I spoke to the low line of hills, their shape visible only by the absence of stars. “They should at least show you respect. They owe it to you, as—as citizens of Dominion.”

“They were not born citizens of Dominion.” You said it mildly, without reproach. “They were Hyllmen, once, and they did not come eagerly to the queen’s banner. Even when they knew their cause was lost, they would not open the gates of the Black Bastion.” I heard the click of your throat as you swallowed. “Those people lost their sons to the war, their gods to the Sav- ior, their land to the crown. They’ll turn to banditry soon, if they have not already, and then they will be hanged, and their children made into beggars.” You tossed the soiled bandage into the fire, eyes flashing red. “The cost of peace, she tells me. Sometimes I wonder whose peace she means.”

You fell silent, dripping cold water into the mess of my palm and dabbing gently at it, wiping away blood and lymph. Your fingers were so thick with scars they were hard to the touch, like hand-shaped stones, and your mo- tions were uncertain, as if you didn’t trust yourself not to hurt me.

There was a prickling, restless sensation growing just beneath my skin. Anger, perhaps, because your speech had sounded very much like one of my father’s, or fear, because it hadn’t sounded untrue.

I took a bracing breath. “Still. Yvanne is the rightful queen. She’s their queen—”

“And I am her drawn blade.” The words came quick and bleak as the fall of an ax. “It was I who beheaded the False Kings, one by one, though they cried mercy. I who set the crown on her brow, with blood still crusted around the jewels. I who rode at the front, who struck first and last, who drew every border in red. Do you know what they call me, in the north? What that man called me before I crippled him?” Your lip curled, and I couldn’t tell if the contempt was directed at them or yourself. “The Knight of Worms. Because I feed them so well.”

You tore a strip of fresh linen with your teeth and spat it out. “They should fear me, boy.” You bent over the work, hair falling to one side and baring the pale nape of your neck to me. “And so should you.”

I watched you bind the fresh cloth around my hand—clumsily, gently, frowning hard—and thought maybe I would head back to the village and raze it after all. It was a shame, really, that I only had three shots.

You began to draw your hand away from mine, but I caught and held it instead. You looked up sharply, eyes dark as silt.

“Well,” I said, enunciating very clearly. “I don’t.”

Your lips parted, and I saw again that phantom smile, berries bursting between sharp white teeth. I had never heard you laugh, but I knew then it would be low and rough and wild.

And I knew, too—from the subtle shift in the air between us, from the catch in your breath—that you were not like that army nurse I’d known, after all.

I permitted myself to imagine it, just for a moment. I would turn your hand palm up, press my lips to the soft, secret center of it. I would reach up and bury my fingers in your hair, pull you down to me. You would let me. Then you would let me go to my knees and give you what you wanted, for as long as you wanted it, until your thighs were slick and the line between your brows was finally gone, and afterward you would sleep deeply, without dreaming.

The images arrived with such vivid assurance, such fine-grained detail, that they felt more like memories than fantasies. You met my eyes and I felt myself tilting toward you, the woman I had wanted since before I knew how, the woman I was just now coming to want—

The woman I was leading to her death.

I recoiled.

You saw it. I watched the knowledge of that flinch move across your face like an early frost, killing whatever had been in bloom. It wasn’t pain. It was closer to relief: You had wanted me to be afraid, and I was.

You pulled your hand away from mine and rubbed it hard against your hip. I watched in awful, cowardly silence as you wrapped your cloak around yourself and lay down with your back to me.

I stayed awake most of the night, sick with guilt and want. I smoked three Lucky Stars in a row, heedless of the waste, before I turned to the book.

The words came easily, pouring from the pen in a hot, spiteful rush. It was all lies, but what did I care? If I couldn’t have you or heal you or save you—if I couldn’t love you—then I would make all of Dominion love you, forever and ever.

Una and the Yew

Six days later, you raised your arm and pointed over my shoulder at the horizon, where the shadow of a mountain now stood. The clouds clung thick and white to the ground, so that the mountain reared up like a broken molar from pale gums.

“There,” you said.

I asked, “Are you sure?”

You did not bother to answer, and I did not bother to ask again. I knew, somehow, that you were right: We had come at last to Cloven Hill, where lay the grail, and the last dragon of Dominion.

Chapter 7

I had read and re-read every version of your battle with the last dragon. I could—and had, on several regrettable social occasions—recite Montmer’s account in the original Middle Mothertongue.

It began: It was there, in that burnt and barren place, where Una met the dragon, last of his kind.

Cloven Hill was, to Montmer’s credit, fairly barren. There were no towns or villages here, or even the lonely camps of shepherds or hunters. There was nothing but bare stone and wind-stunted pines, and the shifting clouds that kept the peaks partly obscured, like poorly kept secrets.

And yet: The earth was not scorched. The air was not sulfurous. An aura of dread did not blacken the skies. There were still slim gray foxes and white hares among the stones, and colorful bursts of lichen and juniper berries. It reminded me, inexplicably, of the Queen’s Wood. It was the sheer wildness of the place, maybe, the sense that no mapmaker had ever written down its name, and no army had ever driven a flag into its dirt.

When the land turned steep, you made one of your subtle gestures to the horse and we halted beneath an alder. You dismounted and I slithered ungracefully after you. You caught me as you always did, hands braced pa- tiently around my waist until I found my feet.

You spoke to the bay for a while, in that soft, private voice that made me wonder if you were lying about not naming him, before you loosed the bindings on the packs.

I didn’t understand what you were doing until I caught the mirror gleam of metal.

You laid a vambrace against your left forearm and pulled the strap tight with your teeth. Knights were supposed to have fleets of servants to assist them, but it was clear you’d learned to manage alone.

I fished the second vambrace from the pile and held it ready.

After a sharp, inscrutable look, you set your arm carefully against the metal and permitted me to wrap the leather straps around it. I didn’t have to ask which piece came next; my fingers already knew the shape of each greave and gauntlet, each strap and buckle. It fit you well, impossibly well, as if the iron had been poured like candle wax over your skin, and the metal was as fine as anything made in my century. (If I ever saw Sawbridge again, I would tell her plate armor had been worn much earlier than she claimed.)

Piece by piece I transmuted you from mortal to myth, from flesh into blinding, blue-white steel. If you wondered where I’d learned to play squire, you did not ask, and I was grateful; I had no good answer.

“Shield?” I asked, hefting it.

“Won’t need it.”

“Helm?”

“Don’t have one.” It was true that you were always bareheaded in the paintings and plays, but I found this suddenly and unbearably stupid. A single stray arrow, a lucky blow—

“The belt, boy,” you said.

I had to reach both arms around your waist to fasten the belt, flushing slightly when my knuckles brushed the small of your back. I fumbled for Valiance, drawing it clumsily from its battered leather sheath. The light caught the blade and my breath stopped.

I’d never held it before. It took both hands, and the tip still bobbed and wobbled. I knew it was old—knew it had been in the yew for centuries be- fore you drew it—but it looked fresh from the forge.

I ran my thumb up the flat of the blade. “Not so much as a dent or chip. Has it never failed you?”

Your answered evenly, without inflection, “Every tool fails, used hard enough.”

“But—is it true—” I felt like a boy asking his priest if angels were real. “The damage disappears?”

You looked away, squinting up the mountainside. “I took a hammer to it once, after—” You stopped. Coughed. “Broke it into ten pieces and threw the shards into the sea.” Your throat moved as you swallowed. “When I woke the next day, the hilt was in my hand, and the blade was whole and pure as the day I drew it from the yew.”

You had been granted a true miracle—an unbreakable sword!—yet you would cast it away if you could. Your fate was laid out before you like a shining path, a tale so perfect it must have been written by the hand of God Himself, yet you would turn away from it.

If I let you.

I thrust the sword toward you, and you sheathed it at your hip, a quick iron whisper. You reached for your hair, twisting it carelessly into your col- lar, and I found myself saying, “Here, sit down.”

You sat, strangely pliant. I knew as soon as I touched your hair that I’d made a mistake. The weight and texture of it—heavy and slick and tangled, like a thicket of silk—struck me as the sort of thing that might haunt a person, lingering like a wound and aching years later.

I braided it hastily, leaving long tendrils falling around your face and down across the metal of your shoulders.

With your back still turned to me, I said, “You’ll win.” I swept a wisp from your neck, tucking it into the braid. “Just—so you know, you will kill the dragon and find the grail. I’ve read all the stories.”

A slight pause before you asked, “Then why do your hands shake?”

“Oh.” My laugh was unconvincing, rusty sounding. I stepped away, trapping my treacherous hands beneath my elbows. “Because I’m an awful cow- ard. Ask anyone.”

You stood and gestured to your horrible horse. “There’s grain for three days more. If he misbehaves”—you appeared to struggle briefly—“his name is Hen.”

“I knew you were lying! But—Hen? Well, perhaps some things ought to be lost to history.” Only then did I follow the implications of the instruc- tions. My chest contracted. “You’re leaving me here?”

