Homebound

I opened Sable's room months ago.

That was not the same as freeing him.

Sable is in the kitchen now. In the chair. In the warmth at my back. In every wall of the house I inherited and chose and bled for. He was the first one I named, the first one who answered, the first one who taught me that a house can want.

But Sable is still the house.

The fires are out. Leste has come up from the water. Corvin has his resting state. Feu has daylight. For the first time since I came to Vauclain, every one of them has a door.

Now December is coming.

The frost is when the covenant takes its due: blood at the bark, years from the holder, the old terms paid in the old way. Every Vauclain woman before me paid to keep the cage standing.

I am done keeping cages.

There is one covenant left to read, one name still buried under the water, and one man in the walls who has spent nearly two hundred years being the place everyone else came home to.

This time, I am not paying the tithe to hold the house together.

I am paying it to bring him home.

Homebound is the sixth and final book in the Vauclain Monsters series: a gothic Southern why-choose monster romance about the winter tithe, the first covenant, and the man in the walls who has never been allowed to come home.