Stolen by the Beast

Feverfew. That is what the doctor prescribed: boil the leaves, strain twice, administer in spoonfuls every four hours, and be precise, because Finn has the wasting sickness and precision is all anyone can offer him. So Maggie Callahan slips out of the cottage after dark, basket in hand, and kneels by the stone wall where her mother planted feverfew and lovage and rosemary in careful rows before the fever took her. A twig snaps. Then another, closer. The fog rolling off Harkness Cove stops drifting and starts curling inward, gathering into a column of white taller than a man - and something steps out of it. She runs. A hand closes on her arm with fingers too long and a grip too cold. When she bites down she tastes iron and salt, and the thing does not let go. Then her mother's silver locket, the one that has never opened for anyone, begins to glow against her collarbone, and the creature flinches. *"Margaret Callahan," he said again, and this time his voice was different. Rougher. Like a man who hadn't spoken in years. "You have your mother's blood."* *"Come quietly," he said, "or your brother dies."* He takes her to the abandoned Corbin house. He is Declan, the Hollow Man the old women whisper about, and what he wants from a healer's daughter is not a cure. *"I want to die," he said.* Morwen Corbin cursed him a hundred years ago for loving her daughter Eleanor, and bound him to the fog: a beast every night, a man every morning, remembering everything he did in the dark. The curse breaks only on a willing sacrifice of equal value to the original sin, and the old blood that could do it has almost run out. Maggie's mother was a Corbin. He gives her three days to find another way. Morwen, when Maggie finally reaches her, gives the same three days and says there is no other way and never was. That leaves Maggie with a dying brother, a curse she means to break instead of feed, a village doctor whose interest in the Hollow Man is not medical, and a beast who is still, for a few hours each morning, the man who watched Eleanor drown and could not move. A closed-door gothic romantasy of sea fog, herb-lore and an old debt, set in a fishing town where the blood moon is not a story.