- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
The Haunting Season has ended, but dark magic lurks in the shadows in this deadly sequel to The Witchery.
After defeating the Wolves, Jailah, Logan, Iris, and Thalia want nothing more than a summer of fun and relaxation. But there is no rest for the wicked, especially when Death comes for Iris. She is to become a Reaper, tasked with banishing souls who refuse to cross over. But Iris suspects there's something more ominous going on when Mathew's role as her tether grows sinister.
Logan and Thalia are ready to prove themselves as witches. Except Logan still hears the howling Wolves and realizes that the Haunting Season may have awakened more than just her magic. And while Thalia wants to spend her days cleansing the Swamp for good, she finds herself heading to a place she swore she'd never go again: home. Witches have started going missing near Annex, and Thalia is convinced that her father is behind the disappearances. With the help of Logan and Trent, Thalia returns to stop him.
Meanwhile, Jailah is focused on her internship with the Haelsford Witchery Council until she discovers a treacherous magic hidden beneath Mesmortes, and there are those who will go to great lengths to keep it buried. So, she turns to the only person who understands, even if it's the one witch who hates her the most.
Separated by distance, the coven is surrounded by magical and mundane threats that must be defeated before they lose their witchery--and each other--forever...
Release date: September 19, 2023
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Print pages: 359
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
![](/img/default_avatar.png)
Author updates
Shadow Coven
S. Isabelle
1
IRIS
May
As the young deathwitch stepped onto the dark sand, she took in a comforting scent. Fresh citrus fruits. Salty air. Long-spilled blood.
Home.
Sun Harbor sat on a little island in the Florida Keys. The land was covered in headstones, unmanaged and neglected, wrapped in cobwebs and cracks. It was a village whose only inhabitants lived underground. A bleedbay once, thriving on making shows of its tortured witches and their mundane collaborators, the very ones whose bodies now fed the earth. The early morning sun seeped through the heavy clouds, revealing bare trees and yellowed grass. Stony House waited in the distance, a once-glorious manor burdened by years of neglect, its dark paint and gray stone covered in vines. Smaller cottages surrounded it, all touched with the same decay. Like Haelsford, Sun Harbor had its own hex, but unlike the Swamp, the dark magic here felt like a hug to Iris Keaton-Foster.
“Miss?”
Iris, enchanted by the literal ghost town, had forgotten the boatman behind her.
“Thank you,” she said politely. “I’ll see you in a few days.”
While she took this trip yearly and should’ve long ago procured her own boat, or looked up a waterwitchery spell to make the lake solid enough to walk on, a sick little part of her relished the mundane’s expression as he looked upon a land he couldn’t truly see. He only saw a thick black fog and Iris’s back as she disappeared into it.
With every step Iris took toward the three-story home, the setting around it transformed. The grass twitched and straightened, growing a deep and vibrant green from dried husks. The garden bloomed, bearing roses, daisies, violets, fresh tomatoes, and a mango tree, its branches heavy with fruit. Looking at the house was like twisting a holographic card; one moment, it was as corroded as the rest of the island, and with a blink, it was restored to its old glory.
At the wrought iron gates, something dragged against Iris’s witchy senses. The house was already brimming with protection spells and death magic, but this sensation didn’t feel familiar to the necromancer who had served as architect for much of them. Not malicious, just … new.
The gates opened with a sharp creak. Witchy or not, only a Keaton or a Foster would be granted access, so Iris was doubly qualified. She entered Stony House and called out, “Honey, I’m Home!”
The door shut behind her. Iris took a deep, bracing breath as her magic did what it always did here. It shrank. Her witchery receded, leaving her feeling empty and spent, as if someone had dimmed the lights of her soul. Groggy, like waking up from a nap that was only meant to be a few minutes long but had stretched into hours. She was still a witch, and this price she paid wouldn’t change that, but when she crossed the threshold into her family home, she was essentially mundane.
Iris pushed back the thick red drapes and opened up all the windows. The morning light revealed an untouched living room, foyer, and kitchen. It had a bohemian feel, from the colorful rugs and comfy blue sofa to the modernist paintings of naked Black bodies on the wall. The walls themselves were painted dark orange, except for the kitchen, which was drenched in baby’s breath blue. Her parents’ old things were neatly arranged. Mortimer’s beloved record player rested atop a table alongside a stack of anatomy and biology textbooks bearing his in-line scrawls and sticky tabs. A case of his pristine surgical tools glimmered in the corner, but as impressive as they were, her father’s collection was not the one that drew the eye.
