Chapter 1
Old gods don’t die.
They wait until a heart cracks open—and walk in.
Tonight, they choose Houston, Texas.
—
The thicket shouldn’t be here—just a seam between two chain-link fences where asphalt sours into dark. One step, and the city falls away.
I’m in a simple sundress. Modest. Calico. My mother would approve.
Bare feet. Cold ground. Air like a held breath.
“Wake up,” I tell myself. Nothing answers.
The first wrong thing is the smell.
Meat. Rot. Wet coin.
And underneath it, the overwhelming bite of lemongrass.
Then the sound—bones grinding, not footsteps. Something big, dragging a history behind it.
“Hello?” I whisper, because I could learn ancient Egyptian like it was child’s play but never managed an abundance of common sense.
It comes out of the dark wearing a dead bear the way kings wear trophies. Fur sloughing. Ribs lit with sick green light. A crown of bone spines breaking through its skull. Eyes like lanterns sunk too deep.
Set’s flaccid manhood.
I run.
Dress hiked. Breath razored. Heart in my mouth.
It follows—fast and lazy at the same time—like it knows I can’t leave its country. Trees blur. The ground tilts. My heel slips; pain lances my arch. I don’t stop.
The thing doesn’t roar. It drags a sound behind it, the groan of a cathedral door over stone. Chains forged in sin and hellfire. The air pressure shifts. The back of my neck turns ice.
“Help!” I choke, and hate myself for saying it.
The bear-god answers with a swipe that catches my shoulder. Cloth rips. Skin opens. Heat floods my side. The scream beads in my throat and won’t fall.
I hit my knees.
The light changes.
“Down,” a man’s voice says—law itself, iron and final.
CRACK. CRACK.
Not a boom—surgical sentences. The night flinches. The monster staggers, lantern eyes sloshing fire.
CRACK. CRACK.
It whips toward the sound. So do I.
He steps out of the dark like the darkness made him.
Long black duster that moves wrong—fabric learning to breathe. The hem seethes; not wind…something else. A black bandanna hides his mouth and jaw. Eyes green as cut glass burn beneath a black cowboy hat. Revolvers sit in his hands like they were born there.
The coat blinks. No, I blink. The coat doesn’t stop moving.
“Back,” he says, no louder.
The bear-god drops to all fours and charges.
He doesn’t snarl. Doesn’t shout. He simply angles his wrists.
CRACK. CRACK.
Shots clip the crown. Green light splashes. The coat’s shadows twitch—thin tendrils unwinding, tasting the air, then settling back as if pleased.
CRACK. CRACK.
The lantern eyes gutter. Bone knocks stone. The body folds.
Silence slams down. My blood roars in my ears.
He holsters both guns in one fluid motion, spinning them before they slide into their leather beds. The coat stills, remembering how to be a coat. He crosses to me with the calm of a storm that already chose its street.
Up close, danger is a scent—metal, rain, a little smoke.
My breath stutters for reasons that aren’t fear.
He looks at the blood on my shoulder, then at me. Green eyes steady, unblinking. Whatever he is, he’s already decided to be it to the end.
“You’re hurt,” he says.
“It’s nothing,” I lie, shaking.
He peels a strip of black cloth from his coat lining—as if the coat gives it to him—and binds my shoulder once, twice. Efficient. Not gentle. Not cruel. I grit my teeth and hold his stare like that might keep my face human.
“What are you?” I whisper.
“Yours,” something reckless in me says before sense can stop it.
He hears it anyway. He always hears the thing you don’t mean to say.
“Always,” he answers.
The coat shifts—too many folds, too many shadows. I swear I see a narrow lid open and close along the seam, like the trench is watching me back. A ripple runs through the hem and brushes my ankle like a cat.
I should run. I don’t move at all.
“Who are you?” My voice is barely a sound.
His eyes catch what little light there is and go brighter. “Find me,” he says. “And I will kill all the monsters of the night to keep you safe.”
