Daughter of the Blood Moon

Three hours before dawn, Pearl Alden walks the southern shore of Ravenshale Island with a lantern in one hand and a canvas sack in the other, salvaging what she can from the wreck of the Morning Star before Victor Orr's men arrive with their carts and crowbars. The ship was carrying medical supplies. Her sister Ruth is at home with lunar fever in her bones, and Dr. Harlow has already handed Pearl a bottle of laudanum and a look that meant prepare yourself. What she finds in the rocks is a half-drowned man who says her name before he opens his eyes. She knows him. The last time Pearl saw Lucian Frost they were children in a sea cave under an eclipsed moon, and she was throwing rocks at the thing his father had become. She pulled him out of a crack in the wall, told him the Frost curse would pass when the shadow left the moon, and held his hand until the sun came up. He has come back to the island with a silver cane, a letter with her name on it, and questions about her mother. Catherine Alden went to the cliffs after dinner to check the tide charts and never came back. Her journals are in a trunk under the lighthouse roof: moonstone, lunar tides, a pact between two families, and a man who told her *The moon dreams through us.* The last thing she wrote to her daughter is a warning. *Do not trust the man with the silver cane.* Pearl reads by lantern light while Ruth's breathing thins in the next room. Irene Jewett, whose father owns the cannery, brings tea to the injured and leaves with a brass key that is not hers; what Irene wants is the Frost name and the Alden legacy, and she says so to Pearl's face. *You're a mapmaker's daughter with ink under your nails, and you have everything.* Victor Orr wants something older than money. He has been chasing a ghost for thirty years, and he will drug a sick girl and bind her to a chair in an icehouse cellar, behind a doorframe set with moonbane needles, to get to the end of it. The ritual that could break the curse is worked in the lighthouse beacon room, through the moonstone lens, and it asks for everything the wielder has. Pearl has read her mother's account of what moonstone magic costs. Victor is happy to say it out loud. *The girl becomes ordinary.* A historical paranormal romance of shifters, wardens, salvage and a wrecking coast, closed-door, ending with a woman who has to decide what she is willing to stop being.