The Oracle of Seraph & Salt
He came to collect her. He didn't expect to be read.
Iris Vane knows every secret in Ashveil. From behind the bar of her little bookshop and wine bar, she reads the coastal town the way other people read the weather - who's lying, who's grieving, which of the old families is not, quite, human. She has spent forty-four years knowing everything and showing nothing, because the moment Ashveil understands what she truly is, she stops being a person and becomes a debt.
Then a man in a dark suit walks in out of the fog, orders a black coffee, and calls her by a name no living soul knows - and for the first time in her life, Iris looks at someone and reads nothing at all.
His name is Julian Thorne. He is older than the town, colder than the harbor, and courteous to the edge of sorrow, and he has come to collect a bargain her family made three hundred years ago - a bargain in which Iris herself is the price, due at the turning of the year.
He cannot lie to her. She cannot read him. And the only way either of them survives what's coming is to find the loophole hidden in a single ancient word - before the debt comes due, before a developer's road cuts the town's buried heart, and before the thing that owns Julian sends something far less patient to collect.
To save her town and herself, the woman who has spent her whole life watching from the shore will have to stop hiding, stand in the light, and choose.
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The Oracle of Seraph & Salt is a slow-burn, fade-to-black paranormal romance featuring a sharp, secret-keeping heroine in her forties, an ancient brooding immortal who cannot tell a lie, a fated bargain, and a small town with older things beneath it.
Book Two of the Sins & Shadows series. Standalone with HEA. No cliffhangers.
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