January 2026

Dear ,

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo said.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given us.”

I’ve been holding this quote close for a good ten years now. It feels uniquely suited to our time, but I take some comfort in the fact that Tolkien no doubt wrote it thinking it was uniquely suited to his time. There have always been “such times,” and there is always a choice. It is, I think, easier to hear it from Gandalf.

News and Events

We’re officially in my debut year, and The Devil Knows Her Name releases in just eight months. I’m hoping the cover reveal is just around the corner, but in the meantime, I’ve turned in my copy edits and acknowledgments, and approved my sample pages. One of the things people ask me most often is, “Does it feel real yet?” and honestly, it goes back and forth — if I’m left unattended too long, I start thinking I dreamed it all. Seeing the sample pages, the book formatted like an actual book, is definitely one of the moments it’s felt the most real.

Regardless of how real it feels at any given moment, it is a real, actual book, and you can add it on Goodreads now!

This week, I also turned in the draft of my second contracted book (working title: THE WALKING TREE) to my agent. This is not a sequel to The Devil Knows Her Name but a completely unrelated standalone about a lonely arborist who discovers a terrible secret about the ancient tree she’s bound to protect. It’s quite a different story from TDKHN, but it’s still a small-town horror with a heaping helping of feminist revenge fantasy.

That story is a year or two away from publication, but your January short story is right here:

Your January Story: The God of Spares

When Cain goes to sleep that night, he is fairly sure he’s dead.

He’s tired, so tired it feels like his bones are crumbling under the weight of it, which only makes sense given everything that happened that day (except that he can’t remember what did happen that day). He’s wearing a cloak that isn’t his and leading a horse that isn’t his and his hands are stained nearly black with blood that isn’t his, which all point to some kind of event. He recalls dread painting his insides when he woke this morning and the rasp of his sword being drawn from its sheath, but everything else is a too-bright blur that makes his stomach feel like it’ll drop out his ass if he thinks about it too hard.

He knows that’s at least two too many feelings for a dead man, but he also knows his heart is cold and still in his chest.

It had taken a while for him to notice. He’d come to himself while walking, knowing he’d been walking for some time but not for exactly how long nor where from, the horse’s reins wrapped in his bloodstained fist and the too-long cloak dragging behind him through the wet grass. He’d paused and looked around, trying to figure out where he was. He hadn’t seen any familiar landmarks, just a seemingly endless stretch of leafless, limbless gray trees whose tops were lost in the mist. Being lost was a bad feeling, one that turned his stomach and buzzed through his nerves and should’ve made his heart thunder in his chest, but there was not a single, solitary heartbeat in his ears. His hand had gone immediately to his chest, found his intact chainmail and the heavy wool shirt beneath and finally his own smooth, unbroken skin, cool to the touch.

Fear had taken him in a wave, but his heart had always been the arbiter of these strong emotions, and without it pounding in his ears fear hardly felt like fear at all. For a moment his body seemed caught in a paradoxical loop, his own lack of heartbeat causing a terror that wouldn’t take hold without it. Finally, the horse had nudged him hard in the back out of impatience; he’d stumbled forward and decided the simplest answer was that he was dead, and none of this was real.

The longer the trees and the mist go on, the more sense it makes. He’s dead, and this is purgatory. He has a horse and a cloak because he’d always imagined himself with those things, and he’s tired because he’s in the habit of being tired after a long day of walking (and whatever else). Thus, when darkness falls and he goes through the rote motions of making camp and preparing to sleep, he wonders what will happen next.

Thanks to the mist that never seems to dissipate, he isn’t able to find any properly dry wood, and his fire is small and smoky. Laid as he is on the grass, the smoke mostly hangs above him, but it’s a thick, pale smoke that stands out against the night around him, so he sees when it drifts abruptly, lazy coils sucking into an eddy like someone is moving through it.

He sits up, no heartbeat in his ears to signal his own alarm. The horse, foot cocked and lip hanging loose in sleep, does not react at all.

A breeze, he tells himself. Or maybe a bat. You’re already dead; there’s nothing left to worry about.

“That’s not true.”

Cain starts violently, waits for the clench in his chest that doesn’t come. Across the fire there’s a shadow, a shape just a shade darker than the night around it. He instinctively casts about for his sword, but then remembers he hasn’t had one of those since, well. He doesn’t remember when.

“I took your blades,” the shadow says; the voice confounds him, pitched like a woman’s but spoken like a man’s. “You might’ve hurt yourself. It seemed safest.”

Cain stills himself, tries not to think of the cold emptiness in his chest. “What’s not true?” he asks.

“Hm?”

“You said ‘that’s not true.’ What’s not true, that I’m dead or there’s nothing left to worry about?”