Your brows crimped, bemused. “Yes.”

“You can’t slay a dragon alone!”

“Everything I have done, I have done alone.” You said it without emo- tion, as a statement of fact. “I thought you’d read all the stories.”

“But what if—look, just let me come with you. Please.”

Your expression moved from bafflement to some harsh, taut emotion that made the muscles of your jaw roll. Eventually you said, roughly, “You make a poor coward, boy.” You turned away and said, “Stay,” as if I were a poorly trained puppy, worrying at your heels.

I watched you disappear into the clouds with something flailing behind my breastbone, a mad desire to shout after you: Wait! Come back! It is not worth it!

Instead, I wedged myself against a crag and opened the book in my lap. There are blotches on that page where the ink dripped and dried before I could think of anything to write.

Eventually I simply stole Montmer’s opening line on the grounds that, technically, Montmer would be plagiarizing from me.

Una and the Last Dragon

When I finished, I put away the reed pen and the oak-gall ink and the book. I paced. I sat. I waited. I felt slightly nauseous and rebuked myself for it.

Then from up the mountainside came a high, keening cry. It was an awful noise, like the scream of metal on metal, but it went on so long it resolved into a single, pure note. The note burrowed into me, becoming very nearly beautiful, so that when it finally ended, I felt as if something precious had been lost.

Silence followed.

I pelted uphill, breathing harshly, stumbling over stones and roots. I rounded a wiry stand of pine, heading into dense mist—

And slammed into something tall and unyielding, like the face of a cliff.

“Una—” I unpeeled my face from your cuirass and fell back, arms lifting and hovering on either side of your shoulders. “Are you alright?”

“Of course,” you said, and you laughed. It sounded like a jar full of teeth being shaken.

You did look alright. Your armor was unscratched. There was a shallow scrape across your left temple because you still hadn’t learned to guard your blind side, but the blood was already gummy, half dried.

But—your eyes. They’d been hollowed out, as if someone had broken into your skull and scraped it clean with the edge of a spoon. The echo of that eerie cry seemed to spread between us like a stain.

“And”—damn my wreck of a voice for breaking—“did you find—”

“Of course,” you said again, coolly. You strode by me, shoving some- thing hard into my belly as you passed.

I nearly dropped it, and when I looked at it properly, I nearly dropped it again. It was a small cup of purest gold, set with tiny red jewels: the grail of Dominion. The half-legendary blessed artifact that had resurrected the Savior Himself, that would save Queen Yvanne’s life and the future of the nation itself.

I wriggled out of my coat and wrapped it tightly around the cup, lest the college archivist come charging down the mountainside, thumbscrews in hand.

By the time I caught up, you were already mounted. You waited in a clearing, just where the sun poured through the branches, running over the plates of your armor and pooling in your hair, so that you were haloed in hazy gold light. Your head was bowed as if in prayer, and one hand rested on your hilt.

I stood mute, while time twisted and sloughed around me.

I forgot you were scarred and plain and unchaste. I forgot you cried out sometimes in the night, as I did, and dreamed of a home you could never return to, as I did. I even forgot you were the sort of woman who named her horse Hen.

You were Una Everlasting, the Drawn Blade, the Red Knight, and I was a boy again, choked with that covetous tangle of desire and desire-to- become that had driven me to war and back again, to archives and libraries and finally here, through time itself, to the far side of history. My whole life existed only to bear witness to yours, and God! It was worth it.

Then the light shifted; the halo vanished. When you reached your hand down to me, I could see again the lines and hollows around your eyes, the rucked skin of scars and the freckles gone blurry with years in the sun.

I should have been able to breathe again, but could not.

You made an impatient, extremely human sound. I took your hand again, and we rode down the mountain together.

When the ground leveled, I asked, quietly enough that you could pre- tend not to have heard me if you chose, “Was it so terrible? The dragon?”

“No,” you said, and then, after a long time, “it was a wild creature, and old—older than anything that ever was, I think, but it was not terrible. None of them ever were. They were”—the cool voice cracked, and I heard the grief running beneath it—“beautiful.”

I clutched the grail hard to my stomach to remind myself that it was worth it, all of it: the cry on the mountain and the hateful faces of the villagers, your nightmares and mine, the blood we spilled and the scars we bore, and even the death of something wild and old and beautiful.

“But we ride now to the Keep,” you said, into my silence. “And there the story ends.” Such yearning in your voice, such relief, that for a moment I couldn’t answer. I felt you stiffen behind me, wary, mistrusting.

So I said, “Yes,” and it felt like sliding a knife between your ribs, or be- tween my own, or as if there were no difference between the two. “The story ends there.”

And this, too, I told myself, was worth it.

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The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

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The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

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Excerpted from The Everlasting, copyright © 2025 by Alix E. Harrow.

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Excerpts Alix E. Harrow

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: Chapters 4 and 5

The lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent through time to ensure she plays her part…

By Alix E. Harrow

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Published on October 21, 2025

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Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs…

Join us every Tuesday through October 28th for an extended preview of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part—even if it breaks his heart. The Everlasting publishes on October 28th with Tor Books. Find additional excerpts here.

Chapter 4

Winter sunlight, thin and crosshatched. Air so fresh it burned in the lungs, like gunpowder. Branches circled all around, bowed low with frost.

I concluded—reluctantly, against all reason—that I was no longer in the office of Vivian Rolfe.

I was in the woods, with one hand pressed tight to the trunk of a tree so huge it seemed built rather than grown, a cathedral of bark and sap.

Despite my cowardly and flinchful nature, I’d never actually fainted, and I did not faint then. But I found that my thoughts were coming slowly and effortfully, as if they were climbing a steep hill.

I thought: It’s summer. But my breath rose in milky clouds and my sweat had chilled to a gelid film beneath my coat. It was cold—the deep, rheumatic cold of midwinter—and I did not like the cold.

I thought: I don’t know where I am. But I did. I knew the muscled shape of the bark beneath my hand and the striations of light that fell between the needles. I knew the brilliance of the berries hanging like red bells from the branches and the weight of the air on my eardrums, hushed and heavy.

This was the grove, my grove, though I’d been miles and miles away from Queenswald. This was the old tree, my tree—the one I had run to as a boy, which had been my castle, my refuge, my only-good-place—though it had been cut down years ago.

I thought: What’s that awful sound? A pitiful, sniveling whimpering. I took a breath and the sound stopped, and then I thought: Oh.

I looked at my left hand, which I had so far carefully avoided, and saw Vivian’s letter opener—actually a slim, sharp knife—still buried between my second and third knuckles. The pain immediately tripled, as if it had been waiting for my attention.

Unsteadily, praying I didn’t choose this moment to faint for the first time, I braced myself against the tree and used my right hand to draw out the blade. I made a mess of it, of course—my damn hands were shaking again— and was relieved there was no one around to hear the sounds I made.

I leaned against the great trunk of the tree, waiting for the tremors to recede. My thoughts now were loud but inscrutable, like the static between radio stations or the noise of a crowd. It was easier to make sense of my body: My hand hurt. My feet were cold. The skin on the back of my neck was tight and prickling, as if—

As if someone was watching me.

I turned slowly. Something drew a bright, stinging line from the hollow beneath my ear to the column of my throat.

The tip of a sword. It came to rest over the knot of my larynx. I swallowed and felt my flesh part easily, almost eagerly, like the skin of an overripe plum.

My eyes moved up the blade, refusing to make sense of the whole, seeing only scattered details. The long, long edge of the blade, sharpened almost to invisibility; lettering etched into the surface, illegible at this angle; the hilt braced crosswise on a mailed forearm. A cloak the color of a picked scab hanging from a truly vast pair of shoulders, capped in shining, scarred metal.

And, above everything: A face that I knew better than my own.

A face I had seen in penny papers and fine oil paintings, in terrible street theater and political cartoons and every night in my dreams. A face I had feared and coveted and envied since I was nine years old.

Later, I would wonder how I was so sure, because none of those artists had done you justice.

They had shied from the sheer scale of you, narrowing the great sweep of your shoulders, tapering your wrists and waist. They had made your face smooth and poreless, forever youthful, when in truth it was pocked and wind-burnt, with heavy lines carved between the brows. Your hair was not the sulfuric yellow of a Saint of Dominion, but the stark white of a snapped bone. A thick welt of scar fell through your left brow and into the eye beneath it, so that the pupil was misshapen, elongated into a black tear.

You did not look like any kind of angel. Yet still, I knew you.

“Una,” I said, and could not imagine why I’d addressed you so informally. I tried again, voice cracking. “Sir Una Everlasting.”

Your eyes—not blue, never blue, but a dark, resinous gold, like burnt sap—did not flicker. You spoke, but it took several moments for me to parse the words. I’d rarely heard Middle Mothertongue spoken aloud, and I was distracted by the sound of your voice, deep and cool and familiar.