An entire wall showed off Sage Foster’s collection of necromantic texts. Before she died, she’d dedicated her life to recovering the books and artifacts that had been bought, stolen, and traded by mundanes. The sight always took Iris’s breath away. She touched the spine of a grimoire that her mother had been working on translating from its original Mandarin. Her fingers came away with dust on them. Out of habit, her hand twitched toward her wand. Clean It Up would do the trick, but she couldn’t use her witchery here. It was part of the bargain her mother made to keep Stony House standing—and safe.
An apparition of a woman flickered in the den, across the living room, and in the kitchen, all at once. Images of a man flashed in reflections, his skin dark, his coils thick and just barely gray. He smiled wide on the surface of a teapot, in the glass of a window, in the light bouncing off the mirror in the dining room. A gust of wind surrounded Iris, lifting her onto her feet and spinning her around. She giggled girlishly at the welcome.
Finally, Sage Foster settled at the top of the stairs. The woman was dressed in a deep purple cape with a large hood and long black gloves.
Iris swallowed thickly, blinking back fresh tears. “Hi, Mom.”
Her mother grinned wide. “If you knew how much I missed you, little death.”
Iris rubbed her eyes. “I missed you, too.”
Her mother smiled, then shouted, “Mortimer!”
The antique tuner on the lovely oak sideboard burst to life, filling the house with the sound of static, and then the classics—Motown, jazz, old-school hip-hop—as if someone
were flipping through stations. The voice, like an old-timey radio announcer, cut through the noise. It said, “Ain’t God good! My little heathen’s home!”
Iris felt a warm wind caress her cheek and flow through her fresh brown-and-blond braids. “Hey, Dad,” she whispered, voice cracking. It felt so damn good to be somewhere where she was unequivocally loved for being herself and especially for being a deathwitch.
Across from her, Sage’s apparition sat in the armchair with three quick violent flashes, as if she were being projected and the film kept getting stuck.
Dread bloomed in the pit of Iris’s stomach. “Are you okay?”
“No—” Sage laughed and flickered, her words cut off. “But you being here makes it better. It’s been harder and harder to take form without you, and even now …” She gestured vaguely with her gloved hands.
“Does it hurt?” An odd thing to ask an apparition, but Iris didn’t know how else to ask if her mother’s spirit was pained in some mortal way. Sage’s presence was abnormal by default, a consequence of skilled necromancy fed by Sage’s own death wish, Iris’s young magic, and a fraying thread between life and death. The fragility of it all was suddenly impossible for Iris to ignore.
Sage shook her head. “It’s more like exhaustion.” She waved the words away. “Now, get me up to date. Almost a senior, I’m so proud of you, Rissy!”
From the radio, her father blared Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration.”
Sage rolled her eyes lightheartedly. “How was your year?”
Iris managed a nervous smile. She pulled a small book from her knapsack and placed it on the coffee table. The Most Wicked Works of Olga Yara.
Her mother’s demeanor changed at the sight of it. Sage growled, inhuman and low. No one could mistake her for a mortal now, not with the inky-black aura spreading around her, or the way she slowly rose into the air, hovering above the seat. Iris felt her mother’s emotions—anger, concern, confusion—pressing against her skin like steam. “Tell me you did not cast from that book!”
A bead of sweat dripped down her back. “I guess I should start from the beginning.”
She told her mother of the last Haunting Season, how it began and how it ended. She spoke of her old friends Jailah and Thalia, and her new ones, Trent, Logan, and Beaumont, and the tethering that still perplexed her. And finally, she explained that against every rule of magic she knew, she’d resurrected the Wolf Boy and discovered the secrets of the Haunting Season. The Roddin Witch was Adelaide Strigwach, the architect of the curse, who had used Iris as a tool to bring back Theodore Bloom, the Wolf Boy.
When Iris was done, her mother’s calm presence returned. She pulled back her hood. “You’ve tethered a mundane boy.”
Iris wrinkled her brow. Of all she’d just said, that seemed like the wrong point to focus on. “Is that a thing? Tethering a mundane?”
A wisp of a man flashed in Iris’s peripheral vision. The television turned on to static. “Now just wait one damn minute. A boy? Did I hear that right?”
“Mortimer.”