“Oh.” The shadow shifts, or at least, Cain thinks it does. One moment it appears to be someone standing just outside the firelight, the next like someone crouched. “Well, both are not true. You’re not dead, and therefore there’s plenty left to worry about.”

That complicates things — or it would, if Cain believed it. But he’s quite sure the shadow isn’t real, or at least isn’t talking. The smoke has made him hallucinate, if dead men can hallucinate; he’s heard of witches and warlocks breathing the smoke of poisonous leaves and flowers to see visions. Perhaps you’re not supposed to burn the wood in purgatory.

“This isn’t purgatory,” the shadows says. “It’s the Bonewood; haven’t you ever heard of that?”

“If this is real, how do you know what I’m thinking?”

“I didn’t say it was real. I just said it wasn’t purgatory.”

“But the Bonewood is a real place. I have heard of it, known people who traveled through it.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t real, either.”

The conversation is beginning to make Cain think this is actually hell. “How do you know I’m not dead?”

“What an interesting question. I could say that it’s because you’re walking and talking on this good plane of mortals. But I think it would be more helpful to say it’s because I didn’t kill you.”

Cain stares hard across the fire, trying to make out a clear shape, a face, a hint of features.

“That’s what you think, isn’t it?” the shadow goes on. “You think you died because you can’t remember what happened. But you’ve been alive this whole time. Your little mind is just blocking out the bits it can’t get around.”

“You didn’t kill me?” Cain repeats.

“Yes,” the shadow says. “I am the event. I am the thing you can’t remember. But you didn’t die. Your mind just — vacated, for a while.”

“And what about my heart?”

“Ah. Yes, I could see why that might make you think you were dead. But still, you’re not. You just don’t need it anymore, because you have me.”

The shadow moves, and a hand emerges from the darkness into the firelight, something balanced carefully in its palm. The hand looks mostly human, if a little strange; the fingers are quite long and the skin is silver as moonlight, and the nails come to sharp little points.

Stranger still is that it’s Cain’s heart sitting in the palm. He’s not sure how he knows it’s his — he’s never seen it before, after all — but he does. It’s like looking at his hand or his foot or any other body part, except this one is detached from him and motionless, bloodless. It seems to have been cleaned and dried with meticulous care, and Cain suddenly finds that he feels better just from seeing it again.

“Who are you?” he asks.

The hand withdraws, and from the darkness on the other side of the fire a pale crescent emerges. Cain squints, struggling to make sense of what he’s seeing before he realizes it’s teeth. It’s a smile, hanging as if unattached in the black.

“I am Nalyxes,” the shadow says. “Do you know that name?”

“No.”

The smile widens. “I thought not. I am the god of the sliver moon and the hanging dark. I am the god of the lantern in the wood. I am the god of the low mist and the lone match.”

“Those are very specific,” Cain says.

“They are what’s left over. Your people worship Seracin for the moon now, and ward off Acendile in the night, and pray to Malycin for the rain. I have claimed the spares.”

“And what do you mean when you say, ‘I have you’?”

“We’re bound together, now. You have me and I have you.”

“How did we come to be so?”

The smile disappears. “That’s the part you don’t remember. I think it best you sleep now.”

The shadow bleeds away into the night, smoke eddying at its passing. The silence is thick in its wake, almost as if it was never broken by voices at all. The horse snorts lightly and shifts to its other foot. Cain lays back down and goes to sleep.

When he wakes, the wood looks just the same as it did the day previous. The sun is largely indiscernible beyond the mist, and the gray jagged trees march on unbroken. His stomach roils with hunger.

Cain is quite sure that everything last night had been a dream, but he’s no longer sure he’s dead. It had made the most sense yesterday, but it is not the only explanation. Perhaps there’s simply something wrong with his heart, some magic or injury hiding its beat from him.

Now that he think the horse is probably real and not a purgatorial projection, he takes a few minutes to check the packs, ensuring that the girth isn’t pinching and the bags aren’t rubbing or sliding. He finds a pack of grain and feeds the horse a handful even though it seems content with the grass.

His also finds a waterskin, near half full. He’s tempted to pour it over his stained hands and scrub away the blackened blood, but he thinks better of it. He’ll need it, now that he knows he’s not dead. Instead, he tries to scrub his hands on the wet grass, which helps a little.

With no more delay, he sets off. The Bonewood might be ominous, but the path is wide and clear, and he feels almost cheerful. He’s heard of people going mad in the Bonewood, and he can see why, what with the unchanging landscape and the utter silence but for his own breath and the plodding of the horse, but it doesn’t seem so bad compared to purgatory.

After a while he starts to whistle to entertain himself. The mist eats the sound, but the horse appears to like it, its ears flicking when he hits certain notes.

Can you sing, too? comes Nalyxes’s voice.

Cain pauses and looks around. He sees no shadow, no shift in the fog.

Just because you can’t see me doesn’t mean we can’t talk.

