Serial · ongoing
The Hearth Contract
Cinder is a fire spirit who used to cover a valley. After one disastrous meal and the strike that followed, he wakes inside a boy named Owen Penn, in a small Pacific Northwest town where the only magic he can find is the kind people keep in their kitchens. He can't leave. He can only take power by eating. So he works at Tanner's, delivers food, and tries to understand a world that has no place for what he is. Then he meets Rennie, a girl who feeds him without being asked and wants a contract he keeps refusing. Her family has secrets. The town has secrets. And Cinder's own past is a debt that hasn't finished coming due. The Hearth Contract is a contemporary fantasy about food, family, and the quiet agreements that hold both together. It's warm, strange, and full of small choices that cost more than they look. For readers who like their magic served at a kitchen table, with the bill folded underneath.
Chapter 1: Not an Extra
He tried again. He lay still in the small room over the shop and reached out the way he had reached out a thousand times before: no hands, n…
Chapter 2: Warm Like Uncle Wick
At the curb Rennie stood with both hands on the strap of her backpack and watched the delivery boy ride off down the row of parked cars. He…
Chapter 3: A Stick Does Not Stand
He racked the bike behind the shop and stood a minute in case anybody needed him. Nobody did. He went up the back stairs to his room. The wi…
Chapter 4: The Ones Who Hide
# The Ones Who Hide The car pulled up to the house and stopped, and then it wasn't a car anymore. Rennie felt the shape of it go all at once…
Chapter 5: Three Months, No Sign
Her daughter sat on the cushion by the window, back straight, eyes shut, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way sh…
Chapter 6: Open It Outside
After dinner Rennie climbed up on the kitchen chair, laid the tablet flat on her knees, and called her father. He picked up on the second ri…
Chapter 7: Second Helping
Second Helping Vesper drew the trace in a line of ash across the kitchen table and laid the root down in the middle of it. What was left ins…
Chapter 8: Worse Than Advertised
Worse Than Advertised Rennie had two of Nana's candies in her backpack the day she got them, and nine by the time it mattered. It wasn't ste…
Chapter 9: Antlers
Ms. Yarrow had the folder open in front of her and both hands flat on top of it. She had already apologized twice for taking up Vesper's mor…
Chapter 10: The Bait
Sorrel was out in the yard before the shop opened, finishing up. Finished first, questions after — that was how Sorrel worked. The root had…
Chapter 11: The Part That Thinks
She had four new friends. Or five. The fifth one had horns — little ones, right up at the hairline — and she had asked first, because Ms. Ya…
Chapter 12: The Secret in the Snowman
"Okay," Rennie said. It was easy to say. Breaking through wasn't the kind of thing anybody kept quiet about — that was the point of it. Ever…
Chapter 13: A Cure for Everything
Rennie came in at a run. The door banged against the wall behind her, the backpack came off her shoulder and hit the floor, and Mom called o…
Chapter 14: Free Soil
In the morning Rennie carried Leaf's pot down the back steps and set it in the strip of sun along the fence. Rosy came down behind her on it…
Chapter 15: Tuesdays and Thursdays
He got to Second Helping at a quarter to twelve and waited on the sidewalk instead of going in. A table for one on a Saturday meant ordering…
Chapter 16: Just a Little More Than Mom
The house was warm. It had been warm all day, long enough that the front room smelled like the inside of a car left out in the sun, and Wren…
Chapter 17: Hard Left
The box was from Second Helping and there were five in it. He ate them standing at the counter with the lid folded back, and when he came ba…
Chapter 18: Overtime
Overtime There was a tray in the furnace with one turn left on it — nourishing pills, the run she could do with her eyes shut — and nothing…
Chapter 19: The Furnace Room
The Furnace Room Wren came out of her room with her socks in one hand and stopped halfway down the hall. She knew fire when it was in a hous…