You said, “Drop the knife.” And then, “Drop the damn knife, boy.”

I tried—although privately I thought thirty was a decade past the time when anyone was pleased to be called boy—but my hand was so far away from my body, and so hard to see through the narrowing tunnel of my vision.

It was only when my cheek hit the earth, the wire of my spectacles biting into the bridge of my nose, that I realized I had—for the first time in my life—fainted.

My last, petulant thought was that my father had been wrong: It was the perfect weather for my service coat, after all.

* * *

The next time I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else again. This, I thought, would quickly grow tiresome.

I was indoors now, rather than out, but the line between the two seemed uncomfortably thin. Starlight fell through ragged thatch. One of the walls had sloughed away, revealing bare wattle. Coals hissed on a dirt floor, smoky and sullen.

And crouched across from me, regarding the coals with a vexed expression, was the founding myth of my nation. I’d thought I imagined you.

But you sat as any soldier might on a long night’s watch: straight spined, red-eyed, a little grim. The armor was mostly missing now, except for the pauldrons capping those immense shoulders, the straps crossing over the quilted wool of your chest. Your hair was half loosed, hanging over your collar in a rough white skein. At your temples I could see the faint tarnish of true silver.

It unsettled me greatly, that tiny, pedestrian evidence of your mortality. You had always been ageless and hale in my mind, like one of those creatures preserved perfectly in amber at the peak of its health. Now you looked dangerously exposed, vulnerable to the ordinary violence of time in a way that made my chest constrict.

I looked at your hands instead. Broad and veined, scarred so thickly in some places the skin tugged the fingers at odd angles. I watched the play of firelight over the knots of your knuckles, and all the questions I’d been trying not to ask myself—where was I, when was I, had I gone finally, fantastically mad, et cetera—fell away. I have always liked your hands.

You looked sharply up at me. You were already frowning—a stern, weary expression you’d worn often enough to wear a deep furrow between your brows—but now you scowled.

“Something amuses you?” you asked, which caused me to become aware that I was smiling, somewhat doltishly.

I stopped. “No. My apologies.”

I sat up, discovering that stiff, rank furs had been piled over me, and that my hand had been bound roughly with linen. I flexed it once and sucked air between my teeth.

“Do you write with the sinister hand?” The question suggested concern, but your voice was flat and gray as gunmetal.

“What? Oh.” I switched to Middle Mothertongue, the words welling up easily. “I’m right-handed. I’ll be fine.”

“A shame,” you said, coldly.

I looked up in time to see you move. It was a fluid, muscular gesture, almost too fast to follow, which resulted in something arcing over the coals toward me. I fumbled the catch and had to scrabble to keep it out of the fire: the book, again.

My hand spasmed around it. The last time I’d touched this book I’d been flattered, then frightened, then stabbed and transported—here. (I was too clever not to know where—and when—here was, but too much of a coward to let myself think the words.)

You were watching me closely with those mismatched eyes. When you were not moving you were inhumanly still, as if you had been carved rather than born. “How did you find me? I would swear no one tracked me from Cavallon Keep.” Still that chilly, taut voice. I had the worrisome impression of a fraying leash.

“No,” I said carefully, “I did not track you from the Keep.”

“You are geweth, then?”

“Pardon?”

“Then how?” Another thread or two snapped in your voice. “How far must I run before I am free of you? When I go to Hell, shall scribes and bards wait at the gates like carrion birds?”

“I’m not a bard or a scribe. If that helps.”

Your brows went flat. You looked pointedly at the book in my arms. “I am no great scholar, boy, but I recognize my own device.”

“Ah.” My hand spasmed again on the cover. I wondered if you had opened the cover, and if you were literate enough to read the title. “I can see how you would think—but it’s not—well, I suppose it is, but—”

“All my life men like you have followed me.” You were dangling now by a single thread. “Hounding me, lapping up the blood and begging for more. You have turned all my graves into glory, all my carnage into pretty songs they sing at court.”

“That’s very… vivid, but I’m telling you I’m not—”

The leash snapped. Suddenly you were on your feet and that enormous bastard of a blade—the most famous sword in the whole of history, the sword every child in Dominion had pretended to wield, swishing sticks at nothing—was back at my throat. The hilt was long enough for at least one-and-a-half hands, but you held it steadily in one, tendons corded around your wrist. It occurred to me, with a queer shiver, that you must have carried me from the yew to this cottage, and that you wouldn’t have found it difficult at all.

The point of the sword dipped lower, settling in the scarred hollow between my collarbones. And yet, your expression was not angry, after all. It was—lost. Bewildered. Afraid, almost, as if you were a stranger to yourself. I felt I’d seen that look before, though I couldn’t say where.

“Liar,” you said. “I know your face. I know your voice. I’ve seen you at court, or the tourneys, watching me—but no more. I’m finished.” There was a sheen over the sap of your eyes, and I thought you would probably kill me rather than let me see you cry.

I should have been terrified, reaching for the revolver at my hip—but I wasn’t. I was perfectly calm, as if I’d seen this play before and already knew my character survived.

I resettled my spectacles. They were bent slightly out of shape. “Listen to me. I am not a bard or a scribe. I am Lance Corporal Owen Mallory of the 2nd Battalion, a shit soldier and a decent historian. I was sent here from”—I paused there, lingering in this last moment of sanity and order—“the distant future, to record your story and—somewhat indirectly, I suppose— save Dominion.”

“Oh,” you said, after a pause. You sounded strangely contrite. “I beg pardon. You are mad.”

You sheathed your sword with another of those inhumanly quick gestures and did not speak to me the rest of the night, no matter what I said or did.

* * *

The next time I woke the fire was dead and the sky was pale. I wasn’t sure whether the sun ever properly rose here, or if it merely slunk, catlike, between the branches.

There was frost in my hair and on the lenses of my spectacles. My throat was raw. I’d talked and talked to you, while the coals rusted into ash and the stars brightened, and you had ignored me politely, as you would ignore a drunk or a street-corner preacher. Sometime in the blue hours before dawn I’d given up, tucking myself sullenly back under the bad-smelling furs. I had fallen asleep watching your face, baffled and irritated and strangely, childishly content.

I was alone, now.

I scrabbled out from under the furs and ducked beneath the sagging lintel. I was no longer within sight of the yew but in a nearby clearing that—in my boyhood—had contained nothing but brambles and goosegrass. Now there was the cottage behind me, which already had one foot firmly in the grave, and an enormous blood-bay gelding, which had at least three.

He reminded me of the skeletons they displayed in the Royal Museum, or a tarp draped over a stack of chairs. His spine protruded tumorously from his back, and his muzzle was the color of dust, or dull knives.

He fixed me with a rheumy eye and peeled back both lips, revealing teeth so long and yellow they might have been whittled from pine.

A voice said: “Be easy.”

It was you, ducking beneath the horse’s neck and running a palm over the ladder of his rib cage. You wore no armor now, but only plain wool beneath that scabrous cloak, which ought to have been a proud Dominion red, but was actually a middling, stained brown. “He’s harmless.”

“I’m sure,” I said, and understood from your expression that you had not been speaking to me.

You spent another moment communing with your horse, or at least his remains, before crossing to a downed log and laying several limp, furred bodies over the wood. Your knife flashed and dipped, peeling them easy as apples.

I lit a cigarette before the smell of blood could reach me. I ought to ration them, but I’d already whimpered, fainted, and babbled in front of the nation’s greatest hero, and I was rather hoping not to vomit, too. I slouched in the doorway and blew out a long stream of smoke, which rose, switchbacking into the sky. Your eyes followed it.

I twiddled the cigarette at you, obnoxiously. “Lucky Stars. Half sawdust, half tar, a testament to modern manufacturing. Uncommon in this era, I imagine.”

I didn’t know how well I was making myself understood. My mouth produced the odd vowels and archaic syntax of Middle Mothertongue with unnerving ease, as if it had been waiting in some unlit corner of my skull, but I wasn’t sure dry condescension had been invented yet.

Apparently it had, because you made a sound that would be described as a snort in anyone who was not a mythic hero. The little corpses, now stripped pink, steamed faintly in your hands.

“What about these, then?” I tapped my spectacles, now slightly misshapen.

No response.

I fished around in my jacket and brandished the revolver at you, somewhat rashly. “How about this? It’s called a gun. See the stamp, just here? The mark of a genuine Saint Sinclair, the finest munitions maker in Dominion.” Still nothing. My voice rose a half octave, whistling through my macerated larynx. “It’s a deadly modern weapon of war. If I pointed it at you, and pulled this little bit here, you would be dead before you could say ‘anachronism.’”

You looked at the revolver briefly, with the tolerant curiosity of a parent being shown a snail shell or a shiny rock, then looked down again. You didn’t say anything.

I put the gun away. “Test me, then. Ask me whatever you like. I know everything that’s ever happened to you.”

That got me a wry, sad smile. “Who doesn’t?”