“I’d like it better if I could see you,” he says aloud.

Fine. A sigh.

The mist, which hangs over his head like a ceiling, funnels downward until a figure coalesces and breaks off. It remains indistinct, a vaporous cloud with a vaguely human shape, but as he watches he catches the occasional glimpse a definitive feature — a sharp-nailed hand, a smile like the curve of a knife, the shadow of a collarbone.

Nalyxes approaches, and Cain stares, waiting for features to come into focus, but the form remains opaque with only fleeting clarity. The god takes his hand like a sweetheart might, folding their fingers together.

“See, you’ve stopped. This is why I was going to stay in your head — I’m very distracting.”

Cain huffs an incredulous laugh. He returns his gaze to the path, licks his dry lips, and continues whistling and walking.

It’s hard to keep track of time. At first, every moment passes with excruciating slowness as he tries not to stare at the thing holding his hand, tries to get a sense of its weight and solidity. The hand in his is cool and smooth, and only sometimes does he feel the featherlight prick of a nail. In his periphery, he can make out the plane of a cheek, the slope of a nose, but when he turns his head to look they disassemble into melting mist. Then, as he becomes accustomed to the presence in his side, time slips away from him, the notes of his whistle and the endless trees and fog simultaneously one moment and infinite moments.

He doesn’t stop whistling and walking until a drop of ice-cold rain hits his cheek. He stops, startled, and looks up: the mist is thinning, and the utterly silent wood is suddenly filled with the patter of rain.

“We’re near the edge of the Bonewood,” Nalyxes says. “I should not intrude on Malycin.”

The hand in his immediately begins to dissipate, and he fruitlessly clasps it, trying to hold it in both of his. “Where will you go?” he asks, suddenly anxious.

The god laughs. “I will be with you still — our bond cannot be broken. You just won’t see me for the moment.”

The figure dissolves fully, but in his head, Cain hears, Still here. Now, keep whistling.

He walks on, his mood strangely more somber even though he sees the edges of the mist. Rain soaks his hair and trickles down the back of his neck. When he whistles again, it’s a mournful little tune, something he heard deep in his cups in a tavern somewhere. Without the mist, the sound echoes, ringing out hauntingly over the rain.

When he comes to the edge of the wood, he stops short: there are four figures before him, two large and two small, braced as if for battle. They’re holding makeshift weapons at the ready — a shovel, a scythe, the two children with sticks. He raises his hands slowly, glad he took the time to scrub them on the grass.

“Who are ye?” shouts one of them — the father, he takes it, although they’re all hooded and bundled against the rain.

“My name is Cain Cloinoff,” he answers. “I’m just a traveler, I mean you no harm.”

The farmer relaxes slightly, but not entirely. “And was it you whistling in the Bonewood?”

“It was. Just a tune to pass the time.”

The family all lower their weapons now, although they don’t come any closer. “No harm in that,” the farmer says, a prickle still in his voice. “We’ll let ye be on your way.”

“Could I trouble you to refill my waterskin?” Cain asks. “I’ve walked a long way.”

“Aye,” the farmer says, pointing to the pump and basin across the yard. “Take your fill and then take your leave.”

“Thank you.”

The family all turns to watch him as he goes, and he realizes none of them will return to their work until he’s gone. “Will he curse us, Mama?” he hears one of the children ask.

The woman does not say ‘no,’ only shushes the child harshly. Cain turns to her to say I will not, but the way her face washes white with horror kills the words in his mouth. Instead, he hurries on to the basin before the farmer changes his mind.

He drinks the waterskin empty, then plies the pump a few times to refill it. He guesses from the current rain and the bogginess of the yard that this farm never hurts for water, so he pumps some into the basin to properly wash his hands. He rubs hard between the fingers, wondering if Nalyxes was left stained with mortal blood where their hands had touched. The water turns rusty red, and —

Cloinoff, stop it! Stop it, boy!

He looks around for the source of the voice, even though he knows with terrible certainty that it’s coming from his own mind, from the past. He grasps the pump handle hard, trying to root himself here, but it’s too late —

He is one of thirty men chosen for this expedition, and he goes with fear and disgust in his heart. The Bonewood is no trifling place, and whatever it is that sleeps there and occasionally whistles in the mist is entitled to its home. But too many young women — young women intended to be the castle’s mistresses and maids — have gone missing there for the lord to ignore, and even though Cain doubts they ever stepped foot in the Bonewood, he goes because he is ordered.

They walk for days without finding anything. The captain’s horse becomes the only thing well fed, because despite the lush green grass that grows throughout, they don’t see so much as a rabbit. The men begin to grumble as the packs grow empty, and finally in desperation the captain turns to Cain.

“Let’s have a whistle, boy.”

“What?”

“I’ve heard you whistle in the yards. See if you can draw it out.”

