Serial · ongoing
The Shadow Sire
Beneath the surface city sprawls the Undercity, a labyrinth of breeding pens and stockyards where human beings called “berries” are raised, graded, and traded as livestock by the rat-folk and hog-folk that rule the depths. Rook, a tall dark-haired sire prized by breeder Charles, is dismissed as a quiet, empty-headed idiot. But behind his vacant stare lies a secret gift: his left eye lets him reach the dead and settle their unfinished business. When a tattered blue yarn doll draws him into dead girl Biscuit’s last wish, Rook fakes dullness to survive the pen system. After learning his friend Six’s fate in a slaughterhouse and stumbling on a truck of runaway noble children and a mysterious white-haired stranger, he must choose how much of himself to awaken to break free.
Chapter 1: Many Happy Returns
The song arrived before anything else in the room did. "Black mandrake, black mandrake, the rose says you have stolen her light. The lily sa…
Chapter 2: Under Observation
"Rook. Rook." A child's voice went off beside his ear like a smoke alarm with a stone in it, and kept going, and went around his head once,…
Chapter 3: Peaches in Syrup
Master Charles got both forearms around him at the waist, which was as high as they went, and squeezed, and made a noise into his shoulder t…
Chapter 4: Blue Yarn
The peach jar's label had a seam down the back where the paper had been lapped over itself, and the print was small, and the woman on the fr…
Chapter 5: Payment in Kind
Rook's hands were not clever. Fortunately the yarn's previous author had not been much of an artist either. He worked by the square of windo…
Chapter 6: Breeding Stock
Charles held his hand the whole way, the way a man holds a child's hand at a market, and Rook let himself be held. The corridor was narrow a…
Chapter 7: Gold at the Root
"Come and sit. Not there — over here, out of the wet." He was on a crate with his back to the wall before he'd agreed to anything, and then…