Rowan Blackwood returns to Blackwater for her mother's funeral expecting grief.
What she finds instead is forgetting.
People lose memories in strange fragments throughout the isolated coastal town. Faces disappear from photographs overnight. Children wake unable to remember their own names. Beneath the cliffs, bells ring from somewhere deep below the sea, though no church in Blackwater has rung for decades.
And Rowan's dead mother may have spent her entire life trying to keep something beneath the water from waking.
As storms close around the town and drowned women begin appearing along the shoreline carrying silver lanterns through the mist, Rowan is pulled into the secrets of the Blackwater Coven - a hidden circle of women bound to an ancient pact built on sacrifice, grief, and memory itself.
But the sea is no longer sleeping quietly beneath Blackwater.
It remembers Rowan.
And somewhere beneath the tide, something has begun learning her name.
Perfect for readers of atmospheric gothic horror, slow-burn dark fantasy, and haunting coastal mysteries, The Ninth Name: Part One is the beginning of a chilling story about memory, inheritance, sacrifice, and the terrifying things love can awaken.