Last Frost

A Vauclain Monsters Novella

By: K.S. Valentina

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The binding is thinning. The thing below the bayou is waking up. And the woman who has bled at the covenant-tree every winter for fifty years has decided this winter will be her last.

Hortense Vauclain has walked the boundary of forty Louisiana acres every Thursday for half a century. She has paid the blood tithe. She has maintained the binding that keeps something old and hungry contained beneath the dark water of the hollow — and she has done it alone, with shaking hands and aching knees and a body that is running out of what the land demands.

Four creatures do the work beside her. They are not human. They are not hers. They are bound to the land by a covenant older than the state of Louisiana, and they have been waiting for her to name a successor for longer than she wants to think about.

She hasn't. She won't.

There is a phone number in the kitchen drawer. A family member in Ohio who doesn't know the land exists, or what lives on it, or what it costs to keep. Hortense could call. She could explain. She could ask someone to take this on.

But explaining means describing the thing she felt move beneath the water last night. It means telling a stranger about the four, and the tithe, and the binding that is failing. It means admitting she is breaking a promise to the one who has patrolled the eastern boundary for eighty years — the one who trusted her when she said she'd set him free.

She can't make that call. So she is letting go — and the four who have held this land beside her don't know yet.

The Last Frost is the answer to a question Della Vauclain will spend all of Boundwater asking: what happened to the woman who came before me?

A gothic Southern novella. Vauclain Monsters series.