Boundwater

I inherited forty acres of Louisiana bayou from a great-aunt I met once. She looked at me across a diner table when I was eleven and said: you'll do.

Twenty-six years old and I still don't know what she was asking.

The land came with conditions. A blood tithe, paid at the last hard frost. A boundary that has to be walked. And four creatures who have been keeping this property for over a century, waiting for someone with Vauclain blood to come home and pay what's owed.

The one in the house has been here since before the house. The one at the boundary was promised his freedom thirty years ago and never got it. The one from the deep water is the most trustworthy thing I've ever met, and I am monitoring my own response to that very carefully. The one made of light walked me in circles my first night on the property. I'm still furious about the mud.

Something lives below the Hollow. I don't know what it is. I know the covenant was built to keep it there, and the covenant hasn't been fed in thirty years, and the things that happen when it gets hungry are beginning to show.

I'm a science teacher from Ohio. I write everything down. I measure what I can.

The rest, I'm learning by having.

Boundwater is a gothic Southern why-choose monster romance — Book 1 of the Vauclain Monsters series. Folk horror filtered through romance. A heroine who asks the right questions. Monsters who are monstrous first.