The radio-announcer voice grew irritated. “Well, if Rissy’s got a boyfriend, I gotta shake his hand! Y’know, look that boy in the eye—”
“And how in the hell do
you plan on doing that?”
Groaning, Iris slunk down into the vintage couch. Spirit-parents could still be so embarrassing. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she muttered.
It’s worse than that. He’s my tether.
Before she could refute her father’s teasing further, Sage’s presence changed again. More than a flicker, it was as if Sage had been doused in a beam of red light, revealing a face writhing in pain.
Iris jumped to her feet. “Mom!”
From the stereo, a raspy voice growled her name. Iris turned, heart pounding. The dial spun back and forth, and her father’s voice returned with laborious breaths, as if he’d been running, or fighting.
However useless, Iris pulled out her wand. “Dad? What was that?”
“Iris, what is it?”
Iris jolted to her mother. The apparition was back to, well, whatever normal was here. She examined her mother’s face. “I just saw something. It was like you were screaming for help, or hurting somehow. And Dad’s voice wasn’t his own.”
Sage stacked her shaking hands on her heart. She said nothing, but her gaze was angled to the now-quiet radio. Iris may not have been able to hear them, but she knew when her parents were talking in secrets the way that any child could. “Tell me what’s going on!” Iris demanded, hating how petulant she sounded.
Sage wrung her hands. “Every year it gets harder. You know that, baby girl. We were never meant to be kept for this long. Just until you found your way with your magic. Until you knew enough about necromancy to put us to rest yourself.”
Iris’s heart dropped at her mother’s tight voice. She didn’t like where this was going.
“It’s time we think about saying goodbye.”
Not yet, Iris thought sadly.
Sage was the last deathwitch she knew. There was no necromancer on the Mesmortes staff. Her courses were essentially history and theory—learning about death magic, but never truly practicing, not the way her mom had once done and had taught her. Not the way the Roddin Witch had spoken of. A sticky anger bloomed in Iris’s chest, but it wasn’t enough to keep the sadness at bay. Even after the betrayal, the blood, the violence, Iris was left distraught at losing Roddin and the Emporium.
She had tried looking for necromancers like herself, who’d been contacted by Death, or saved from the afterlife the way that she was. Being a necromancer might’ve made her special in Haelsford, but deathwitches had existed since the beginning of time. She couldn’t have been the only witch Death had spoken to or had spared.
The internet could be a perilous place to research witchery that wasn’t the everyday things learned in a coven academy. First, there was the Witchery Web Safety Act, established after a rogue witch had posted his intentions to use magic to commit mass murder, a spell that not only promised death but also worked, unlike a lot of the dark magic drivel people posted for attention. Then there were the witch-obsessed hexeaters: mundanes who either pretended to be witchy or would pay good money to any witch who offered themselves up for dissection in misguided pursuits to become witches themselves.
Still, Iris had found a few interesting leads. There was a boy in Delhi who claimed he’d seen Death as well. Unlike Iris’s vision of a great grim reaper, he’d seen a man dressed in red who spoke to him after he was almost crushed by a vendor cart a few summers ago. The boy’s blog hadn’t been updated since, and his contact form gave Iris an error message. But looking at his past posts,
she could see that he was a true deathwitch. Between the silver pentagram on his wrist and the way he spoke of necromancy, his witchery didn’t ring false.
Another necromancer, a ten-year-old in Jacmel who received her blessing early, vlogged of a man in dark glasses and a crooked top hat, who had taken her hand in her dreams and told her that she was bound for a higher purpose. The words turned Iris’s spine into ice, and she knew for sure. Death approached necromancers around the world, appearing to them in different ways depending on their backgrounds or beliefs.
But this was a small comfort. With Adelaide either dead or disappeared and Sage passing on, who did Iris have to understand her death magic?
Her face warmed.
The closest living connection she had to her own necromancy was Mathew Beaumont. A mundane. For once, she found herself wishing that he wasn’t. She wished desperately that he was her true tether, the way Jailah and Vero once were. Two witches, their magic made to complement each other’s.
Iris had … other wishes about Beaumont. Ones that she locked up tight, would never wear on her face, would rather die than admit.
“Iris?” her mother prodded gently. “I don’t want to frighten you, but my magic’s running thin. You need to put us to rest before it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
“A soul who overstays its welcome is a nasty sight. If you put us to rest now, we get to say goodbye together. You’ll be eighteen in August. Still a child, yes, far from grown. But those are the terms. I don’t want you to come back here and find us … gone. Or worse.”
