Salt and Shadow

By William Craig Parkhurst

Never Love The Living

He had been dead for a hundred and twenty-nine years. She was eighteen. It should have ended there. Elizabeth Vance is poor, sharp-tongued, and the prettiest girl in Kittiwake Cove, Alaska - two hundred and eleven people at the bottom of a bowl of mountains, where the November sun visits for five and a half hours a day. Sebastian Aldercott is the mayor's son. He is beautiful in a way that stops conversation. He does not blink at regular intervals, his skin is golden in a town that never sees the sun - and when four hundred pounds of falling steel comes down on Elizabeth in an abandoned cannery, he crosses four hundred feet of gravel in a second and a half and catches it with his bare hands. His family drinks the blood of elk. They have not touched a human being since 1848. And there is one rule his mother will not bend: they do not fall in love with the living. They break it anyway. What follows is a diagnosis at twenty, thirty-five nights in a hospital room in Anchorage, and a decision made at three in the morning that cannot be unmade - and then eleven years of the most ordinary happiness either of them will ever have. Because Elizabeth does not die. That is the whole of the problem. She will bury her father. She will bury every person she has ever loved, one at a time, forever. And when the hunters who have tracked Sebastian's family for a hundred and ninety-one years finally come up the hill, she will find out what she is actually capable of - and so will everyone else. Four thousand miles and thirty-one years later, in a hardware store parking lot in Vermont, somebody is waiting to find out whether she can still be taught to want anything at all.

A novel of love, blood, and the long arithmetic of outliving everyone - for readers who like their vampires quiet, their romance earned, and their endings paid for in full.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HDN6VNW1
• ISBN13: 9798191844312
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 217 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"