For readers of Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks, this strange and sexy novel of queer love in a small town is an unsettling reminder that the horrors of modern life is a monster ready to possess us all.
In the valley at the intersection of three towering mountains sits Cadenze, an ugly, remote town with little to its name. It's filled with tourists in the summer and dead the rest of the year, when most of its residents surrender to a sleepier existence. Except, that is, for whatever is lurking in the caves. . .
Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, and for many generations, so was every member of her family. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother's heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party much like every other, Angelina runs into Patrick's ex, the sternly handsome Jagvi, who's back in town for a spell. Perhaps enticed by Jagvi’s arrival, an ancient evil lying dormant in those caves is awakened, and soon Angelina’s small, contained world begins to shatter.
As the monstrous force grows bolder, it infilitrates Angelina’s life. It talks with her dog’s mouth; it guzzles on her memories; it controls Angelina from the inside. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it — the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her?
Release date:
October 29, 2024
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
304
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Look for Angelina right in the middle, grinning and dissatisfied. Part of her wondering where her derelict older brother is, and what the guilty note in his voice meant when he told her he’d be late. Part of her longing to be back in Cadenze’s main square, where thirty minutes ago the last tourist bus of the summer had trundled in, bearing Angelina’s last chance to get laid for the year. And part of her cheerful right here at this family party, drinking wine from a mug because they’d long since run out of glasses, hazily conscious of disco music on the stereo and the sharp tang of woodsmoke in the air.
Her uncle Franco’s farm was not impressive in grandeur or beauty, but it was abundantly rugged, strewn with chicken wire and fig trees, and it smelled like home. It fit all the Siccos, just about: the older generation playing cards, aunts and uncles trading gossip, the cousins on parade with their pretty wives all dolled up for the occasion in lipstick and flowery dresses, the children yowling through the crowd and rolling in the vegetable garden smeared in mud and overripe tomatoes, the farmyard cats ganging up on Angelina’s dog. Their long shadows stretched out in the late summer dusk and the mountains crowded around them. In the center stood Angelina, in her own flowery dress and lipstick, her hair running riot and her mouth running more riot. To her right, her uncle Sam pinching her cheek. To her left, somebody’s shy girlfriend wondering where Angelina’s brother was. Before her, the ominous sight of her mother moving through the crowd, looking for her. Nothing behind her because everyone was always grabbing her elbow, turning her toward them, begging for her attention.
It wasn’t that Angelina didn’t want to be here; she wanted to be everywhere. It annoyed her to miss anything in Cadenze, the tiny ugly town that she privately believed belonged to her. She didn’t want to be only a queen among her family, celebrated and beloved, glittering at the heart of the night. She wanted omniscience. She wanted to be a god stretching out the fingers of her influence everywhere, all-seeing eyes peering into every cranny. At least she had envoys. And here came Gemma now.
Gemma was not a Sicco, but she was a born-and-bred Cadenze local with no outstanding family feuds, welcomed by Angelina’s clan as a favored albeit second-class citizen. She slyly elbowed Angelina’s mother out of the way—good woman—and launched herself at Angelina, kiss on each cheek, strong smell of neroli, pink lipstick cracked at the corners of her mouth.
“Well?” Angelina demanded.
“Oh my godddd, I’m not as good at spotting lesbians as you,” Gemma moaned. “Okay, let me think. There were two women with leather jackets. Three with short hair, but two of them were at least fifty. I dunno if that matters to you or not.” She leered at Angelina affectionately. “I think I saw one girl with a nose piercing? Or maybe it was her septum? Or?”
Shaky intel at best, but it wasn’t really Gemma’s fault. She made a valiant effort, scouting crowds for Angelina’s potential flings. Gemma simply did not have the discerning eye that Angelina required, and even when looking for leather jackets, short hair, facial jewelry, pins and badges, T-shirts flashing Ani DiFranco or Sleater-Kinney, loose jeans riding low and the like, she could not see beyond them. She could not spot an anxious spine nor a loping swagger; she would not catch a woman’s gaze and wait to see if that gaze was pleased to be caught. But she tried her best, and she’d more than earned the brimming cup of wine that Angelina handed her.
