Someone put a cup of coffee in front of him, on top of a report about a broken taillight, and he looked up to find his partner, Wade, watching him, concern on his face. How sometimes it chanted in a way that sounded like magic to him, and he felt things in his body shifting unnaturally. How sometimes it drowned out actual conversations he was trying to have. He had only told Devon, Jesse, and Isla about the whispering, but even to them, he’d downplayed how bad it was. Every time he had a chance, the voice would start again, like a monologuing movie villain. With his partner on medical leave for more than half of December, he’d fallen so far behind on everything he wasn’t sure it was possible to catch up. He was sitting at his desk, trying to catch up with the massive backlog of paperwork he’d accumulated over the previous month. When it whispered to him at the station, it was all he could do to refrain from banging his head against the nearest filing cabinet. The damned thing just kept rambling, like it didn’t understand him any better than he understood it. “Shut up,” he mumbled to it, as though that ever had any effect. They didn’t know how many people Hector MacKenzie had killed in his desperation, but it was at least two, with another planned.Īnd Fletcher had killed a man over it too, which was how he’d ended up in the position of being driven crazy by a dead witch whispering Gothic straight into his brain. To see that, a person only had to look at what had happened with the book in the last twenty-five years. Fletcher was hard pressed to see the difference. Tristan Hunter had assured him that the book hadn’t been evil, just the grimoire of a power-hungry witch who had died hundreds of years ago. He hadn’t learned Gothic, and he wasn’t going to, especially not in order to understand the things whispered in his brain by an evil, magic book. Out loud, he tried to talk about it as little as possible.

But Fletcher didn’t have another word for it than “book,” so that was what he was calling it to himself. It wasn’t exactly a book anymore, since its pages and binding had been consumed in the fire and the only remnant of it was in his head. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.Ĭontent Warning: this book is intended for adult audiences only, and contains violence, swearing, and graphic sex scenes.Ĭover art © 2018 by Madeline Farlow at Įditing by Madeline Farlow at įor my husband, the first person I ever trusted who didn’t let me down.

Blackbird in the Reeds by Sam Burns