Showing results by narrator "Tirzah Hawkins" in All Categories

In a city drowning in fog, even a monster can be a sanctuary. In the climate-controlled silence of the British Library, manuscript conservator Cordelia Elliston lives a life of careful repairs and quiet order. But the charred diary she finds in a private estate clearance refuses to be fixed. The leather is fever-hot. The ink moves like living shadow. And when the page pulses beneath her fingers, Cordelia is pulled through a crack in the world. She wakes in the sulfurous, batswing-lit London of 1888. It is a city paralyzed by murder, but the killings are merely a symptom.

Her grandmother left her a house. A pile of notebooks in three languages. And a man inside the volcano. He has been waiting for her since 1991. His name is Ahiakua. He has a body of basalt and a voice like distant thunder. He learned English from her grandmother. He reads Wendell Berry on the rim of the caldera, and when he touches her, he leaves dark prints that don't fade. Dr. Hina Akana came back to inventory an estate. She did not come back to inherit a centuries-old monster who has been carrying her name across thirty-five years of silence.

England, 1348. The Black Death has taken half the village. Then it takes Elsbeth. Else—healer's daughter, herbwoman, the last person in Ashenmere still boiling water instead of praying—dies of plague and is thrown into a mass grave. Three days later, she claws her way out. The buboes are gone. Her blood runs dark beneath her skin. And when she touches the dying, they heal. The Church sends Brother Callum to investigate—a monk with bruised knees and a faith held together by discipline alone. He expects a fraud.