“It’s really good,” Gemma said, which meant she had a secret. Gemma with a secret was unbearable. She’d spend the next hour lingering joyfully on its juiciness, assuring Angelina that she would not believe what Gemma was about to tell her, before sharing some insight that inevitably fizzled upon its revelation. Gemma had divorced her husband young, and Angelina suspected that Gemma considered the divorce worth the heartache for the secret she possessed before the news leaked. It had been a brutal breakup that left her an outcast among their generation’s set of Cadenze married women. Misfortune begets misfortune, after all, and nobody wanted Gemma’s marital affliction to contaminate their own. Angelina was the only one among their peers who had no fear of Gemma’s bad luck with men rubbing off on her. As friends they had plenty in common: both twenty-five, unmarried, and defiantly happy that way, still loyal to their beloved shithole hometown, two fallen angels busy building an ugly paradise.
“Nini,” Angelina’s mother, Caro, said, finding her way through at last. Caro looked stressed, fine lines deepening around her mouth. Threads of silver glinted in her long blond hair, which she always wore down, tumbling girlishly over her shoulders. “Your grandmother wants to say hello.”
“Where is the old witch?” Angelina asked, and then, spotting her a few paces behind: “Nonna!”
She stooped to give her shriveled grandmother a kiss, ignoring Caro’s troubled sigh. Nonna always seemed on the verge of winking at her, eyes bright with secret affection, like they were two friends caught by accident on opposite enemy lines. Caro avoided her mother when she could, complaining of childhood mistreatment (“Nothing I did was good enough, I could never please them! You can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up with five brothers and not one is on your side!”), but the three women were usually dragged together for a photo at every family event.
As a rule, the Sicco family bore boys. In terms of blood relatives, Angelina had five great-uncles (four deceased), five uncles (one deceased), nineteen male cousins (two deceased), and a brother, Patrick. There was one exception in every generation. Angelina and her mother and her grandmother formed the lineage of Sicco women, a cluster of anomalies with a reputation for wildness. Sicco women made up their own minds and flouted convention, and when they married, which was not often, they did not take their husbands’ names. Angelina’s grandmother had been a partisan in the war, seducing Nazis and harboring fugitives. Her great-grandmother had been known for a protective streak and extremely good night vision; she had lived nocturnally, patrolling Cadenze’s farms, sometimes felling a wolf with a well-aimed stone to his forehead. Angelina’s mother had run away from Cadenze at seventeen, only to return pregnant, penniless, and heartbroken (more stupid than wild, her uncle Sam said, but that was Caro all over). Patrick’s father was a married man from San Michele who wanted nothing to do with them, and Caro spent nearly two years raising Pat alone in stricken obsession, writing letters that came back unopened, sequestering herself in a crumbling house, and (as Nonna told it) screaming down all attempts at help or advice, until she met Angelina’s father: an itinerant worker who nobody knew much about, except for the fact that, judging by Angelina, he was not white. He disappeared before anyone even knew that Caro was pregnant. Contrary to Patrick’s father, Caro was not lovesick over him, did not rue raising her next born alone. She was fond of telling Angelina, “You’re all mine, baby.” But Angelina’s skin said differently.
Long before Angelina had committed any real deviance, the Sicco family decided Angelina’s foreign appearance and mysterious father were proof enough of her own wild nature. Then she’d surprised them again when she was twenty-one, by coming out.
“Hair’s getting so long,” Angelina’s nonna remarked. “You look like a Spanish dancer.”
Angelina gave a lackluster clap of her hands above her head, and her nonna giggled. Despite Caro’s persistent suspicion that Nonna was trying to steal Angelina’s loyalty, the old woman was essentially harmless, even if she did have a collection of vintage rifles mounted to the wall above her bed. She clutched Angelina’s wrist with a wrinkled claw. “Going to stay the night, baby?”
“Nini has her own house, Mama,” Caro said.
Nonna shot her daughter an acidic look. “She knows she’s welcome here.”
“I’ll see how drunk I get,” Angelina said, appeasing them both.
“It’s a good party,” Gemma chimed in, doing her best to defuse the tension. “Your auntie’s doing tarot readings, did you see?”
“I already got mine,” Angelina said. “Knight of Pentacles. Same as always.”
Caro laughed. “Well, Jethro brought a girl who reads palms.”