I have no real temper to speak of—I rarely raise my voice and frequently apologize to people who cut in front of me in queues—but I found a nervy anger rising in me. I had dedicated my life to the legend of Una Everlasting. It was you who sent me to war and you who brought me back, you who stalked my dreams and consumed my days.

And now here you were, the object of all my reverence: a weary, hard-weathered woman who would not even look at me.

I flicked ash forcefully over the threshold. “And do they know everything that will happen? Because I do.”

Your hands went briefly still, fingers cradling an animal skull.

I pressed into the stillness. “Where are you in your story? You’re not young, so you’ve already defeated the False Kings and won the crown for Yvanne. Some of the tales make mention of a ‘great injury’ during the First Crusade—was that your eye?” A hot, uneven glare that I interpreted as a yes. “So. You’re hunting the last dragon, then, and the grail.”

Now you looked away. You staked the animals neatly along the spine and nestled them into the coals of another sullen fire. “It is no secret,” you said, after too long a pause to appear casual. “The Queen did command it so before the whole court.”

“But then—what are you doing here? This isn’t where you find it.”

“And I suppose you, a madman, know where the last dragon dwells?” you drawled, removing all doubt about the existence of dry condescension.

“Yes,” I answered promptly, and was pleased by the fractional widening of your eyes. “It was a subject of some debate—Lazamon’s map was the only record, and he was famously unreliable—but they found the bones in Lysabet I’s reign, and that settled it.” I paused, eyes narrowing. “If you don’t already know where it is… shouldn’t you be out there looking?”

I felt as if the machine of my brain was finally grinding into motion again, after stalling out from sheer shock. Assuming I had truly fallen through time to the era of Una Everlasting and was not suffering a colorful mental breakdown—what were you doing in the woods outside of Queenswald, huddling in the remains of some poor peasant’s hovel? In the ballads and books, you struck forth with pure heart and fiery eye, praying to the Savior to guide your feet true.

Your expression had not changed, but somehow—by the bend of your shoulders or the angle of your neck, by the way your eyes fled from mine—I knew: “You’re not looking for it at all, are you. You’ve abandoned the quest.” My voice was high, a hoarse accusation. “You can’t. You’re supposed to— you must—”

“Only one person has the ordering of me.” Said sharply, with one lip peeled up to reveal the white tip of a tooth. “And she is not here.”

“The queen, you mean.” That nervy anger was sharpening, edged with disgust that felt outsized, misdirected. “The queen whose death would mean the end of Dominion. The queen who called for you—her champion, her right hand—as she lay dying?”

“And I answered, as I ever have!” You were on your feet, striding toward me, hands balled into red fists. I was taller than most men, but you stood head and shoulders over me, glaring down at me in a way that made my palms hot.

“Though I swore I would never again ride to battle, I rode out that very night, for her.” Your voice was low and viperous. “Though I had put my sword aside, I took it up once more, for her. Though the hope of the grail is no more than the echo of an echo, the whisper of a whisper—I have scoured the countryside since midsummer. For her.”

I did not retreat or look away, although I felt the force of your furious despair like a battering wind. I saw your eyes move to my throat, where my pulse beat fast and uneven.

Shame chased the wildness from your face. You took a deliberate step back. The muscles of your jaw rolled before you said, stiffly, “That is three times now I have frightened you. Forgive me. I sometimes—forget myself.” You unclenched your hands with an effort so visible I expected to hear cartilage popping.

You continued evenly, almost formally, “I have searched, and I have failed. I came here because I had not returned to this place since”—a pause, a drawing up of your shoulders—“the day my fathers were slain. Though I have dreamed of it, these many years.”

These sentences slotted into my mind like keys into locks. I badly wanted a pen and paper. Ha, I would write, and also Eat it, Harrison, because I was now the only living scholar who could definitively state the location of Una Everlasting’s childhood home.

But there were other things I would not write down, like the wistful pang I felt at the idea that you and I had played beneath the branches of the same tree, separated only by a millennium. I would leave out the plural fathers, too, which had never been in the books or ballads, and which bewildered me; I’d had a vague conviction that homosexuality was a recent invention, symptomatic of modernity, or at least boarding schools.

And, of course, I would not mention the dreams; a courtesy, from one madman to another.

I prompted, carefully, “And why have you stayed?”

You were quiet for so long I thought you wouldn’t answer. You busied yourself at the fire again, the flames hidden by the slab of your cloaked shoulders.

Then you said, “Because it is quiet here, where there is no one to bid me rise or kneel. Because I can sleep, at least some nights, and I am so damn tired.” You pulled a charred body from the coals and studied it. “Because, for weeks now, I have butchered only animals.”

That lost, fearful expression had returned to your face, as if you had been walking for a long time in a country you did not know under stars you could not name. As if you had forgotten where you had meant to go in the first place, and no longer believed it was worth it.

I knew, suddenly, where I’d seen that look before: in my father’s eyes when he sobered up and in my own mirror every morning. It was the look of a coward, a turncoat, someone with a crack running down the center of them, so that all the honor and courage ran out and left nothing but shaky hands and bad dreams behind.

And I knew, too, why Vivian Rolfe had called me to her office. Why she had slipped her blade between my knuckles and sent me tumbling into the past. It wasn’t because of my articles or my Medal of Valor or my uncommon grasp of dead languages.

I wasn’t here to translate or transcribe your story; I was here to make sure there was a story to tell.

She needs you, Vivian had said.

You had lost your way. And I—who knew every turn and twist in your journey, every step you must and would take—was your compass.

I crouched at your left side, near enough that you turned your head sharply. I wondered if you had learned to guard your blind side yet, or if it still startled you, the way I was still taken unawares by the frailty of my voice.

I held myself motionless, palms loose, trying desperately to assemble the right words. I wished I could retire to my office for a week and return with a typewritten speech. I wished for the first time that I were more like my father, who never stuttered or second-guessed.

Eventually I began: “I know you don’t believe me. I don’t blame you, really. But imagine I was telling the truth. Imagine I really had seen Dominion nearly a thousand years from now—still strong, and growing stronger, all because of the foundation laid by you and Yvanne. Imagine I could tell you that all of this—the fighting and the killing, everything you’ve done—is worth it?” It was not possible to say the words without thinking of Colonel Drayton: of his big pink jowls and his big pink hands, the way he clapped us on the back as if we were choking on our dinners and the way he looked at me just before he died.

I dragged again on the cigarette, although it had burned down nearly to my knuckles.

I went on: “Every queen since Yvanne has worn the crown you won her. Every war since the First Crusade has been fought beneath your flag. The highest military decoration is named after you, for God’s sake, and do you know what they call the very best and bravest soldiers, at the front? Red knights.” Technically the term only applied to men who died in battle, but I thought it might be poor taste to say so. “Now, you are legendary. One day, you will be a legend.”

You looked away again, but not before I saw the hunger in you. That same burning, aching desire I’d felt as a boy, and again when I stood in Vivian’s office—to matter, to make something good and great out of the pitiful meat of my life.

“Listen, I grew up not far from here. I was—still am—nobody. Nothing. I was lonely and frightened and foreign, or foreign-looking, which is just as bad. But then I found you.” I was glad for my thin, wisping voice, which disguised the tightening of my throat. “I read your stories—I mean, everyone does, but I read them over and over. And I found the courage I needed to serve my country.”

I reached for the collar of my jacket, hands shaking, and folded it down so you could see the wreckage of my throat. It was not the handsome, dashing sort of scar that every soldier privately hopes for. It was fat and wormy, stretching the skin unevenly over my collarbone and knotting over my windpipe like a badly tied cravat.

The first civilian who’d seen the whole of it had gasped once before pressing her hands over her mouth. But her shock had transitioned quickly into fawning admiration, as if the scar were a medal I couldn’t take off. She’d kissed it—sweetly, even eagerly—as if she had been appointed by the state to thank me for my sacrifice, and I’d escaped her flat seconds before the shaking fit began.

You did not gasp or fawn. You considered me steadily, like a woman who had both suffered and committed much worse. I experienced such a keen rush of gratitude that little spots danced briefly in my vision.

I blinked them away. “This was the price of my service. Of my loyalty.” This was an absolute lie, but it was such a familiar lie by now that the words tripped out of my mouth like soldiers in a line. “But I swear to you: It was worth it.”

And, for the first time, I thought maybe it was true. Maybe my whole life—my shame and my torment, my bad dreams and my pitiful manuscript— had been in service to this moment, when I recalled Una Everlasting to her duty.

“Please,” I said, and you looked at me as if you, too, felt some grand design at work, the invisible thread of fate tugging you toward your destiny. Your eyes were a dark and lambent amber, without grain or variation. “We need you.”

I reached, impulsively, for your bare hand.

I had time to think: I should not have done that, before I found myself looking up at you from the cold ground, your knee on my breastbone, your hands pinning my wrists on either side of my head.

