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Brightwater
Paperback
Series: Vauclain Monsters, Book 5
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 14 2026
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.47
Height: 0.58 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
I paid fifteen years of my life to save the man in the channel.
I would do it again. That isn't the problem.
The problem is what the trade gave back.
Feu has always been the light at the edge of the Hollow. The amber flicker at the tree line. The thing you are never supposed to follow. He spent seven months leading danger away from me before I knew enough to thank him for it, and I am still not comfortable with how much that matters.
Now he has hands.
Sometimes.
Thirty seconds at dusk. Forty-five by the end of the week. Long enough to touch me. Not long enough to stay.
The door opening for him is not like Leste's. Water has rules. The channel has weight. Feu is light, wanting shape, and the covenant has never been generous with wanting.
I have a tremor now. Gray at my temples. A house watching from the kitchen window. A rougarou at the fence. A man in the water who knows exactly what fifteen years cost. And a will-o'-wisp sitting beside me at the bench, becoming real by increments I do not have a budget for.
I'm still a science teacher from Ohio. I still write everything down.
But I am beginning to understand that some lights don't lure you into the dark.
Some lights have been keeping the dark from finding you.
Brightwater is a gothic Southern why-choose monster romance - Book 5 of the Vauclain Monsters series. Folk horror filtered through romance. A heroine rewriting the covenant from inside it. Monsters who are monstrous first.
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