Gemma nudged Angelina’s ribs. “Literally everyone’s trying to tell your future.”
“You’re looking at it,” Angelina said cheerfully. The party sprawled before them. Dusk now but light everywhere, the streaking sunset in fiery orange cream across the mountain-cut horizon, the candlelight flickering against her family’s gathered faces, the firepit spitting sparks, the porch lights swaying in their heady cloud of moths and mosquitoes.
“I’ve got a little something-something to add,” Gemma said, beaming. “Just a pinch of seasoning for the next few days, a morsel of news, if you will—”
“San Rocco save us,” Angelina’s nonna said. “The Valenti girl has a secret.”
Gemma looked abashed. Caro said, “Nini, where is your brother?”
“On his way.” Angelina had no idea whether this was true, but she moved instinctively to obscure Patrick from their mother’s appraisal, smiling wide when Caro turned a narrow-eyed look on her.
“When you see him, tell him I need to discuss something with him.”
Angelina doubted this. What Caro actually needed was to put her arm through her tall son’s and trot him around the yard to demonstrate to her brothers that she had a handsome and devoted young man at her beck and call. Angelina would protect Patrick from this indignity, if she could, but she still wished he would materialize. His absence tripped her up. There were plenty of people to talk to and a big pot of rabbit stew in the kitchen beside a stack of buttered white bread. There was her idiot dog, coming up to butt her mournful mongrel head against Angelina’s leg. Angelina didn’t need her big brother, but it was strange not to see him among the men, catching her eye as he howled along to the chorus of whatever seventies ballad their uncles had put on.
Gemma pulled her aside. “So you’re not gonna even try and guess?”
“What if I accidentally get it right,” Angelina said, “and ruin your whole night?”
“There’s no way you’ll get it.”
Angelina laughed, squinting out over the crowd. For one final moment, the Sicco family and the rich finale of a Cadenze summer evening belonged to her, her control and confidence uninterrupted. Then her brother appeared, long hair freshly washed and tied back, faded jeans and a Morbid Angel tour shirt, climbing up the hilly path to join them, and Angelina guessed Gemma’s secret. She knew it exactly, from the relaxed set of Patrick’s shoulders and his smile that revealed both anxiety and relief. He held himself like he knew exactly who he was, and who he was worried him a little. And he only looked like that around one person.
That person arrived behind him a split second later, cresting the hill to stand at Patrick’s side. Behind her shoulders, all the light in the evening stilled and then began to sink.
“Aw shoot, she blew my news,” Gemma said. “I didn’t think Patrick would bring her straight here. I saw her get off the bus just now, and she had a big fuckin’ bag and everything. It looks like she’s staying a while. Did you know Jagvi was coming to town?”
“Kind of,” Angelina said.
For a long time, Angelina had thought that Jagvi looked the way she did to deliberately fuck with Angelina, to be so obviously, openly handsome that Angelina would let her guard down. She watched Jagvi approach with the cool eyes of a prizefighter sizing up her opponent. Jagvi was shorter than Angelina, the ideal height to sink a fist into Angelina’s stomach. She had short, sleek black hair in jagged tendrils down her neck, practically a mullet, the latest in a series of dykey haircuts she’d paraded in front of Angelina over the years. Dark skin, high cheekbones, and a mouth that seemed to hold a neat hook of scorn in its corner. And those hands, hanging open at her sides, square fingers beckoning.
A quiet ripple of murmurs rolled through the party as people noticed her. Like most of Cadenze, Angelina’s family did not know what to do with Jagvi. They didn’t trust her still face or the wolfish grin she regularly wore, that shocking flash of her teeth. She surveyed the world from atop a high wall; or at least, she surveyed Cadenze that way. Heavy barricades kept her features smooth, her eyes half-lidded, her speech considered and condescending. She was like a pit of snakes concealed by a trapdoor, her smooth countenance a heavy wooden surface belying the venom hidden beneath. Every so often one of the vipers lunged up and sank its fangs into Angelina before Jagvi snapped it back, unmoved.
