Saint Delilah

by Isabelle Spotts

Genres: Ghost; General Fiction; Horror; Thrillers; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

Delilah is dead. But her story is far from over. In this feminist supernatural suspense novel, she will find her peace—and give hell to the man who killed her.

Delilah’s death was not swift or painless. A ghost at nineteen, business entirely unfinished, her last breath was angry. Someone killed her, but she doesn’t know who.

Undead creatures stalk Delilah’s spirit, eager to feed on her soul until nothing is left but a frightening poltergeist. She can’t pass on until the violence of her death is balanced with a life for her life.

Her killer must be killed.

If anyone can find her murderer and keep the darkness at bay, it’s Magda, the owner of the strip club where Delilah danced—and a powerful spirit medium. And when a young man comes to town seeking Magda’s supernatural services, he can see Delilah. He can hear her, touch her, and make her feel alive again.

The three come together to search for Delilah’s murderer. As the creatures close in, Delilah’s soul weakens but her power as a poltergeist grows, allowing her to affect the living.

Delilah may be dead, but she won’t waste this second chance—she’ll take those who’ve harmed her down with her.

Release date: August 11, 2026

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

There's a Body in the Woods

DELILAH

There'd been no way of knowing how dark it would be, though I'd imagined the sleepless nights of eternity. Who hasn't?

But . . . heaven. Heaven is for good girls.

Heaven is for no one.

I did look for a light at the end, when the heat took hold. Blunt force, it's surprisingly warm. It'd been painful-the dying part. But it passed in the same way that my mother said all things did. A scraped knee, it'll pass; a sharp splinter, it'll pass; heartbreak, it'll pass. I heard her voice at the end, too. I imagined it, of course, because she wasn't there when it happened. She wasn't running through the woods as I was, her heart wasn't pounding hard against her chest as frantic and desperate as a knock at the door in the middle of the night, begging, Please, let me in, he's right behind me.

Whack.

It'll pass, darling. It'll pass.

I was missing my mother when I died, because I was alone-except for him. He was there. But now I don't remember him. I imagine he's not worth remembering-whoever it is that killed me-though I can recall many other men who've killed women. I can picture their faces moving across my television screen on the nightly news, their eyes black and far away, like they live forever in that place where the blood pooled at their feet. I can even remember their names, the way they're whispered with an air of celebrity. But I cannot remember the faces of the women they killed. I cannot remember their names.

Panic works through me as I look at the trees above, swaying tenderly in the morning wind, the world coming into view again, and I feel a tug somewhere in my chest.

I can't remember my name.

My light is a cool one. It did not welcome me to a gilded gate, or a city of clouds, or ancient angels with their arms held open-or guide me to the land of bodies that simply mean nothing. No, my light is a morning without sunrise.

I'm still in the woods-that, I know-but nothing is familiar. When I stand, I move away from my body in the ground, and there is a quiet coming-apart as I do. It's as gentle as the unfolding of a stick of strawberry gum from its wrapper, and I am not her anymore. I am not the girl lying in a shallow grave. I am not the girl covered in pine needles, whose color has changed, whose shoulders are misaligned, who's been . . . discarded. Among the dirt, I can see a speck of glitter on my cheek. It tries to catch the light but there is none.

What a metaphor.

And . . . I'm topless, which doesn't usually bother me, but now, now it's saying something, and I can almost hear it. It's as if the forest animals have gathered around in an ill-omened version of Snow White and they are not cartoon-eyed; they are not kind. They whisper, Well, wasn't she asking for it?

But who would ever ask for this?

As I walk through the tall trees, my memories seem to hang in the air, motes of my being, of all I ever was, and they fall around me like pine needles being shed from their branches. I'm grabbing handfuls but missing the important parts. I try to think of the day before-to capture a single memory. I close my eyes, and I'm there again, working my usual shift at the club. I hear the music swelling in the speakers and I see the stage; I see myself stomping down the long peninsula it creates between the round cocktail tables. My platform heels are a shade of opal, translucent, catching the eyes of everyone below, and they glow in the dark like crystal balls. I try to see my future within them, but I cannot see what is to come.