There followed my first moment of real terror: that I might respond disgracefully. That you might notice. I twisted beneath you, suddenly frantic. “Let go—”

You threw yourself away from me and sat staring, breathing hard, so obviously horror-stricken that my pride suffered a slight injury. You climbed slowly to your feet. “Four times, now,” you said, almost to yourself.

Then, louder, “You may stay if you like. I will share my fire and food, in memory of my fathers, who let no one go cold or hungry in this wood. But do not touch me unawares, and do not go unarmed in my presence.”

You drew a slim knife—Vivian’s letter opener, which I had forgotten about entirely—and flicked it so that it buried itself point-first in the dirt, bare inches from my head.

I blinked at it. “Why?”

“So that you might feel… safe.” You looked at your own hands as you spoke, as if you mistrusted them. I did not think a letter opener, nor even a revolver, would greatly extend my life if you desired to end it, but I didn’t say so. I reached for the handle.

You nodded stiffly at my hand. “And tend to that. The blood will draw beasts.”

You turned and strode into the trees.

“It will come to you in a dream.” I threw the words at your back, a prophecy lobbed at an unwilling subject. “That’s what the stories say. God-the-Savior speaks to you in a dream, and you follow His word to the last dragon.”

You stopped but did not turn. “I have not dreamed since I came here.” “You will,” I said.

Chapter 5

Days passed, and they were each the same.

I would wake alone. You would greet me with grim silence, and I would search your face for some sign of renewed faith or divine awe. Only your eyes changed, sinking deeper into their sockets; I suspected you of avoiding sleep.

Later you would hunt, or tend the bay, rubbing handfuls of dry grass over his scarred hide, speaking in the low, honeyed voice you reserved exclusively for him. I had learned not to approach you at these times. For an animal of his size (prehistoric) and age (also prehistoric), your horse moved very quickly, and still retained enough teeth to leave a crescent of yellowing bruises on the back of my arm.

You had said, quite harshly, “Stay away from him.”

“It’s alright, no real harm done,” I’d said, and understood from your expression that, this time, you had been speaking to me.

I gave your horse a very wide berth thereafter, and did not miss the hopeful way he lifted his hind leg as I passed.

At first, I was afraid to wander out of sight of the hut, but I never got lost, or even slightly turned around. The land was familiar to me, though I had learned it as a boy, twenty years ago and a thousand years from now. I knew every slope and dale, every bare crag and narrow stream. I knew where the rabbits denned and where the yew stood, already ancient even here at the beginning of everything.

I sat among the roots sometimes, head tilted back against the tendons of the trunk, and understood why you ran here, when you ran. It was a place apart, a secret kept from the world: There were no queens or ministers beneath the yew, no wars or quests. There was only the slantwise light and the gently moving air and the wild, cold smell of the earth.

In the evenings we would huddle in the remains of the hut, talking softly. Or, at least, I would talk—asking questions or complaining about the cold or describing my attempts to brew oak-gall ink—and you would suffer in stoic silence.

Sometimes you would tend your tack or armor, working oil into the leather joints; sometimes you would lay your blade across your knees and polish the metal with long, even strokes. I would fall quiet, then. I liked to watch you—the easy competence of your hands, the pull of muscle in your wrists—and I liked to watch the sword.

There were so many stories about it: They said it could cleave stones and fell trees, that if it broke in battle it would appear whole and perfect again the next dawn, that it had been forged long before Dominion was born.

Horseshit, according to Professor Sawbridge. She’d become an archaeologist, she always said, because words lied and bones didn’t. She’d shown us the actual swords she’d dug up from this era—rough, lumpen things, with horn hilts and bog-ore blades.

Yet: Here was Valiance, with a hilt cast wholly in metal, a grip wrapped in fine leather cording, and a blade of such pure, coruscant steel that it shone blue in the firelight.

After your work was done you would bank the coals and settle in the doorway to keep watch, your cloak pulled tight around your shoulders. The knot between your brows would ease then, and you would stare out at the star-pocked wood as if you would be content to live out the rest of your days here, in the dim margins of history.

I would feel restless then, almost guilty, and turn to the book instead.

My pen was a hollow reed, clumsily cut, and my ink was gummy brown, but the words came easier than I expected. Like the lines of a poem I’d memorized as a boy, or a story I had told before and would tell again.

Una and the Crown

I chewed at the splintered end of my pen. “Could you describe the scene for me, when Yvanne’s messengers came to you?”

You paused in the act of adding wood to the fire. “I thought you knew everything that had ever happened to me.”

“Well, I know versions of it. Your story has been—will be, I suppose— written down a dozen different ways, by a dozen different authors. Lazamon is the most complete and popular version, but it’s also the most recent. My old adviser—uh, that’s sort of like a liege lord, except instead of beheading you she can make you rewrite your thesis chapter—says the material evidence is even more contradictory and varied.” I adjusted my spectacles, which had developed a tendency to list to the left. “Personally, I always liked the one where they find you at prayer, and you break your vow of silence to answer the summons. ‘I would deny God before I deny my queen,’ you say, and then—”

“I told them to fuck themselves.” You settled the log on the coals and added, almost chattily, by your standards, “I was drunk as a dog, when they found me.”

“… Oh.” I chewed my pen some more, and then wrote: When the queen called, Sir Una answered, as she ever had. There was no need, I thought, to burden the reader with unnecessary detail.

I wrapped the book carefully in a scrap of hide and burrowed under the furs, watching you. You sat very upright, but there were bruised hollows beneath your eyes, as if someone had pressed their thumbs hard into your face.

“Do you ever sleep?”

You shrugged. “Fire needs tending.” I’d noticed by then that you were uneasy around the fire, approaching it reluctantly and feeding it warily, as if it were a dog that had bitten you once before.

But I didn’t think it was the reason you never slept. “You don’t want to dream, do you.”

Another tectonic shrug, as if the earth itself rested on the bend of your shoulders.

I watched you for another few minutes. I thought of simply telling you where the dragon’s bones were found, but I didn’t think you would believe me. And even if you did—I had decided to believe in God as a very young man, mostly to annoy my father; I was not so faithful that I could turn down the chance for proof.

I crawled out from under the furs and crouched by the coals. “Let me mind the fire tonight.”

Your eyes flicked to me, then back to the flames, uncertain. I reached— very slowly—for the stick you used as a poker, taking it from your hand without touching your skin. “Look, if you collapse from exhaustion, I will starve almost instantly. Or be murdered by brigands or, more likely, your horse. Surely even a madman deserves better.”

I could tell I’d hit some deep-set nerve, some fundamental instinct that caused you to come when you were called, to serve when you were needed. Yet your queen needed you, and here you were, hiding where fate couldn’t find you.

You didn’t lie down, but you unbent enough to lean against the mud wall, swaddled in the muddy folds of your should-be-red cloak. Your eyes narrowed to dark gold slits.

You slept, eventually, brows low and knotted, as if you dreamed and did not like it.

I pulled the furs over you with a tenderness that was almost an apology, although I didn’t know what I was sorry for.

Fate always finds you, in the end.

* * *

“How did you know?” Your voice woke me, trembling with some great emotion.

I tried to jerk upright in answer, but I’d fallen asleep in an awkward huddle beside the ashes of the fire, and my muscles had fossilized overnight. I made a feeble flopping motion instead. “Know what?” My voice sounded like two knives scraping together.

“The dream.” You were breathing hard, air rushing through the bellows of your chest. “Last night I saw the dragon, dead before me. I saw the cup. And I heard a voice—a terrible voice. It said—”

“Cloven Hill.” I had achieved an approximation of sitting up, but my neck seemed to have several extra angles in it. “The remains were discovered there by a shepherd’s son who was looking for a lost lamb, apparently. The papers loved it. The skeleton hangs in the Royal Museum now, of course.”

I managed to turn my head the five degrees necessary to look at you. Your face was so pale that the scars were a garish pink. That misshapen pupil was huge and black, almost spilling the bounds of your iris. “It’s true, then.” Nearly a whisper, full of awe. “You knew what would happen before it came to pass. You’ve come from… the future.”

“I did mention it.” I was rubbing my neck with one palm, to no effect at all, resisting the urge to whoop with awe and triumph only because I thought it might leave me permanently crippled.

You glanced at the corner of the hut where you kept your kit. A bright flash of silver winked beneath the leathers. I hadn’t seen you fully armored since the day I arrived; it struck me now as strange that you’d been wearing it at all.

You said, “Tell me how it happens, then.”

I wished I’d thought to rehearse in all these long, silent days. I wet my lips. “You follow God’s voice north. You find the last dragon in its lair. The battle is long and bitter, but you prevail, and in the dragon’s horde you find the grail. You carry it in triumph to your queen. And then…” The final twist, the heroic last stand. The tragedy.

In my undergraduate courses, I’d taught your death as a narrative tool, an elegant equation about honor and valor and the cost of nationhood. Now, looking into the burnt sap of your eyes, close enough to see the ordinary imperfections of your skin, it did not seem much like an equation.

