Novels by Chezzi Howald

The air the next morning didn’t smell like rain—it smelled like expectation. Ireland had moods, and this one was sharp enough to cut skin.Maeve was stringing herbs above the doorway when I came downstairs. “You didn’t sleep,” she said without looking.“I tried,” I said. “The house had opinions.”Niall poured me a mug of blood warmed with sea salt. “The house likes to test new tenants. If you passed, it’ll stop whispering.”I almost told him it ha

Sleep didn’t come easy. The sanctuary had too many kinds of quiet.When I gave up pretending, I followed the draft down the corridor until the floor dipped and the air changed. The stairwell hadn’t existed yesterday. That was the thing about this place—it liked to improvise.At the bottom, the light came from a single brass lamp. Shelves crowded the stone walls, loaded with jars, relics, and books that sighed when I passed. It smelled like clove smoke and old storms.Lucian was there, sleeves rolled to the elbow, sigils chalked down his arms. The lines pulsed faintly—wards or scars, hard to tell.“Can’t sleep?” he asked.“Sleep and I are in a trial separation,” I said.

The body arrived before dawn, dragged behind a horse through the rain.Brother Malachy and two novices laid it on the flagstones beneath the altar. The gargoyle’s eyes still glowed faintly, amber fire sinking back into stone. Its broken wing jutted at an impossible angle; sigils carved into its chest had blackened like burnt script.The church that wasn’t a church anymore smelled of salt, ash, and blood that wasn’t human.Father Aedan Crowe stood over the ruin in silence. His robes were simple—wool, unadorned—but the air bent around him like light refusing to touch shadow. His face was carved lean by time and conviction, a single line of scar cutting from temple to jaw.“Who?” he asked finally.

Matrix’s POVThe wardline pulsed behind me, low and steady, like a second heartbeat I didn’t want. I spat blood into the gorse and watched it bead bright in the rain before the mud swallowed it.Shoulder burned, thigh leaking, nose broken. Every breath whistled. Silver’s blade had kissed deep enough to hum. I’d bled across three continents for less cause, but she always made it personal.Wind from the Atlantic hit cold enough to sting. The hedges hissed and shifted, making corridors that didn’t exist a minute ago. Ireland—alive in the worst way. I pushed through until the ground dropped toward a ruin crouched above the bog: one tower, one roofline, everything else chewed to bone. Shelter.

The house had one good hour a night: just after dusk, just before the storm remembered our address.I came in dripping, fog on my shoulders like a second coat. Maeve had a pot warming by the peat fire—blood spiced with cloves because apparently that’s a religion here even if religion isn’t. Niall sat in the shadow of the window with a book he never turned the page on, listening for the sea like it might knock.“Bad night?” Maeve asked, handing me a mug.“Got chased,” I said. “Not wolf. Not human. Don’t worry—your cliffs still have one Silver and zero corpses.”“Praise be,” she said dryly, then softened. “Drink.”I did. Heat slid down and

Ireland smelled like rot and religion. The kind of place that buried its ghosts instead of burning them.Matrix stood at the edge of a broken dock, rain pouring sideways off the Atlantic. His boots were soaked, his jacket stuck to his back, and the salt wind clawed through every old scar he’d earned on the run from the Order.He’d thought he’d hate the silence. Turns out he hated the way it listened.A gull screamed overhead, but he barely noticed. His mind was fixed on the coast beyond the fog — the cliffs, the woods, the faint trace of her. Silver.Three months gone, and she still