I am the girl with the short hair and the shorter skirt.

I am the girl who smiles when she dances.

Behind the stage there's a neon sign that reads Night Faces, and below the text there are three fluorescent women-silhouettes of their faceless profiles glowing in different colors, the light changing and dancing between them in a cast of pastel blue and soft lilac. Another sign hangs in the smoke of the bar, its bright magenta words shining in double exposure, flashing Girls, Girls, Girls. I remember thinking of the faceless neon women when I danced-my protectors. Phantom women. The kind of women who are untouchable.

I can see Magda working the bar, popping beer caps with the bottle opener she keeps at her hip like a gun in a holster. She smiles as I climb down from the stage, and she wipes the sweat from my forehead with the back of her hand, her bony knuckles sharp against my skin. My hand finds hers in the way it always does-with a quick squeeze of affection. She's not my mother, she's my boss, owner of the club, but I love her, and she is my family. I think of what she said before my first dance, with a gentle tug at my ear, a forceful whisper: If you give them everything, honey, they'll never have anything they can take from you. I realize now that I've kept those words closed away in my chest. They made me feel safe. They were a spell of protection.

But as I carry on through the woods in a daze of disbelief, moving farther from my body sunk in the earth, not safe, not protected, I feel for that spot in my chest where I put her words, and they're gone. There's a hole in their place, a raw and bleeding puncture. When I hold my hand below my sternum, I can almost feel the bloodletting, the river that left me. I know this wound is not what killed me. It's worse.

I hear the sounds of quick footsteps coming from deeper in the woods, and soon I spot a man and his dog between the trees. The man carries a rifle. The dog smells blood. I try again, quickly, to puzzle my last day into the warning it should have been. I look for things that are out of place, a clue that will release me from this unsavable state that I'm in, but everything is coming and going, my memories deteriorating as swiftly as my body on the forest floor.

I focus my thoughts to the day before. I'm standing behind the bar with Magda, and I hear the bell chime at the door as two men walk in. I recognize them from the factory where my parents work. They're both bearded, wear dirty jeans. Magda nods in their direction as they enter, and she grabs my arm.

"Take 'em back, would you, sweetie?"

The man in the woods is screaming, and I know that he's come upon my body. I know that he's afraid. So afraid.

I cover my ears, block out his howls.

I am walking toward the parlor, and I'm afraid, too. I hate what happens in that room.

"Right this way," I say as I lead them to the back of the stage and through the swaying silver curtain, a veil of shimmering stardust, and past the dressing rooms, where I smile at Michelle, another dancer, who's dry-shaving her legs, balancing on a stool in front of her vanity. I come upon a dark curtained door, quite the opposite from the other, a veil of dusk, and pull it back.

"Make yourselves comfortable," I say.

There is a cool and constant breeze that oozes from the room. It climbs up my body until the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.

This is it. This room. This is the warning-that I'll end up in the parlor.

The fucking parlor.

I know who the parlor is for.

Now I sit down on the hard ground. Now I listen to the screams of the man who will let the world know that I'm gone. I so badly want to tell him that he doesn't need to be afraid-his fear catching in the treetops, rustling the leaves above me and shaking through the forest. He has to know that there is no saving me, but doesn't he also know that what came for me will never come for him, that he doesn't need to run from it, that he's a man?

I feel a stream of liquid pour from my heart, but there is nothing there. I hold my chest, which isn't bleeding, as the man runs through the trees, crying. I hear something else, too, from somewhere behind me. A hissing noise, like a snake but different-deeper.

I know of the place of the dead. I know that I will remain nineteen forever, that I will be remembered as a dancer, and by some, a stripper, and by just a few, a daughter, a sister, a friend. The best of my life is over. I'm not sure that it ever truly began. I know that what I have to do now is find her-find Magda.

But the hissing . . . it's coming closer.

MAGDA

Two a.m. That's bar time. But Magda had worked until the night met the morning. She was tired when she blew out the candles, closed up her parlor, and locked the doors to her club.