But you had already strayed far from the path of your story; if I told you how it ended, you would never return to it. You would never slay the dragon or fetch the grail. The country would lose its first queen and its greatest hero, and I didn’t think Dominion—fragile, freshly born—would survive the loss.

Your country needs you. Had Vivian Rolfe seen that version of the future, somehow? Was that what drove her, what gave her such a burning, unbending air of purpose—the terror of a world without you?

“And then?” you prompted, and I found that—though I was a coward and a deserter—I was not yet a traitor. I would not trade the past and future of an entire nation for one woman.

“And then,” I said, “the queen is healed, and the kingdom prospers forevermore.” It wasn’t a lie.

You did not look comforted. “And afterward?” you pressed. “Does she— Yvanne said this was my last quest. Did she speak the truth?”

My mouth was full of acid, burning the back of my throat. “Yes,” I said, and—God forgive me—that wasn’t a lie, either. “This is your last quest.”

For a moment, you didn’t react at all. Your face was so perfectly still it might have been a painting or a sculpture, the symbol of a person rather than the thing itself. But your features softened suddenly, animating into an expression I’d never seen you wear. Not joy, but the hope of joy, like a lost sailor who hasn’t yet seen land, but believes for the first time that he might.

The sight of it did something odd to my vision. For a moment I could see the way joy would look on your face when it finally arrived. I could see you laughing, head thrown back, throat long and unguarded. I could see a ripe berry popping between your teeth—juice running clear down your chin—my own hand reaching to wipe it away—

“Gather your things,” you said, sharply. “We leave before noon.”

My head jerked back, causing my neck to make a sound like a guitar string snapping. “Oh, thank God.” And then, after a pause: “We?” I’d anticipated a lot of wheedling and pleading before you permitted me to come with you. I had several very compelling speeches worked up, including one on bended knee and one in verse.

But you were ignoring me, already bent over your work. I hurried to gather my few things before you changed your mind.

When the camp was cleared and the gelding saddled, you mounted with fluid certainty, as if you’d been mounting this same horse for ten thousand years and would do it for another ten thousand.

In the softened light of morning, I could almost imagine him as a noble steed, rather than a bad-tempered mummy. He pranced a little, as if he, too, felt the threads of the story pulling taut around us.

I was backing awkwardly out of the way, wondering grimly how many miles my shoes would survive, when your hand appeared in my vision. It remained there, cracked and callused, red knuckled in the cold, until I realized you were waiting for me to take it.

I had noticed by then the way you held yourself away from me, as if your body was a grenade with the pin half pulled. I wondered when you had last touched someone you did not intend to kill, if you even remembered how.

Yet still: There was your hand, waiting.

I eyed it. “Are you sure you—”

“Yes.”

I eyed the gelding, who was rolling the bit in his jaw with a sound like bones in a meat grinder. “And you’re sure he—”

“Yes.”

“Why? I thought you despised bards and scribes. ‘Carrion birds,’ I think you called them.”

You did not answer. Your hand did not waver.

I took it. I set one foot in the stirrup, and you hauled me up as if I weighed nothing at all. You settled me in the saddle in front of you, where one of the furs had been folded over the low pommel, so that my thighs lay over yours, my back against your chest. Your arms reached easily around me for the reins, which you hardly seemed to need. The long muscles of your legs tensed in some secret language spoken only between you and the gelding, and he turned northward.

And for the first time since I had lost the book, everything felt right. It was like an out-of-tune instrument finally ringing true, a poorly told tale finally making sense.

I was so overcome by it all—by the wild, fresh smell of the air and the heat of your body around mine, by the implausible fact that I was riding out on the last quest of Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, in the name of Yvanne the First—that I almost didn’t hear you when you finally answered my question.

“Because it was not God’s voice I heard in my dream, boy,” you said, and I felt your breath on the fine hairs at the back of my neck. “It was yours.”

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The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

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Alix E. Harrow

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Excerpted from The Everlasting, copyright © 2025 by Alix E. Harrow.

The post <i>The Everlasting</i> by Alix E. Harrow: Chapters 4 and 5 appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts paranormal romance

Read an Excerpt From The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur

A woman makes a deal with a demon to win back her ex-girlfriend, only to discover the girl of her dreams might be the devil she knows…

By Alexandria Bellefleur

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Published on October 1, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur, a paranormal romance out from Berkley on October 21.

This wasn’t her elevator. For one, it was too big, practically the size of Sam’s first studio apartment. Second, it looked like the inside of a pimped-out perfume bottle, like the one her grandmother once owned, a pretty vintage thing made of handblown crystal with a brass collar and an atomizer bulb. Or a whisky decanter, maybe.

Etched with gold leaf and inlaid with gemstones— sparkling emeralds and rubies, blue sapphires and pearls— the walls were gently curved, concave, and made of what looked like frosted sea glass, milky pink. Plush woven rugs covered the floor, and velvet jewel-toned poufs and pillows lay scattered about.

“Hiya, Sam.”

She tensed, teeth grinding together, and turned slowly in the direction of the voice, hands fisted at her sides.

Perched on the arm of a bubblegum-pink chaise, the bane of Sam’s existence batted her lashes and grinned. “Do you like what I’ve done with the place? I thought the elevator could use a little facelift.”

“You,” she growled, a rage unlike any she had felt before overcoming her, her vision tunneling, tinted red. “I’m going to kill you.”

In two strides, she crossed the room, seized Daphne by her dainty shoulders, and shoved her back against the wall, ready to make good on her promise.

“Ooh, frisky,” Daphne purred, wiggling suggestively in Sam’s hold.

She clenched her jaw. “Try homicidal.”

“I can’t help but wonder,” Daphne mused, “how do you plan on killing that which cannot die?”

Sam resisted the urge to spit. “I don’t know, but I can try.” She set her forearm against Daphne’s throat. “Bet I can still whoop your ass. Get a few good licks in before—oof.”

It happened dizzyingly fast. One second she had Daphne trapped, and the next she was staring at the wall with her arm twisted behind her, her wrist pinned against the small of her back.

“Mm.” Daphne’s breath tickled her ear. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

No warning, no nothing; Daphne licked a stripe up the side of Sam’s neck and—oh sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Her tongue was forked. Forked like a—like a snake, like a—

Like a demon.

It should’ve disgusted her; it did disgust her. It was depraved, it was wrong, her thighs clenched, and her stomach tensed, and—oh, Sam was going to need so much therapy after this.

“I swear, if you don’t let me go right this instant, I’ll—”

“Make another threat you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making good on?” Daphne laughed and the sound sent a shiver up Sam’s spine. “Go on—dazzle me.”

Daphne nipped at her ear with teeth too sharp to be human, then stepped back, letting Sam go.

She shoved away from the wall. “I loathe you.”

Daphne’s bottom lip jutted out. “I’m sensing a lot of hostility from you, Sam.”

“You think?”

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The Devil She Knows

Alexandria Bellefleur

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The Devil She Knows

Alexandria Bellefleur

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“I don’t understand what has your panties in such a twist. You got what you wanted.”

“What I wanted?” Sam cried. “What could possibly make you think that was what I wanted?”

“You wanted to be rich enough to give your dream girl her house in the Hamptons.” Daphne shrugged a shoulder. “Were you not wealthy?”

Well, yes, but—“I assumed I would wake up to find my bank balance had a few extra zeroes on the end of it.”

“And you know what they say about assuming.” Daphne threw herself down on the chaise with a sigh. “Look, if you aren’t happy, maybe you ought to think about what it is you really want.” She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand. “Do a little… soul-searching, perhaps?”

Sam glared flatly. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Did what? Follow your request to the letter? Sure did.”

The letter, maybe, but certainly not the spirit. “No, you messed with my wish so I’d have to make another one. That’s what you did.”

“Maybe I took a few creative liberties with the execution, but—”

“Creative liberties?” Sam scoffed. “You made me a criminal.”

“No, I made you a crime lord, sweetheart. Big difference.”

“Yeah! Huge difference! Misdemeanor-petty-theft versus felony-grand-larceny huge! I was looking at twenty-five years in federal prison. Twenty‑five. And!” Sam thrust a finger in her face. “I wasn’t even competent. You made me an incompetent crime lord! I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I didn’t even know what was happening! Everyone thought I was drunk! Or on shrooms, apparently.”

Daphne batted her hand aside. “You didn’t wish for competence.”

“Well, excuse me for not knowing I needed to!” Sam fumed. “This is—this is bullshit, is what it is. This is not what I agreed to.”

“It’s exactly what you agreed to.” Daphne threw her legs over the edge of the chaise and rose to her feet. “Did you think you could outwit me? I mean, come on. Do you really think you’re the first person who thought they could make one wish and skip off into the sunset with their soul?” She tutted. “Nice try, but I wasn’t born yesterday.”

Sam flushed. Maybe not the first person… “You told me you couldn’t care less about my soul. That you weren’t even the one who wanted it.”

