Thrilling crossover YA Horror perfect for fans of Krystal Sutherland and Tiffany Jackson, where the captain of a high school cheer team is caught in a bitter rivalry and turns to an ancient, supernatural creature for help, not knowing she’s just made a deal with a devil and could lose everything that matters, including her life.
Maris Larsen is the captain of the West Eaton High cheer team. She’s Coach’s favorite and the team worships her. Being on the team makes her feel special—powerful. When she’s leading the girls on the mat, Maris doesn’t have to think about her dead-end life in a dead-end town. She can forget about her depressed mother and absent father and the fact that her girlfriend doesn’t really love her. But when newcomer and Coach’s new golden girl, Genevieve Ray, joins the team, the only thing going right in Maris’s life is suddenly in jeopardy. A bitter rivalry develops between the two, but Maris is determined to take Genevieve down. The knife she needs to wield comes to Maris in her dreams.
While sleepwalking, Maris is visited by a monstrous, decaying beast in the shape of an enormous deer. Doe is an ancient, tired creature who has been wandering, trapped in her current form for decades. She cannot die, but she cannot go on living as she has. Only a girl related by blood to those who bound her in this form can free her, but those girls she loved died years ago—murdered in a fire.
But Maris is somehow linked to Doe’s beloved girls—linked by blood—and so she has the power to free Doe, to unleash her immense power. In Maris’s dreams, she and Doe form a bond, but Maris doesn’t know the creature from her dreams is real. Maris doesn’t understand the danger she’s in. She only knows Doe has promised her a way to win her battle with Genevieve. But for Maris to win, someone has to die, and the only real winner in the end will be Doe.
Release date:
June 23, 2026
Publisher:
Nancy Paulsen Books
Print pages:
368
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We love the sound of cheer. Palms slapping thighs, bodies hitting the mat, bones creaking snapping clicking. We will be old before our time, maybe, but that is the future, a time we don’t worry about. Not when we have circuits to run today and pyramids to perfect tomorrow and choreo to memorize yesterday. Drill it drill it drill it Coach yells. She’s not afraid to cut girls. No weakness, she tells us in her office after practices, before games. No weakness. Physically. Mentally? We’re hanging on for dear fucking life, most of us girls are hanging on by our acrylics. Coach knows. That’s why she gives us what we need. Rules and rhythms, running laps until we sweat, launching back somersaults straight from standing, twisting a full three-sixty as we soar through the air, repeating and repeating until we can’t breathe. We are not those shiny girls from TV we have no trophies no medals no rings we don’t compete. Don’t have the funds. Don’t have a school that cares, respects us. We’re here because the pressure does something to our nerves something painful and warm. We’re here because what better way to hurt yourself than in the pursuit of perfection?
After practice, sweaty, worn thin, we run more. Out of the locker room and to the arms of people who will pretend they love us for long enough. Home to whoever’s there, to the parking lot behind the drive-thru, back seat, bedroom floor with your best friend, the one who slept with your ex and lied but you forgave her because what does it matter when none of you matter?
2 MARIS
Nell’s waiting on the hood of Maris’s car. Waiting for Maris after practice is the kind of thing girlfriends do but they are not that, won’t ever be, because Nell is Going Places and Maris is going to die in this town. “Hey,” Nell calls out to Maris in that long, languorous way she has, like she’s three tequilas deep on a hundred-degree day, but that’s just Nell. Nell, olive skin, sleek dark hair, feline eyes always watching. Nell in short skirt, bare legs, no goose bumps even though it’s October and already cold enough to freeze. “There’s some trash on my car,” Maris calls back, and Nell laughs her dirty smoker laugh although she’s never touched a cig. Maris walks over, gym bag smacking her splits-sore hip, waits for Nell to slide down but she doesn’t. “What took you so long?” Nell says. “Everyone else left ages ago.” What took so long? Maris replays Coach’s voice snaking into the locker room:“Larsen, my office.”
Picking at her already bloody cuticles as she sat across from Coach with her perfect pink manicure and listened to her say “These goddamn grades, Maris. How many times do I have to say it? Do you even want to make it to senior year? Graduate?” Of course I do. I want to graduate. I want to get a job and an apartment and live on my own so the only shit I have to deal with is mine. She looks at apartments when she is bored in class or in the middle of the night sleepless and fantasizing. Has saved a list of places with high ceilings and beautiful golden light and shiny wooden floors arranged in pristine patterns. Manhattan, mostly, but she doesn’t want to limit herself too much. So lately she has widened the search: Paris Rome Barcelona. She could get a job one with a fancy title and a company credit card and she could live in her pretty apartment with the golden light and a doorman who tipped his hat to her every single day. Maybe she could. Maybe some version of her could. Out loud she says, “I’ll try harder,” because Coach looks disappointed and Maris hates letting her down. Coach is not warm or sweet or any of those things, but she is the only person in Maris’s life who cares about her getting out of West Eaton High. Closer to a mother than her actual mom.
