Nightshade

The book opens with a memory of falling—screaming into an emptiness that swallows sound, chest collapsing against impossible wind.

The book opens with a memory of falling—screaming into an emptiness that swallows sound, chest collapsing against impossible wind. Clouds slip away like vapor overhead. Whispers accompany the descent: the sun will turn to darkness, the moon to blood. Do not be afraid. With graceless impact, the narrator is reborn into the putrid depths of darkness. This fragment—suspended between death and creation—sets the tone for a story spanning centuries and parallel planes of existence, where falling and rising are not opposites but the same motion viewed from different ends of time.

A homicide detective's murder case matches Farryn's hidden birthmark

Farryn Ravenshaw, a Chicago symbology lecturer, is packing up her office when Detective Hines arrives with forensic photos of a prostitute named Alicia Maxson—face torn away, fingers severed—found in a locked motel room beside a stone carved with an aberrant cross. Farryn's father, a Yale professor who vanished years ago, had spent his career studying this exact symbol, attributing it to an ancient cult called the Pentacrux. What Hines doesn't know: Farryn carries a strikingly similar mark as a birthmark on her arm. At Aunt Nelle's old Victorian, she cracks open her father's sealed journals and discovers obsessive writings about Nightshade—a shadow realm he believed her dead mother still inhabited. His final entry reads with urgency: for Farryn's sake, he must cross over and find a man named Van Croix.

Centuries earlier, a girl watches the stake consume her mother

In Praecepsia, an ancient city ruled by militant clergy called the Pentacrux, a young girl named Lustina is dragged before an execution platform. Bishop Venable lights the kindling beneath her mother, accused of witchcraft. The woman screams her daughter's name toward the sky, promising they will meet again in another life. When the screams die to crackling, the bishop presses a white-hot iron bearing the Pentacrux cross into Lustina's arm. She is absorbed into the monastery—scrubbed raw, shorn, dressed in coarse white fabric. Two young nuns, Aurelia and Maria, become her only friends. The bishop warns that Lustina carries her mother's evil and will burn just the same unless he exorcises it. The girl's defiance only hardens with every punishment.

A cruel young baron pins a defiant girl and something breaks inside him On visits to the Van Croix estate, where Bishop Venable tends to the ailing Lady Praecepsia, Lustina meets the baron's teenage son Jericho—ice-eyed, sharp-tongued, openly contemptuous. When she finds an injured bird in the woods and refuses to surrender it, he tackles her. Pinned beneath him, she digs her nails into his scalp. He bites back a smile—and…