Daphne jabbed a finger into Sam’s chest. “Let’s get something straight here, buttercup. I’m not your benevolent fairy godmother. News flash? I’m evil. Whatever my reasons, I’m not granting wishes out of the goodness of my heart.” She held up her hands. “But, look, if you believe I’ve violated our agreement in any way, you’re welcome to file an injunction with our injustice department.”

“Injustice department?”

“Sure. You want their phone number?” With a flick of her wrist, a business card appeared between her index and middle fingers. “Here you go.”

It read 666-GET-BENT.

Sam threw the card on the floor with a growl. “You are a real piece of work, you know that?”

“You say the sweetest things,” Daphne simpered, and Sam had to take several deep breaths to keep from lunging at her.

“So, what? I’m just supposed to keep making my wishes and you’re gonna keep corrupting ’em until I run out?”

“No one is forcing you to wish for anything, Sam. Executory consideration, remember?” She swept out a hand and gestured to the metal side-sliding door set into the wall, the only clue that this room had once been an elevator. Was still an elevator? “No one is stopping you from walking out that door and returning to your life as you know it.”

Life as she knew it meant a life where she and Hannah had broken up, and Sam… Sam wasn’t ready to accept that.

“But you don’t really want to do that, do you?” Daphne mused, as if sensing the direction of Sam’s thoughts. “You’re still so in love with Hannah that you can’t picture a life without her.” She paused. “You can still have everything you want, you know. All you have to do is say—”

“I know how it works,” Sam snapped. “I say I wish, and you give me what I want just half a bubble off plumb, and I wind up in the back of a cruiser in cuffs.”

She was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t, trapped between a rock and a demon.

Daphne held up her hand and stuck out her pinky. “What if I promise I won’t make you a felon this time?”

Sam wrinkled her nose, not even trying to hide her distaste at the idea of locking their pinkies. “You really ought to work on your sales tactics.”

Daphne sighed and dropped her hand. “I’ll admit, I can see how corrupting your last wish might not have engendered the most confidence that I won’t do it again—”

Sam snorted. “Try any confidence.”

“—but, as a gesture of good faith, to prove to you that I’m being sincere, I’ll throw in a complimentary get-out-of-jail-free card with your next wish.” She snapped her fingers, and another small rectangular card appeared in her hand. “I, Daphne, a representative of Hell, hereby grant you, Samantha Cooper, legal immunity. Henceforth, from now until the time when ‘nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom and there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places’ blah, blah, biblical end of times, blah, you will not be held liable for a violation of law, including criminal prosecution and civil liability.” She brandished the orange card at Sam with a flourish. “Put plainly, should you decide to, say, evade your taxes or give in to any homicidal urges, you won’t face any legal ramifications.” She shrugged. “You’ll just feel icky about it.”

Sam held up the card. “This has the Monopoly man on it. It’s literally from the board game. It even has ‘Parker Brothers, Inc.’ written on it.”

“And? Ever heard of a gesture?” Daphne rolled her eyes. “I don’t think you realize what a big deal this is, Sam. Do you know how many people have sold their souls just to get out of jail? Here I am giving you my best BOGO and you’re going to look a gift horse in the mouth? Rude.”

“Rude?” Really? “That’s rich coming from you.”

“Fine. In addition to the get-out-of-jail-free card, I’ll sweeten the deal and promise that I won’t put you in a position that would cause jeopardy to life or limb. Happy?”

Sweeten the deal? The bar was in Hell. “Promise you won’t put me in a position that would cause jeopardy to life or limb or land me in prison, and then we’ll talk.”

“I just gave you a get-out-of-jail-free card—”

“And that’s great and all, but Hannah made it clear she couldn’t be with a criminal, so—”

“No, Hannah made it clear that she couldn’t be with a criminal who got caught.”

Daphne said it as if the distinction was important.

Sam shook her head. It didn’t matter. “Just—promise.”

“Fine. I promise I won’t put you in a position that would cause jeopardy to your life or limb or land you in prison.” Daphne crossed her arms, foot tapping impatiently. “Granting wishes is my art, Sam. I hope you realize this would be like asking Michelangelo or Matisse or Pollock to paint by numbers.”

Tough. Daphne could experiment all she wanted when someone else’s soul was at stake.

Promise or no promise, Sam trusted Daphne about as far as she could throw her, which was to say not at all. But the alternative? Giving up? No way.

Hannah had never given up on her. Well, she hadn’t until she’d turned down Sam’s proposal and broken up with her. But before that, she hadn’t. From day one, Hannah had been—second to Sam’s parents—her biggest champion, encouraging her to take risks that she might not have otherwise, believing in her when she hadn’t always believed in herself.

Sam owed it to Hannah to try again, loved her too much to throw in the towel. Things had been good between them once and they could be good again. Giving up was not an option.

Sam just had to get her wish right this time. Build on what had worked with her first wish and be ultra specific. Leave absolutely no room for Daphne to twist her words.

What was it Hannah had said back at the restaurant?

When we met, you had so much potential, and I’m not going to wait around a second longer and watch you continue to squander it.

“I’ve got it,” Sam said, knowing what she was going to wish for. “I’m—I’m ready to make my next wish.”

“Go on.” Daphne swept out a hand, gesturing that Sam had the floor. “I’m listening.”

“I wish that I were the outrageously successful, wealthy, competent”—Sam had learned her lesson there—“executive chef of Glut. Oh!” Just in case… “Without a taste for crime and…” She paused, playing over Hannah’s words, her gripe about Sam spending too much time at work. “With a healthy work-life balance.”

There. She’d checked all of Hannah’s boxes, addressed all the areas in her life where she fell short. With Daphne’s promise and her own careful wording, what could possibly go wrong?

Daphne’s face split in a grin. “Wish granted.”

Excerpted from The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur Copyright © 2025 by Alexandria Bellefleur. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Devil She Knows</i> by Alexandria Bellefleur appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Alix E. Harrow

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: Prologue and Chapter 1

The lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent through time to ensure she plays her part…

By Alix E. Harrow

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Published on October 7, 2025

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Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs…

Join us every Tuesday through October 28th for an extended preview of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part—even if it breaks his heart. The Everlasting publishes on October 28th with Tor Books. Get started with the prologue and chapter 1 below, and find additional excerpts here.

Una and the Yew

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

Chapter 1

Several years after the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.

This was not, in itself, remarkable; most members of the Cantford College Department of History received so many books in the post that their offices had been overtaken by a series of architecturally unsound towers, which would collapse if anyone exhaled too aggressively in their presence.

But this particular book was different, because this particular book did not—according to every archaeologist, historian, medievalist, linguist, antiquarian, archivist, and even most of the conspiracy theorists I had ever consulted—exist.

True, I may have harbored certain fantasies that I would one day prove them all wrong. I may have pictured myself unlocking a long-lost vault or descending into a catacomb, perhaps holding a torch aloft and whispering, to no one in particular, By Jove, I’ve found it.

But I was not in a vault or a catacomb.

I was sitting at my very ordinary desk in my very ordinary office, which the department had granted me only last term, in the manner of people who have been feeding a stray for so long they might as well name it. Outside the sky was a very ordinary late-summer blue.

And I was holding in my hands the single greatest historical discovery of the century, or possibly the millennium.

I wanted to weep. I wanted to laugh. I wanted most of all to open the book and run the tips of my fingers over the pages, to prove that it was real and so was I. (I was prevented by a vestigial but powerful fear of the college archivist, who kept thumbscrews in her desk specifically for people who touched old paper without washing their hands first.)

Instead, I whispered, somewhat hysterically, “By Jove, I’ve—”

“Mallory, old boy?”

A moneyed, overloud voice, a tread like a parade march: This could only be Jeremy Harrison, the other lecturer in my subfield.

As was my long custom in every stressful situation, I panicked. I wrapped the parcel paper back around the book, fumbled with the top drawer of my desk, which always jammed when it was damp, which it always was, and, in the end, stuffed the book down my shirtfront and hunched my shoulders to hide the lump.

This was sheer professional avarice, I’m afraid: There was only one endowed faculty position in Middle Dominion Studies. Harrison wanted it with the indefatigable passion of someone who thought admiration and wealth were his birthright; I wanted it with the indefatigable passion of someone who had never experienced either and would eat bullets for a taste.

Whoever discovered this book—the book whose corners were presently digging into my ribs—would have more than a taste.

“There you are.” Harrison rounded the corner and slouched against the doorframe, looking as usual like an escapee from a painting of a fox hunt. “How’s the book coming?” He asked this question two or three times a week, because he was at heart a bastard who reveled in the suffering of others.

“Fine. Wonderful.” My voice was a thin rasp, unpleasantly high. I tried not to resent it; the field surgeon had told me I was lucky I had a voice at all, or, indeed, a pulse. “But I was just leaving, actually, excuse me.” I stood, still hunched, scuttling around my desk in the manner of an arthritic crab.