The words land in me like a key turning.
Every smart part of me screams. The rest leans closer.
Something I don’t acknowledge in daylight uncoils inside my chest and speaks before I can stop it. How should I reward my brave gunslinger?
Heat climbs my throat. Maybe I said it aloud. Maybe I only thought it. My mouth is unreliable these days.
He gives me a slow, dangerous smirk under the bandanna. Only his eyes show—glowing, impossibly human, hungry. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to. The space between us obeys him first.
“You’ll think of something,” he says.
God help me: I already have.
“Your name,” I manage. “Tell me.”
Silence—not refusal, assessment.
The coat tightens at his shoulders, almost resentful. The tendrils slick back into seams. The eyes in the cloth—if they were eyes—close, patient.
“Endymion,” I say, because the name finds me. It tastes like rain on iron. Like a story I was born with.
He stills the way predators do when the right thing steps into their circle.
“Eve,” he returns, and my name isn’t a question in his mouth. It’s a vow.
I try to stand; my knees argue. He’s there before the argument finishes. Not a swoop. A decision. His hand under my elbow is heat and inevitability. The coat flares—shadows lifting, then laying down again like a living thing resettling around me.
“You shouldn’t be real,” I say.
He tilts his head. “Luckily for you, I live to break rules… even reality’s.”
My laugh cracks into a sob and never makes it out. He notices. Of course he does.
The thicket exhales. The city leaks back—a hiss of tires, a flicker of sodium light beyond chain link.
He shifts half a step closer, not touching, filling the space like a promise. “Find me,” he says again—quieter, crueler to the world and kinder to me. “I’ll do the rest.”
I nod like I have any control over the part of me that already said yes.
The coat brushes my calf—soft, deliberate. The hem leaves a smear of dark on my skin that my body mistakes for a blessing. His gaze drops to it, then returns to my eyes. Approval. Possession without ugliness. Like a brand the night recognizes.
“It’s not safe,” I say.
His look answers: That’s the point.
A distant siren rises. The thicket loosens its ribs.
He steps back into the dark the way some men step into cars—like the night is his vehicle and he knows every gear. The eyes in the coat open once along the hem—blink—close.
“Wait.”
He’s already gone.
—
I wake like I’ve been dropped.
Apartment dark. Fan ticking. Streetlight flickering through blinds. The taste of iron in my mouth. My shoulder throbs beneath clean skin. No rip. No blood. A strip of black cloth is tied there anyway.
I stare at it.
It wasn’t tied in this room.
“Endymion,” I breathe. The name warms the cloth. I don’t move for a long time.
3:07 AM on the lock screen. A text from Dr. Arthur Wimberly I won’t open yet. The city hums like a big animal sleeping with one eye open.
I should be terrified. I’m not.
I am awake in a way coffee can’t buy. A hot, steady line runs low in my belly—part fear, part want, part yes. Shame tries to rise and forgets how.
My mouth moves before my brain: “How should I reward my brave gunslinger?”
Silence. Then heat—my own—answering back. I press my hand to my mouth like I can catch it, but the words already happened and the room heard them and something old took note.
I look at the window. There’s a smear on my calf where the coat touched me. A thin dark crescent like a fingerprint made of shadow. I rub it. It refuses to fade.
Find me, he said.
“Where?” I whisper.
The AC kicks on. The blinds shiver. A train moans far off. Every answer sounds like distance.
I think about the monster’s eyes guttering out. The tendrils waking and smoothing back down. The way his promise felt like a blade he was glad to pick up.
I pull the blanket to my throat and stare at the ceiling crack until it becomes a map I can use.
“Okay,” I tell the dark. “I’ll find you.”
The old gods lean forward.
And somewhere, a man in a living coat smiles under a bandanna, green eyes bright, and chooses which monsters will die first.
The old gods don’t die. But new monsters are born every day. So which was he… God or Monster?
