The Vein's Shadow

Some houses don't just haunt you. They feed.

Michael Denny has spent forty-five years perfecting the art of disappearing. A wandering handyman with a gift he keeps turned down-an empathic radio that reads the emotional truth beneath every surface-he's learned that feeling things too deeply gets you killed. So he moves. He stays invisible. He leaves places better than he found them and lets places let him go.

Then a Craigslist ad hooks something beneath the static.

The house in the Highland foothills looks like a normal Spanish colonial. Helena Thorens looks like a warm, capable woman who needs some water damage repaired. The family she's assembled-Jake with his basketball and his empty eyes, Cupcake with her perpetual smile, Elias with his careful footsteps, ancient Mother Ruth hollowed to the last thread-looks like people doing their best.

Denny's radio says otherwise.

Something ancient lives in this house. Something that has been wearing human faces for longer than recorded history, feeding on the emotions that make people themselves-their grief, their hunger, their capacity for joy-until nothing remains but a shell performing the memory of a person. It has called Denny here deliberately. It knows his frequency. It knows that a man exhausted enough by running might finally, voluntarily, stop.

And it might be right.

The Vein's Shadow is a slow-burn supernatural horror novel set in California's Inland Empire-a story about empathic gifts, predatory intimacy, and what it costs to stop vanishing long enough to fight. For readers of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, and Alma Katsu's The Hunger.

Book One of the Shadow of the Vein series.