“Of course, of course. Far be it from me to stand between a war hero and his duty,” Harrison said, solicitously and hatefully. The Everlasting Medal of Valor was the only thing I had ever achieved that Harrison hadn’t. I longed to rub his face in it but, as the whole thing was a complete fucking farce, never quite could.

I produced a hoarse ha, ha and ran for it, like the coward I always was and always would be.

I waited until I was on the train back to my flat—still bent nearly in half, as if I were smuggling an infant or suffering from an intestinal complaint— before extracting the parcel from my shirt.

There was no return address on the wrapping, no stamp of origin. Just my name, Owen Mallory, and the address of the campus mail room written in an unremarkable hand. I should have been at least mildly concerned that the entire thing was an elaborate hoax designed by Harrison to embarrass me, but all I felt was a rising, heady relief. As if the whole of my life up till now had been a sort of dreary, shameful churning, like dog-paddling, which would be redeemed by everything that happened next.

I peeled back the paper.

The book was bound in rich red heartwood, cut against the grain so that the rings of the tree were visible, rippling outward. The spine was affixed by a series of clever bronze hinges, cerulean with age, and a familiar, circular symbol had been burned deeply into the wood, stained with soot or wine-root. I traced it with one shaking fingertip.

An underfed boy of seven or eight was seated beside me, watching me in the frank, unashamed way that young people watch the unwell. He had an extravagance of eyelashes, which gave him the wistful, sleepy look of someone woken mid-dream.

I found myself opening the book, pointing to the title page. “Can you read this?”

The boy recoiled a little from the sound of my voice. Then, warily, as if I were mad or, worse, intending to teach him something: “No, sir.”

“Don’t worry, few people could.” Middle Mothertongue bore a frustratingly faint resemblance to our modern language, but it had always come easily to me, like a childhood dialect I’d not quite forgotten. I closed the book and tapped the cover. “And what does this look like to you? This symbol?”

He bent to study it obediently. His hair—an unfortunate, Gallish shade of red—was still fine enough to form a babyish snarl at the nape of his neck.

“A lizard,” he declared, eventually. “Or a dragon, maybe, chewing up its own tail.” He spent the rest of the ride offering suggestions for the improvement of the design (blood, teeth, blood dripping from teeth, et cetera), gesturing enthusiastically. His wrists were spattered with hot pink scars, as from welding sparks or ash. The munitions factories ran on twenty-four-hour shifts these days, and there weren’t enough grown men and women to work them.

The train dinged. I stood, and the boy nodded amiably at the book. “What’s it called?”

I swayed, teetering on the edge of the thing that would transform me from no one into someone. It felt momentous, fateful, even. As if you had watched over me—haunted me, guided me, saved me thrice over—solely so that I could be here, now, with your name on my tongue.

The boy was waiting with his long dreamer’s lashes tipped up to me. Would there be another war by the time he was old enough to enlist? Would it be your story—newly published, perhaps leatherbound, with my name in small print on the title page—that sent him to the front? Something swelled painfully in my chest at the thought; pride, I decided.

I leaned closer and told the boy the five words he couldn’t read, that I could, as easily as if I’d written them myself: “The Death of Una Everlasting.”

Before I stepped off the train, I dug a coin from my wallet and tossed it to him. He caught it in one small, scarred hand.

Buy the Book

The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

Buy Book

The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Excerpted from The Everlasting, copyright © 2025 by Alix E. Harrow.

The post <i>The Everlasting</i> by Alix E. Harrow: Prologue and Chapter 1 appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Horror

Read an Excerpt From Blood Like Ours by Stuart Neville

A mother faces the ultimate supernatural horror: the monster she must become to protect her child.

By Stuart Neville

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Published on October 2, 2025

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Blood Like Ours, the second novel in Stuart Neville’s The Blood trilogy, publishing with Hell’s Hundred on October 28.

Moonflower ran. The pack keeping pace, panting hard, paws drumming on the dirt.

Two coyotes, a Patterdale terrier, and two mutts. Even though his legs were shorter, the little terrier was the fastest of them all, weaving through the scrub like a black mis- sile. The two mongrels scampered after, the taller of them jumping the low bushes, the smaller ducking between them. The coyotes held back, both females, still wary. But they belonged to Moonflower, no question. They would die for her.

Moonflower came to a halt and looked up at the end- less expanse of sky. Stars already prickling the deep blue blanket of the new-born night. The pack did as she did. Scant wisps of cloud skated the heavens above as wind climbed the mountain, tearing the evening scents away before she could grasp them. Hunger had wrung her stomach to a dry ball of pain. The mountain scrub glow- ered all around. How many days and nights? Moonflower had lost count. She was alone now, that much was certain, except for the voice that had been whispering in her ear.

Low and insistent, the voice seemed to speak from somewhere just inside, as if some tiny creature had nested next to her eardrum and spoke to her in the quietest moments, or when she lingered in the strange limbo between sleep and waking. This morning, back in the cave where she had taken shelter, when her mind kaleidoscoped between the real and unreal, the voice had whispered to her that she should take one of the dogs.

They were so devoted to her that they would offer themselves gladly, lie on their backs with their bellies and throats exposed, and allow her to rip them open and feast. They would welcome it, the voice said.

“Liar,” Moonflower had said aloud in the dark, causing the dogs to stir around her.

Yes, they loved her, and yes, they would give her any- thing she wanted, but she would not take it from them.

The Patterdale—Sweeney, she called him, after the villainous barber in a book she’d read—stood erect and sniffed at the air, then gave a stream of yips.

“You smell something?” Moonflower asked.

Sweeney gave her one look before rocketing off through the scrub. Moonflower paused for breath then sprinted after him. The rest thrummed behind, panting, paws beating dirt. She giggled. Despite the aching sadness, the thrill of sprinting through the moonlit scrub brought a shining joy to her heart.

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Blood Like Ours

Stuart Neville

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Blood Like Ours

Stuart Neville

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She wondered what scent had caught Sweeney’s atten- tion. Out of all of them, his nose was the keenest. Even sharper than hers. In the few days he’d been part of her pack, Moonflower had learned to trust his lead. Now she followed him up a rising slope, steeper and steeper, her tattered sneakers dislodging grit and gravel, robbing her of momentum. The others passed her, the two mongrels, John and Yoko, she called them. A boy and a girl, bonded so tightly to each other that they could barely be separated.

Then the coyotes—she had no names for them yet— keeping a cautious distance. It was the other dogs who should be scared of them. Moonflower had heard of coy- otes playing with domestic dogs to lure them away from their homes, but these two feared her too much to harm her friends.

The dogs all paused on the crest of the slope. All except Sweeney, who barreled on and down the other side, yip- yip-yipping as he went.

Too late, Moonflower found the scent on the rushing desert air, and her stomach rolled and growled in response. Not the blood of a wounded animal, not even the scat of a rabbit or a deer. This was a more subtle smell. Flesh, not alive, but not rotten. Clean butchered meat, ready for cooking. And above it all, the acrid sting of burning charcoal.

“Oh, no,” Moonflower said.

She sprinted up the remainder of the slope, but she heard the cry before she reached the top.

“Daddy!”

A kid’s voice, bright with fear. Sweeney barking.

“Oh, no,” Moonflower said, “please, no.”

Moonflower reached the crest and looked down to a clearing in the scrub. A mobile home, new and shining, its awning out, lights glowing from within. A kettle grill, some kind of metal container on top, like a chimney filled with charcoal, gathering heat as fire spread from piece to piece. A table alongside loaded with two plastic bags full of Saran-wrapped meat. A moonlit feast ready to cook.

“No,” Moonflower said.

A boy child backed up against the side of the vehicle, Sweeney a few feet away, barking at him. The boy cried out for his father once more.

A door opened on the side of the mobile home, a man leaning out. “Hey, buddy, what’s—”

The man fell silent, staring at Sweeney. The Patterdale became quiet too, briefly, then turned his fury on the man, dashing forward, barking, backing away, then forward again.

“Don’t move, Jerod,” the man said. “Just stay real still, now. Amy?”

A woman’s voice from inside, the words indistinct.

“Take it easy, now,” the man said, glancing back into the mobile home. “Just hand me my rifle.”

More words from inside, rising in pitch.

“Just hand me my rifle. Quick, now.”

The other dogs sensed the fear that rose up from the clearing. Low growls came from the mutts’ bellies; the coyotes hunkered down low.

“Quiet,” Moonflower said. The dogs became still and silent, and she took three steps down the dusty slope. “Sweeney,” she called.

The Patterdale didn’t hear her, but the boy did. He stared up at her, eyes and mouth wide.

A woman, the boy’s mother, appeared in the door behind her husband, pressing a gun into his hands. A large hunting rifle, its oiled stock gleaming, a toy seldom used. He raised the butt to his shoulder, aimed the muzzle at Sweeney. The snick-snick of the bolt echoed over the hills as he chambered a round.

“No!”