Sage’s words were soft, but her expression was hard with urgency. Iris hadn’t been in the Swamp with Trent when his mother appeared to him, but the way he spoke of the apparition worried her. Even if the Swamp’s mind-altering hex was a part of it, the thought of her parents corrupting into horrors chilled Iris through.
A gentle breeze of her father’s doing wrapped around her. Iris wanted to hold her parents, and to be held by them. “Before the end of summer. I’ll put you both to rest.”
***
Three days passed with the sweet laziness of early summer. Thalia had given Iris a handful of seeds to plant in the clearing behind the house, which quickly blossomed into fruits and veggies, their colors witchy vibrant. She’d packed snacks and frozen hot dogs, and made the Simmons family lemonade recipe that left her teeth sticky with sweetness. Iris spent the mornings curled up on the couch under the quilt, flicking through her mother’s collection of grimoires. The house was freezing at night, unlike every other house in the state, and while Iris could have lugged wood into the fireplace, she relished the cold. Knowing that it was a result of the ghosts, her spells, and Sage’s magic left Iris comforted by the chill.
On her last day in Sun Harbor, there was no goodbye hug. Only a stuttering of the radio as it cut off, a slight chill against her cheek and the feeling of holding back tears. It was the last time she’d be home like this. In August, she would finally put her parents to rest. After that, she’d come to Stony House and find it lifeless. She missed them already.
“You’ll be able to Call us like you Call any soul, baby,” said Sage gently.
A short necromantic Call here and there wasn’t the same, but Iris nodded, if only to reassure her mother.
When Iris stepped outside, her witchery burst into her chest like a kerosene-soaked match. She inhaled, relishing it, even if she didn’t feel quite whole yet.
This time, when she reached for her wand, the magic in her blood thrummed.
2
THALIA
As a small child, Thalia Blackwood had spent the majority of the year counting down to the summer months. Summer break was a respite from schoolyard bullies who hated her for nothing other than her tawny brown skin and the magic that had rooted in her veins. But before that—before the blessing, the bloodshed, and her escape—Thalia spent the sweltering days firmly in her mother’s orbit. The two tested new recipes for shortbread and lavender cakes because it was never too hot for Fiona Turner to quit baking. And when Pastor Abraham Turner came home after long days of preaching and pontificating, little Talullah would leap into her father’s arms, neither caring that the front of her shirt was covered in flour and icing.
How adorable, Thalia thought sardonically. Her stomach turned with anger and disgust. She didn’t recognize the little girl in those memories, and good riddance to her naivete.
Summer in Haelsford was a different beast. The air was as thick with humidity as it was with the chattering of overeager tourists, though the small witchtown attracted visitors year-round. Those who wanted to see the notorious hexed Swamp without the risk of being slaughtered by its hungry Wolves chose the summer months to do so, while others made a point to visit during the Haunting Season. Thalia wasn’t sure who annoyed her more: those who wanted to brag about seeing the Swamp with little danger to themselves, or those who foolishly snapped videos of themselves dancing over the edge of the protection spells during autumn.
From the porch of her cabin, Thalia watched the Segway tour roll up to the edge of corrupted earth, rotting vegetation, and an atmosphere that was ripe for mind games. She knew it all too well. She’d been taken into the Swamp just months ago and had seen it up close and way too personal. Maybe she should’ve been the one guiding the nosy tourists. Shit, she could do a whole haunted Haelsford tour, and maybe even get Iris to rouse up some ghosts to make it something really special.
As Thalia genuinely wondered how much money she could make doing just that, she touched her index finger to the little green sprout in her thumb. After protecting Mesmortes with her greenwitchery, she’d earned this sprout. It was proof of her growing magic, her connection to the earth. Thalia touched it and remembered who she was. A greenwitch. A powerful one. One who’d survived the Swamp.
The one who might finally cleanse it.
Thalia turned back into the cabin. She’d learned that watching the Segway tours at this point often led to curious looks leveled at her, and she hated feeling like a fixture of the land rather than a living, breathing being. Maverick trotted in after her, his claws clicking against the hardwood floors.
She gave him a stern look from behind her wide-rimmed frames. You ready to let me take care of those nails, or what?
With a whine, her scruffy dog scurried into his bed.
