Breakwater

I paid the tithe. I pressed my hand to the bark at the last hard frost and the binding renewed and the hollow went quiet and I thought: this is what it feels like when it works.

It worked. Just not enough.

The covenant renewed at its original terms — terms written in 1847 for something that has spent 178 years growing. The boundary holds. The lures are weaker. The thing below the hollow has a name now, and I didn't want to learn it, and that's been the pattern.

The one in the house knows something he hasn't told me. I can feel it in the shape of what he doesn't say. The one at the boundary is still here — not because he has to be, not anymore. The one made of light flickers in patterns I'm starting to read. I am keeping notes.

The one from the deep water stopped being careful with me. What I didn't know is that the water he came from runs in two directions, and I haven't mapped the second one yet.

The parish is talking. Conversations stop when I walk into the diner. I am holding a line this town can't see and being blamed for what leaked through before I held it.

The lid is too small for the jar.

Breakwater is a gothic Southern why-choose monster romance — Book 2 of the Vauclain Monsters series.