Serial · ongoing
The Heartless Warden
Elliot Vance died, and then the rain brought him back, and the house on Winter Street had a son again — one without a heartbeat, and one his mother can't look at without flinching. He's eighteen. He has a younger brother, Milo, who makes costumes and sews name patches into coat linings, and who is the reason Elliot does anything at all. He has a job now, with the Wardens, which is how this city deals with the returned: a probationary seat, a chief who uses him, and a caseload of whatever comes out of the Grey. What he doesn't have is a way to keep the Coldbrook Street murders out of the file. He knows who was in that house. He knows what the Wardens will do once they know it too. So he works the case from the inside, slowly, badly, at a cost the book keeps counting — [Audience Expectation: 41%] — one survival at a time. A dark urban fantasy about a family that hurt its own, a city that came apart at the seams, and a brother who chooses the lie for as long as he can stand it. It isn't a romance, and it doesn't hand out clean endings by the chapter. It's the kind of book that makes a quiet house feel occupied.
Chapter 1: Curtain Up
I AM NO GOD OF THE STAGE Every time he survives, the bill comes due. After the red meteor crossed the sky, the world stopped making things.…
Chapter 2: What the Storm Brought Back
He woke with gravel under his cheek and rain running into his ear. For a while he lay still and let it happen. Moving would mean finding out…
Chapter 3: House Lights
The chain held. Through the door, over the rain: a woman's voice. "Milo." Nothing moved. Then the voice again, closer to the gap. "Why's the…
Chapter 4: Say Your Name
Volume One: The Ones in the Play He came back up Winter Street with the clinic form folded to the size of a card and his thumb on the crease…
Chapter 5: Ground's Soft Out Back
The rain quit a little before midnight. Elliot lay on his back in the room at the back of the house and listened to it quit. He had a list.…
Chapter 6: Red in the Rain
The rain came down in sheets and the boy in the red coat went along the middle of the road with his head down. He could not lift his feet. H…
Chapter 7: The Voice Behind Him
The jug came off the stand heavier than he expected. Five gallons in a plastic shell, cold all the way through. He got both hands around the…
Chapter 8: The House
The rain had come down out of the sheets it had held all night. It fell steady now, and the gutter over the porch ran and broke, ran and bro…
Chapter 9: Written in Water
Written in Water He woke sitting up. The sheet was wet through where he'd been lying and cold at the edges where he hadn't, and his shirt wa…