Thalia glanced at her phone. It was new, bigger than her last phone, and she was still getting used to the way everything on her home screen was arranged. It was a splurge, but as it turned out, there were plenty of people in Haelsford and beyond who thought she and her friends deserved a reward for their actions on Hell Night, as Iris called it. The GoFundMe was in Logan’s name at Thalia’s request; the last thing Thalia needed was for her image to be plastered online. Besides, a girl who looked like Logan Wyatt was bound to inspire more clicks and donations. And when bloggers and journalists and fame-hungry YouTubers came around to dig up information for exposés, Jailah took care of them with that southern sweetness, tucking her threats into cute little quips.
The phone buzzed. Thalia had six unread messages in the group chat with her girls called red coven, but she clicked the notification above it.
The message was a picture of a Black boy smiling wide. Trent Hogarth was in London and had found an absurdly overgrown bush. His fingers were stretched out toward it, and the text read:
on my Greenwich shittttt
Thalia laughed. After an anxious moment where she tried to determine the perfect response, she settled for an eye-roll emoji, and allowed herself to ask when do you get back again?
She swallowed. Watching those dots bounce and pause and bounce again gave her heart palpitations.
End of summer. I want a welcome back
party. gonna smoke you at beer pong.
Oh yeah, she replied as if she hadn’t known. As if she wasn’t mentally counting down the days.
This summer, she wanted to be normal, as she’d told Aunt Nonni on a tense phone call after the semester
ended. She didn’t want to be a witch with a bounty on her head, blood on her hands, a tangle of repressed Catholic guilt in her belly. She wanted an average teen summer, like in movies. She would do her RA job, go swimming, and chill with her friends. She wanted to be a girl who didn’t worry about money. A girl with a little crush.
Thalia hadn’t realized she was smiling until she saw the flash of her teeth in the dark screen of the phone. She almost didn’t recognize herself. Her brown curls had gotten bigger, longer, messier. Her cheekbones seemed a little more defined, and her smile—well, it appeared more often these days. Her time in the Swamp had changed her—for better, for worse—and Trent was the only other person who knew what it was like to have that cursed land sink itself so thoroughly into their consciousness. Even now, Thalia could still feel the damp soil under her nails from when Adelaide Strigwach’s Wolf had dragged her into the Swamp.
It was worse at night. Thalia had never been an easy sleeper—being wanted by a violent town of witch burners will do that to a girl—but she now relied on sleeping drafts to silence her mind. Her greenwitchery had always allowed her to feel the Swamp’s hexed presence, but it felt different lately. Unsettling still; a low hum against her witchy senses, droning on in the back of her mind. But rather than a fearsome thing to avoid, the presence now felt more like a beckoning. With her guard down at night, that hum often grew into a buzz, but she could ignore it if she tried.
She couldn’t ignore the sleepwalking.
It’d happened twice since the summer began. The first time was two days after the semester ended, and a normal day by all accounts. She’d taken a walk with Jailah after dinner, then the two went back to Jai’s and video-called Logan, Trent, and Mathew, the latter two joining even though the European time difference was killer. Thalia could’ve just stayed in her dorm room, but she always preferred the little cabin in the woods that had been passed down to a Mesmortes greenwitch for generations.
That night, she laid her head down on the pillow in the creaky old bed.
Just before dawn, Thalia woke up near the Swamp. She’d jolted upward, the shock more potent than her terror. She used to look at the Swamp like it was something to fear, but now? After she’d already been dragged into its depths by Adelaide Strigwach, a creator of its curse? How could it scare her now?
Then again, Thalia had never experienced such dark witchery. She wasn’t a sleepwalker before this. Her psyche had clearly been altered, whether she felt afraid of the Swamp or not. That was the rational explanation.
You’re okay, she told herself on the way back. Be gentle with yourself.
You are safe.
At the cabin, she’d found Maverick sleeping soundly, completely oblivious to Thalia’s absence. Her bed looked hardly ruffled, and her glasses were on, which meant that she’d woken up gently and gone out as if it were a normal morning stroll.
She was eager to call it a random occurrence until it happened again this week. This time, Thalia awoke in the Swamp, a few yards from the border. There was dirt under her nails like she’d crawled or tried to dig something up. Without the Wolves, the Swamp was mostly quiet, but she’d left quickly, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
![Shadow Coven](https://bingebooks.com/files/books/photo/650673331c6fe/thumb2_B0BNPJ1F6L.webp?ext=jpg)