Leo Vance is broke, tired, and running out of excuses.
His design work has become a chain of bad clients, late invoices, dead inspiration, and compromises that smell too much like the life he never meant to build. Then an estate lawyer calls about his late great-uncle Alistair Finch and a storage unit that must not be divided, inspected, donated, or sold before Leo opens it himself.
Inside Unit 237 waits a locked trunk, a scarred ginger cat, Alistair's warnings, and a pair of beautiful cordovan boots that should not exist.
The moment Leo puts them on, everything changes. His creativity sharpens into something almost supernatural. His body begins to move with impossible grace. His senses open onto hidden claims, debts, weaknesses, and paths beneath the city ordinary people never see. But the boots are not a blessing. They are a contract built from a skinwalker's rite, twelve stolen animal spirits, and a Warden that has spent generations guiding desperate vessels toward the same final price.
The cost is a soul.
His, or someone else's.
As Leo follows Alistair's journal deeper into the truth, he discovers that the boots are only one instrument in a larger economy of cursed gifts. The Warden lies. The Collector hunts. The Maker waits. The eleven bound spirits still remember what was taken from them. And the city is full of people powerful enough to deserve punishment, which makes the boots' temptation almost unbearable.
When Leo uncovers the cruelty of Richard Thorne, a landlord and developer willing to ruin tenants for profit, the curse offers him the cleanest path: one violent act, one soul paid, one monster strengthened in the name of justice.
To survive, Leo must learn whether power can be redirected without becoming its servant, and whether refusing the obvious sin is enough when the boots have already started turning him into something the city will learn to fear.
The Skinwalker's Boots is a dark urban supernatural horror novel about cursed objects, animal spirits, creative desperation, debt, predatory power, and the nightmare of discovering that the gift that saved you was only teaching you how to pay.