Patrick had been expecting Jagvi for weeks, and in his lengthy expectation, Angelina had found safety. It would be just like Jagvi to leave Patrick hanging. It would be just like her to say, I’ll be there soon, and then make him wait months, even years. In the decade since Jagvi and Patrick broke up and Jagvi left Cadenze, she had visited only a handful of times. Once to spend three nights ostensibly with her dad but actually on Patrick and Angelina’s couch, lounging around in her basketball shorts and baiting Angelina, so that everywhere she turned she found Jagvi’s faux polite face and another pointed question. One Christmas holiday that Angelina never allowed herself to think about. Another trip eight months later, when Jagvi and Patrick fought so badly—Patrick would never say over what—that Angelina had dared to hope their friendship was done for good. But a year after that, Jagvi had been back again, driving past Angelina drinking on the roof of Gemma’s house, making inscrutable eye contact.
She’d been here six months ago, too, but Angelina had not begrudged her that trip.
Now the guilt in Patrick’s voice earlier made sense. He’d attempted to smuggle Jagvi in as though she could join the party unnoticed, glancing toward Angelina, half warning and half appeal.
He probably expected a scene. He knew all about Angelina’s antipathy. No matter how she tried, Angelina had never been able to convince Patrick that it was his ex who caused trouble, that Jagvi was the chaos element in Angelina’s equilibrium, that maybe Angelina couldn’t keep her temper, but Jagvi couldn’t leave well enough alone, making a beeline for Angelina at every opportunity. Tonight was no exception.
“Hi, Angel,” Jagvi said.
“Don’t call me that,” Angelina said automatically. Jagvi was the only person who used that nickname. The first time, Angelina had been thirteen and drunk, sneaking back into the house. Big night, Angel? Jagvi had said, raising her eyebrows, and Angelina had been so intimidated and awed by her brother’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend that she hadn’t dared correct her. By the time she’d gathered the courage to protest, Jagvi was unswayable and Patrick thought it was sweet. It’s nice you guys have a thing, Patrick insisted. These days Jagvi called her Angel not with the indulgence of an upperclassman, but like a taunt, like she was savoring each uncomfortable syllable.
Jagvi grinned at her. Pointy canines. “How’ve you been?”
“I’m always the same. How about you?”
“You guys are so polite to each other,” Gemma said. “It freaks me out. You want some wine, Jagvi?”
Jagvi shook her head.
“Well, I need more,” Gemma said. “Back soon. Welcome home, I guess.”
Angelina watched displeasure track across Jagvi’s face, like it offended Jagvi’s sensibilities to be reminded that she was from here, and not just a reluctant visitor. “Don’t worry,” Angelina reassured her. “You won’t be here long.”
“Are you telling me not to worry or yourself?”
“You and I have always been very simpatico like that,” Angelina said. Jagvi laughed. That old teenage thrill ran down Angelina’s back; she was used to ignoring it by now. She didn’t want to impress Jagvi anymore, but sometimes her body forgot. “Did you come straight from work?”
Angelina flushed. “I guess the uniform would have been a bit bloody for the bus.”
“Too early for Halloween,” Jagvi agreed, with a straight face that gave no sense of how gory her day had been. Patrick’s accounts of Jagvi’s work as a paramedic swung between dragging crumpled bodies from wreckage and fixing old ladies cups of tea.
“Listen.” Angelina cleared her throat, discomfort prickling through every limb, but it had to be said: “I’m sorry about your dad.”
Jagvi looked interested, rocking forward on her toes toward Angelina. “Are you?”
“I know it must be…” Angelina hesitated; like most people in town, she had disliked Jagvi’s drunk of a father, though not nearly as much as Jagvi had hated him. Angelina had not gone to Riccardo’s funeral, back in the spring. Patrick had. He’d come home tired and sad and gone to bed without saying much. “Complicated.”
Jagvi nodded.
“You don’t wanna talk about it,” Angelina guessed.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Jagvi agreed. “Tell me something else. How’s work? Are you seeing anyone?”
“Uh, no,” Angelina said, and only after she’d answered did she wonder whether it was a strange thing for Jagvi to have asked.
Jagvi looked pleased, either by the confirmation that she’d done right to leave Cadenze and its utter dearth of queer prospects, or because she liked watching Angelina stumble. Angelina wasn’t sure when she and Jagvi had ended up alone in the middle of the yard. A neat force field of two or three feet had formed around them, another of Jagvi’s defenses. Angelina knew it was different in the city, had seen the way girls crowded close to Jagvi when she was in her element. But in Cadenze, Jagvi was the half-caste daughter of a grumpy old bastard, and people kept their distance.