Night Faces was a rural bar hidden down a long and winding stretch of a crumbling country road that had seen too many Wisconsin winters, that had compressed and expanded again and again to quell the tension of the ever-changing seasons. The bar sat just outside the all-but-forgotten town of West Salle. West Salle had once been called the Town of the Light, the site of an alleged religious miracle. But now it was just another small town with an unremarkable population sign, peppered with RVs and mobile homes, and a lumber mill and a pallet factory that employed the majority of its residents.

Outside, Magda walked through the gravel parking lot to the motel next door, which she owned alongside the club. She rented out cottages, too-entrepreneurial woman that she was. The cottages were behind the motel, situated in a large field that grew wild in the summer with milkweed, goldenrod, and white daisies. They looked out on a lush pine forest where the property ended. Each cottage had a small porch and a firepit. Magda waved to a man and woman, still awake, sitting next to a fire that was as tired as they were, crushed beer cans littering the ground around them.

"You get some sleep now, folks," she shouted as she made her way to the rectangular swimming pool that separated the motel from the cottages, checking the lock on the chain link fence that surrounded it. The color of the water stifled the once-was glamour of the motel pool-a cloudy green. There was a constant film of leafy scum that Magda couldn't skim from the top without its returning with a vengeance. She'd long since given up and put up a sign: Swim at Your Own Risk. Most guests covered the rusted pool chairs with beach towels and sunbathed instead, afraid of what lurked beneath the putrefied water. The kids in town even told stories about a creature and sometimes tried to hop the fence in the night to catch a glimpse of it. But it took only one stern look from Magda to scare them away. She knew that she was a myth in her own right.

Magda's empire was a strange attraction, but she offered survival to the rural folk of West Salle. She did so with thick, flaky pieces of cod fried in sizzling peanut oil, and the warmth of wheat-toned wood paneling along the walls of her bar, and her girls who spun on the stage like disco balls-throwing flashes of sparkling nipple to the crowd. There was loud music, and slot machines, and double pours of generic spirits strong enough to kill a cow . . . and, of course, there were other spirits, too.

Number 6 was Magda's favorite motel room, and what awaited her there tonight was heavenly. After a hard night of work, she did not long to return home to her lonely, whispering farmhouse; she longed for the bed in that room-and, most especially, the person who was in it. But as she walked to the door, peeking in through the curtains with luscious anticipation, she heard something awful. It was a noise that she could not mistake, one she hadn't heard in a very long time, and it came from the forest.

Magda ran from the motel to the edge of the tree line, an early-morning fog chasing her steps. Just beyond it, she knew that something moved about in the woods. The kids in town, they talked about a creature in her pool, but they knew nothing of monsters-not like she did. She closed her eyes and lifted her hands toward the forest, trying to see with her mind's eye what was there. But then she heard screams, not of a creature but a man. When she reflexively opened her eyes, she saw what she was looking for, what she was dreading-for only a moment, as it sidled between the trees. A ghastly thing not of this world, what she called a keeper. They took a different shape every time. There was only one now, but she knew there would soon be more.

There were always more.

She stepped closer, squinting into the forest, and right as she did, a man burst from the woods waving his hands in the air, calling out, "Help, help, somebody help! There's a body in the woods!"


The sky was only just waking, the sun hiding away behind heavy clouds not yet ready to greet the day, the day that would forever be the day that she died.

Magda knew the man who came from the woods, cheeks salted by tears, dog at his heels. His name was Henry. He was Magda's dear friend, and he'd hunted behind her bar for years. He knew the land better than anyone.

"Magda, there's . . . there's . . . a body . . . in the woods, not a mile in," he said as he searched her eyes for answers. His chin quivered with sorrow or fear, or both.

When Magda grabbed him by the shoulders, she was struck by the blood. There was so much that it turned her vision to crimson, and she could see nothing else, and so she quickly let go of him. She fished for a small silk handkerchief that she kept tucked in her dress, nestled between her breasts. She pulled it out and ran it through her hands over and over again, concentrating. Her eyes filled with liquid.