Cain’s lips immediately go dry as the desert, and the tongue he licks them with is dry, too. The fear he has held at bay for days squeezes around his heart until it’s hard to breathe. He takes a drink from his waterskin to wet his mouth, and he whistles.

He can manage no tune; it’s hard enough to simply make the notes come out, and the tremble in his breath gives it an eerie, piping quality. The fog eats the whistle just as it’s eaten the noise of their booted feet and the creak of leather armor and the snorts of the captain’s horse, so they all know when the sound comes back that it’s no echo but a response.

The mist stirs and they all twist to face the disturbance, but nothing emerges. Instead, the mist rushes at them; where before it kept a distance, hanging over their heads like a ceiling and obscuring the wood beyond twenty paces, now it comes in close, folding around Cain until he can barely see his own hand. The whistle dies on his lips, and the fear that takes him makes his heart clench painfully in his chest.

Hello, says Nalyxes, everywhere and nowhere in the fog. You called?

Forgive me, Cain thinks, and he can think nothing else, because the pain in his chest has become sharp as a blade. He can hardly breathe around it. Vaguely he hears the panic of the other men and the shouting of the captain, and he curses them for bringing him here, for hunting a sacred thing in a fruitless attempt to assuage the lord’s injured ego.

Hunting? Nalyxes says, all gentle amusement. You sweet thing. I cannot be hunted by such as you.

The pain drives Cain to his knees. It feels as though his heart is being wrung out like a washcloth, and his right arm is going numb. I don’t want to die here, he thinks.

I am no healer, Nalyxes says. There is but one way I could save you. It has been…some time since I attempted it. I would need something from you.

Cain can barely hear the voice over the wheeze of his breath. He’s sunk onto his elbow, trying to relieve the pain in his chest, but there’s no escape from it. His vision is rimmed with black.

I think I will take this, the god says. It seems to be doing you more harm than good, anyway. And Cain suddenly feels a touch, like a cool hand has reached straight through his armor to his bare chest. When he looks down, he sees nothing but mist.

The stabbing ache intensifies, becoming so agonizing that his vision goes fully black. Just as quickly, it disappears completely, and he’s left gasping in blessed relief. He does not yet sense the wrongness of it; he only knows there’s no pain and, strangely, no longer any fear. A wave of gratitude takes him so strongly that tears burn beneath his lids.

On your feet, sweet thing, the voice says. They’ll come for you now.

Cain looks up; the mist is rolling back to its original boundaries, leaving him a clear view of the other men. His vision seems sharper than it was a moment ago, and the rest of the company seems smaller, frailer. He sees their hands trembling on hilts, hears the tremors in their breaths, smells the pungent musk of fear sweat. Were they always so bent, so craven?

As he wonders this, one eye after another seems to catch on him, head turning in double-takes. A murmur and a shift goes through the company, and the circle of blades that was turned outward turns in on him. “Cloinoff?” the captain asks. Cain glances up at him, and the man’s face goes bloodless in terror.

“It has him!” the captain screams. “It’s taken Cloinoff!”

The man kicks his horse forward, and the massive hooves and broad, armor-plated chest bear down on Cain. He steps aside as if in a dream, ducking the captain’s lance but catching his arm. Cain feels the tendons in the man’s shoulder tear, hears the breath whoosh from his lungs as he hits the ground. Cain lifts his sword — when had he drawn it? — and plunges it into the captain’s chest. He feels no shock and no fear.

He hears the next men coming, rushing from behind him. He whirls, dodges, drives the still-wet blade into another body. They all seem so slow to him, so weak; he catches a two-handed strike with only one hand, and another sword splinters and breaks under the force of his blow.

They should run from him, he thinks. A gout of blood spills over his sword, his hand. Why do they not run from him? His breath does not grow short, and his muscles do not quiver with fatigue. They have no hope against him.

A distant part of Cain expects horror. One man against thirty; even to prevail would be a terrible thing. But he will prevail, and he feels no horror. Uncounted humans died every day, and he cannot bring himself to grieve a few more. Instead, the blood sings through his veins, euphoric at his own strength, his own ability.

Time flows like water. With infinite moments now stretched out before him, it seems foolish to keep track of these few so closely. He doesn’t realize he’s killed them all, nor how long it took, until the wood returns to silence. He glances down, sees his red hands resting on the hilt of his sword. The blade of it has run through the upraised, open palm of a hand and into the neck — one last plea for mercy ignored.

Cain jerks back to himself as thunder rumbles low over his head. His hands are clenched around the edge of the basin, and his neck aches as if he’s been standing this way for some time. Rain drips from his hair, sending ripples through the sheen of water in the basin, but he sees his reflection nonetheless: one eye as brown as it always has been, the other black from corner to corner but for the hanging sliver moon in its center.