The Sicco family tolerated Jagvi’s presence for Patrick’s sake, and without much grace. Angelina had once overheard her nonna praying to San Rocco that Patrick would finally give up on Jagvi. “He will do anything that girl asks,” she’d said, confiding in Cadenze’s patron saint like he was another old lady gathered around her kitchen table to play scopa. “It’s not healthy.” Jagvi’s hold over Patrick was a well-trodden family problem, somewhere on the scale of severity between Uncle Sam’s drinking and Caro’s melodrama.
Gemma returned with a bottle of red and Angelina’s cousin Jethro. Together they looked like the prototypical Cadenze couple: Gemma’s straggly waist-length blond hair and heart-shaped face (“I’m a three in the city,” she once told Angelina, “but that makes me a Cadenze eight”) and bulky Jethro’s big shoulders and small black eyes.
“Come on,” Jethro said. “Cave time. Oh, hi, Jagvi. Welcome back.” He made significant eye contact with Angelina over Jagvi’s shoulder.
“Thanks,” Jagvi said.
“Cave time!” Gemma pushed the wine into Angelina’s hands. “Pat’s here now, let’s go!”
“You guys still go down there?” Jagvi asked.
“Sure we do,” Gemma said. “Who doesn’t love a big ugly haunted cave? It’s the coolest hangout in Cadenze.”
Angelina leveled a glare at her, and Gemma added, “Sorry, Nini.”
Her shallow penitence made Jagvi grin. Jagvi had told Angelina a few years ago that she shouldn’t take every criticism of Cadenze as a personal insult. It was at the summer festival, late afternoon, and Angelina had been too drunk for a good comeback. Not so drunk that she’d forgotten how it felt, wavering angrily in her bikini top and combat boots while Jagvi stood there looking smug and licking an ice cream cone, strawberry ripple dripping over her knuckles. When their eyes met now, Angelina knew Jagvi was remembering it, too.
“Still not over that?” Jagvi asked.
“Nope,” Angelina said. “And you still don’t belong here.”
“Yeah,” Jagvi agreed. She turned smiling as Angelina’s brother joined them. “But I like to try my luck. Keep you on your toes. Hey, Pat. You coming to the cave?”
Patrick punched Angelina’s shoulder in welcome as he joined them, but his gaze was set on Jagvi.
“If you are,” he said, which was the whole problem.
It was a lovely cave. Pitted walls of rock soared up to the high ceiling, and generations of Sicco graffiti scarred the lower stones. Higher up, out of reach, were paintings by artists unknown, of ancient eyes layered with smoke from centuries of campfires. The occasional glimpse of a sword, the line of a richly embroidered robe.
The cave lay under Franco’s corner of the mountains, just before the land tapered into a ravine. It was an unofficial haunt for the younger generations, their own den where they could moan about their elders and take whatever there was to be taken and drink the rest. One time Angelina and Jethro had spent a whole night out there, sharing stolen oxy and shaking with cold in the cave mouth with the stars wheeling before them. Another night Patrick drank too much and fell asleep while everyone else was still talking, then sleepwalked over to their campfire and pissed into it.
At the back of the cave lay a neat line of stones, barely calf high, placed more as a sign than any genuine barrier. Beyond them stretched the pit. It yawned down, deeper than anyone could tell. Little children were kept away, and adults stopped going once their eyesight began to fade. Sicco teenagers sometimes sat on the edge with their hearts catching in their throats. If they dangled their legs into the pit, there was an acknowledged touch, a curious stroke along the arch of the foot, and then a nudge like a knuckle pressing up against the sole, turning them back.
The air stayed fresh in the cave despite its small mouth, and even a little light seemed to fill it with warmth and honey. The Siccos were proud of it and so kept it to themselves, as they did with all their favorite things.
“My pa said he hid out here for a week,” one of the cousins insisted. “Said he barricaded the entry with rocks and left a little nook for his rifle’s muzzle.”
“How’d he eat, then, dummy?” Angelina said.
