The Orphans of Whimwick

 

Every child in Whimwick died young. The women who raised them never aged.

Three weeks after surviving Whimwick Halloween, Neris Vallowen is still carrying her dead sister's voice inside her. Then an impossible door opens in an abandoned storefront, and a barefoot girl steps through holding one of Neris's stolen childhood memories.

The child calls her mother.

Her arrival leads Neris and Toren Brask to Bellwether, Pennsylvania—a town rebuilt on the disappearances of adopted children and ruled by women whose photographs have not changed in generations. Beneath its streets, placement ledgers record lives as deposits, grief as currency, and thousands of stolen years waiting to be claimed.

As nine black circles begin to open, Neris must uncover what the mothers took from Ione, free the children trapped inside Whimwick's oldest system, and confront the ancient presence preparing to enter the world through their bodies.

But the First Mother has been waiting centuries for someone to remember her name.

The Orphans of Whimwick is Book Two of The Whimwick Harvest, a supernatural horror series about impossible stores, immortal witches, stolen memories, and the terrible machinery hidden beneath childhood wonder.