Showing results by author "Jess Rae" in All Categories

The sea remembers every secret—and it’s coming to collect. Seryth has weathered blood and shadow, betrayal and fire. But when the tides rise bearing whispers from a drowned kingdom, she’s forced to confront a truth older than the Hollow itself. The crown she thought she’d escaped now lies in the hands of an enemy who wears her face in the dark, and the ocean’s pull is more than a call—it’s a demand. Allies fracture. Loyalties rot. And somewhere in the depths, an ancient power stirs, promising salvation or ruin.

An atmospheric Southern Gothic romance of curses, memory, and the kind of love that survives the fire. In the shadows of 1800s Tennessee, where the soil clings to secrets and the trees grow twisted with time, nineteen-year-old Danielle Whitlock returns to her family’s crumbling estate to confront a legacy soaked in sorrow. The spiral—a haunting symbol etched into stone, mind, and blood—has followed the women of her line for generations. But Danielle is not like the others. She hears the voices. She dreams in ash.

When artist Mara Ellison inherits a flood-bitten Victorian on the edge of a Southern river, she finds the house already knows her name—and expects her to learn its rules. With a townsman eyeing her land, a ledger that writes back, and a quietly relentless carpenter who refuses to turn bravery into theater, Mara must choose: perform a haunting, or practice a home. Blackbird House is a modern gothic about thresholds and plain miracles: a door that cools under a thankful hand, a river that insists on its sentence, and the hard, ordinary courage of staying.

When nineteen-year-old Elara returns to her grandmother’s ridge house in the Appalachian hollow, she finds more than heirlooms waiting. A sycamore tree as pale as bone stands watch, a cracked pocket watch stops at 10:17 each day, and a ledger filled with rules whispers what it costs to live here: Kin before names. Bread before bargains. Never pay in leaving. The hollow keeps storms, secrets, and sometimes people. If you feed it heels of bread and speak plain, it will mind its side of the fence.

In the aftermath of the Sovereign’s fall, Seryth wears the Hollow’s crown—a living relic of root and light that ties her to the land’s oldest power. But the ember that nearly consumed the realm still breathes deep beneath the roots, and its hunger has only grown. When the pale tree at the basin begins to burn from within, Seryth is drawn into a final confrontation with a force that cannot be killed, only contained. To seal the ember, she must stand against the Heartflame—an ancient, burning will given form—and risk binding it through herself.

In a world held together by a fragile lattice of ancient magic, darkness stirs beneath the surface—an unstoppable tide led by the Hollow King, a merciless force bent on unraveling all that binds the realm. Seryth, the last Binder, wields a glowing shard that holds the key to preserving the lattice and the world itself. Torn between the weight of her destiny and the sacrifices it demands, she must rally fractured allies, bind ancient powers, and stand against a rising storm of shadow and fire.

The forest crowned her. The thorns obey her. But power never comes without sacrifice. Seryth has survived the Hollow—but not unscathed. No longer the voiceless girl feared and forgotten, she now wears the thorns of a sovereign bound to a land that hungers for blood and memory. Magic seeps through her veins like sap, ancient and wild, reshaping not just her fate but the balance of power across a crumbling kingdom. But claiming a crown is not the same as keeping it. Old enemies stir beneath sacred roots. The Order that once hunted her now seeks to control her.

When Celia Vale inherits the crumbling estate of Graysmire, she expects loneliness and ruin. What she finds instead is a house that breathes in silence, watches through its walls, and whispers with the voices of the dead. Drawn into the manor’s decayed beauty and haunted halls, Celia uncovers the truth of its hunger: a curse bound by iron, bees, and the true name of something older than the land itself. Beside her stands Ambrose Vale—brooding, grief-marked, and tied to Graysmire as much by loss as by blood. Together, they must survive a house that devours without mercy…

The hive is not dead. Though Celia and Ambrose sever its first heart, the silence spreads deeper, twisting roots into the soil of the village itself. As suspicion turns the townsfolk into enemies, the pair must descend into tunnels no one dared enter, where skulls whisper and memories bleed. To destroy the hive, Celia must sacrifice more than her life—she must sever her dearest memories. But in Graysmire, love and grief are bound, and what is cut away can never be reclaimed.

What grows in the silence after power falls? Seryth was never meant to carry the Hollow’s voice. Raised by the Rite to obey, not question, she only knew two things: keep her head down—and survive. But when an ancient force stirs beneath the roots of a dying world, Seryth becomes the unlikeliest seed of rebellion: not with fire, but with breath. Not with blades, but with memory. Haunted by forgotten rites and hunted by the very order that once shaped her, Seryth’s path leads deep into the moss-veined catacombs of Lirien’s Reach.

When Jerica Whitthorne returns to Briar’s Hollow to claim her late grandmother’s house, she expects peeling paint and bad memories—not a blood-deep curse that wakes the moment she steps onto the porch. The farmhouse she inherits isn’t just haunted; it’s alive, breathing with the remnants of a deal struck generations ago—a deal sealed in blood, fire, and whispers from the dark. Jerica has always been different.