Several of the cousins gave her stubborn looks: Sicco family legends were not to be questioned. Despite a fair amount of petty theft and violence, it had been generations since the cops took much interest in the Siccos, so stories like their great-great-great-grandfather’s standoff in the cave over a crate of stolen morphine had taken on mythic dimensions. Nowadays there wasn’t even a police department in Cadenze. The boys in blue were outsourced from Myrna, showing up occasionally to bust meth houses or search for runaways. Like everyone in her town, Angelina distrusted them and steered clear of all federal uniforms. Even the fortnightly garbage collectors made her hackles rise.
“He’d left supplies up here,” tried Cousin Eugene, a teenager with yellow hair and a glass eye. “Just in case.”
“I heard he took some of the morphine,” another suggested. “Kept his appetite down.”
“And his shooting straight,” Patrick said, exchanging a grimace with Angelina. The two of them had been raised with Caro’s disdain for her forefathers’ exploits. The once-in-a-generation daughters were the significant members of the Sicco clan, Caro had explained, dropping a conciliatory kiss on Patrick’s head. The men were just there to support their lone and courageous women. Thanks, Ma, Patrick had said, his face tight like he knew it was true and felt all its weight. Angelina was fifteen then, and she and Patrick had been living on their own for two years.
“You two only like the really gruesome stories,” Jethro complained.
“Nothing too gruesome!” Angelina said. “But Beloved Great-Whatever-Paw-Paw just seems tame when you think about the Myrna kid killer. Or the thing in the pit.”
“That’s not about our pit,” Patrick said comfortably. “No matter how much you want it to be.”
“It could be our pit!”
“The thing in the pit is on the other side of town,” another cousin said. “Under the Pepper Grinder.”
“I heard it was back Maudoro way, not even in Cadenze.”
“Wait,” one of the girlfriends said, frowning. “What’s the thing in the pit?”
Whoops of delight through the cave, and a mild argument sprang up as to who should tell the story. Patrick won, eager to take the stage, perhaps because of Jagvi’s presence.
Patrick always looked best when he was performing. He dabbled as a front man for fledgling local rock bands, and he liked to lose himself in the set, his long, dark hair released from its customary ponytail and swarming around him while he snarled into a microphone. At home he was quieter, more thoughtful. He could be a stickler for rules and followed a constant duty to behave well, as if some absent authority were always hovering over his shoulder. He hated to be late for work and couldn’t leave a parking ticket unpaid for more than a day, his mouth thinning as he worried over some new favor their mother had asked of him.
But he changed when there was a crowd before him. Shoulders squared, expressive hands. His jaw sloped slightly toward the left, and paired with his deep-set eyes, it gave him a devil-may-care attitude that looked excellent on a band poster or amid the boys at happy hour or now, in the yellow lantern light of the cave, telling the story of the thing in the pit. He leaned forward with his beer held high.
“Okay, so,” he said, “once there was and once there wasn’t a monster that lived in the mountains. This monster wasn’t like the wolves, who ate flesh, or the bats, who drank blood. This monster came down into town once in a while to eat a whole life.”
A chorus of protest: already he wasn’t telling it right, he’d already missed—
“It’s my version!” Patrick maintained. “You can have your turn telling it later. So. The monster hounded the town. Fathers woke up with no sons where an heir used to be, just an empty bed and a wardrobe full of clothes with no memories of the person who wore them. Men appeared at their weddings only to find their girls didn’t exist, even though the church was filled with flowers and the priest was waiting to be paid. That’s the thing about this monster. It’s not hungry for your death, it’s hungry for your life.”
“No, no,” Eugene said, shaking his head. “See, this is why your version doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t eat your life. It eats your future.”
“Same difference,” Patrick said.
“Actually, it’s not,” said another cousin, Matthew, a community college teacher about a decade older than the rest of them, clearly only here for the weed. He took a lordly toke from the joint circling the crowd. “Your version ends with death, and death is fast. It’s just another moment in your life. The last moment, but still a moment, and often a short one. The legend says that’s not enough sustenance for the thing in the pit. It wants the future that could have been yours, and it eats every morsel.”
“Futures,” Eugene corrected. “Because you could do all kinds of things, you know, like maybe you ma. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