Coach leans back in her chair and stares at Maris. Her eyes are dark, like her long hair, stark against her pale white skin not a hint of old teenage acne scarring in sight. “You know, I gave you captain because you worked your ass off for it. You’re only a junior. It should have been Kate or Claire, really.” She shrugs. “It was going to be Kate or Claire but then you showed me how much you wanted it. You showed me how much you cared. You showed me how much you could focus. All you have to do is take that focus out of the gym and into the classroom.” Coach raises an eyebrow. “It shouldn’t be this hard.” Maris stands, shoving the chair she was sitting in away, legs scraping loudly. “I got it,” she says, a heartbeat away from a snarl but she would never snarl at Coach unless she wanted to spend all of next practice running sprints by herself. “I hear you.” Coach calls to her before she steps out of the door. “It wasn’t just the focus,” Coach says. “You’re a leader. The team—they never looked at Kate or Claire the way they look at you. So lead them, Maris. Be better. Or do you want them to follow in your footsteps so you can all fail out together?”
“Captain duties” is what Maris tells Nell now, and she knows Nell will believe it because she doesn’t care enough to question it. “Come,” Nell beckons, and Maris does she always does. Nell kisses Maris, warm mouth, and Maris wishes like she does too often that Nell could be a piece of shit just like her. Then it wouldn’t feel so bad that Nell refuses to love her back. Won’t let Maris drag her down. “You need a ride?” Maris asks, and Nell shakes her head. “Tutoring,” she says. Yeah, Nell tutors, and Maris can’t get above a D in math. “You want to come?” Maris frowns at her. “What, come sit by you while you teach some kid geometry?” “Yeah,” Nell says, grinning. “Who knows, maybe you’d even learn something.” Maris stills, her face suddenly hot. Oh, so now Nell thinks she needs help? For a horrible second she imagines Nell in Coach’s office Coach shaking her head and Nell saying of course, I understand, I’ll try my best with her, but you know what she’s like. “I don’t need a tutor,” Maris says, her words clipped. “I need a—” She is about to say girlfriend remembers it is forbidden instead says, “A fucking break.” “Fine, don’t come!” Nell says, and then her hands are reaching for Maris, fingers nipping at Maris’s waist. “But I still have a little time first.” A little time is all it takes Maris in the passenger seat laid flat and Nell’s mouth working on her making her forget all about bad grades and tutors and words she can’t say. “Call me later,” Nell says when she’s done, a pleased smile on her beautiful face and she leaves Maris lying there still catching her breath. Nell is always the one who leaves.
3 TEAM
You can’t make money in town, not real money, not enough money for shitty cars and too-tight dresses and cigarettes and weed. So we go a couple towns over to their glass box mall. We put on nice-girl dresses, heels low enough to walk in, hair scraped back, tied up in silk ribbons. We sell perfume and lipstick and jewels, bags and espadrilles and tiny bikinis. Our customers tip us around Christmas and spring break, feel bad for us not flying to Mexico or Palm Springs or Miami. Our managers call us good girls, like our gloss, our appropriate necklines. It’s only after our shifts are done that we strip. Back to basics, back to our bones, hair undone and lips slicked red and feet in battered sneakers, cutoffs showing so much leg, bras visible through thin tank tops. Everybody thinks girls like us want to glow up, grow up. Why? We know who we are, what we’re made of. Don’t want anything different. We’re good at acting, but when we are in the gym, when we are on the sidelines, when our bodies are screaming that’s no act. That’s everything we are.
We speed. We go too fast because how else can you move, in a place like this, a world like this, where girls like us, if we stop and stay and stand still, get told we were asking for whatever shit happened to us. So we keep moving, always in the gym on the roads only stop when we are safe. In each other’s cars, beds, hearts. Tonight it’s quiet out, a Thursday, slow night in town, before the Friday release the Saturday flight. What Friday means to us: practice, short and intense, that will leave us crawling on the mats. Then home, to change tease our hair, tie it up in high high ponies finger-comb through curls paint our lips red, pink, coral, plum and slip into our uniforms, always a little too tight, a belt that says I’m alive. But tonight, we drive. October air crisp through open windows the road unspooling before us like it could go on forever like we could drive and drive music up and bodies humming the horizon always on its way never quite finding us. In reality it always ends and we leave each other on the doorsteps of apartment buildings, houses that lean, townhomes dead on the inside. We brush our teeth, wipe off our makeup, change our tampons, get ourselves off, text our exes and go to sleep. One more day. One more day. That’s it.
On the way home we see a dead deer on the side of the road. Swear to god those carcasses are permanent fixture here, decaying flesh left to spoil in the sun. This one’s missing its head.
4 DOE
The creature runs alongside keeping pace with the car the one with the girls inside a shadow matching turn for turn, mile for mile although it knows it shouldn’t push itself this way that its body is no longer built for such exertion. Once upon a time it was pure power. The familiar shape of a deer, but outstripping any other of its kind, grotesque and statuesque a beast that towered above its prey, that if seen could send humans fleeing in fear, strike terror into the marrow— Well. It could have, if it could have been seen by all humans but it could—can—only be seen by a select few. Those who have the same blood in their veins that was once used to bind the creature, bind its power. Without those binds it can only imagine the delicious screams it would coax from the humans. At its sheer size, mass, dark velvet flesh and crown of antlers looped with the silk of spiders home for the creatures that roam the deer’s flesh, slip in and out of pockets of rot. Bound, though, it remains in a space between worlds—roaming the earth, this earth, but invisible to all the humans it sees. Correction: not to all. There is one—one precious, so special, so adored. One who those girls in the car worship one who has that blood in her veins that connects her to the creature. A tie, delicate but tough diamond bright. One for whom the deer has big plans. But not now, not yet—
For now it just chases, invisible to the girls in the car waiting for the time to come waiting to take what it wants.
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