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42 stories found · by Last update

Winter in the Blood

by Diana Summerhill

  • 24 Chapters
  • 191 Pages
  • 52,580 Words
  • 5 Views

Dr. Linnea Kjellberg expects frostbite, uncooperative terrain, and a terrified winter wolf when she is flown into an isolated research station in the far north. She does not expect the wolf to shift into a severely injured man, a werewolf, or the heavily armed unit that refuses to let her leave until the spring thaw.

Soren Valke, alpha of the Skardi werewolf pack, guards the only passable mountain route in the territory. Trapped inside his compound by an unseasonal blizzard, Linnea is forced to tend his wounds and navigate the lethal politics of a society she never knew existed—one that demands the death of any human who learns their secret. But someone in the pack wants Soren dead, and they won't let the human doctor get in the way. As the temperature drops and the attacks escalate, Linnea realizes the man she's saving is just as dangerous as the enemies outside the gates, and the bond pulling them together might be the very thing that gets her killed.

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The Osorio Endowment

by Noel Morrow

  • 16 Chapters
  • 205 Pages
  • 56,378 Words
  • 7 Views

Beatriz Soriano is a university bookkeeper with a dangerous quirk: she is terrible at lying, but she can read people's souls and secrets like balanced ledgers. In the college town of Osorio, funded by a massive haunted endowment, ghosts and magic are currency. When Beatriz is unknowingly drafted into a supernatural proxy war, she finds herself physically and fundamentally mirrored against Valentin Montoya—a dangerously capable enforcer fighting for the opposition. As they exchange blows and uncover secrets in alternating turns, both realize they are fighting a war where neither side knows who actually pays their wages. To survive the unseen masters of the endowment, the human ledger and the rival proxy must calculate the true cost of their survival, risking the very souls they guard.

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The Ward of Debt

by Noel Morrow

  • 16 Chapters
  • 185 Pages
  • 50,932 Words
  • 1 Views

Nneoma works the night shift at Odimene General Hospital, a sprawling, hidden facility where the day staff files away injuries they cannot explain, and the night staff deals with the monsters who caused them. As a Scavenger, Nneoma can touch any broken object and see exactly what it used to be. She uses this skill to scrape together a living, hiding from a supernatural debt she inherited. But when Kameke—a lethal debt collector for the hidden ward bosses—comes to collect a price that cannot be paid in money, Nneoma is forced onto a deadly transport route through the hospital's deepest, most dangerous stations. Bound together by an undeniable mate-bond that neither wants, they must survive a journey where the medicine is worse than the sickness, and the debt demands a piece of a soul.

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The Morada Survey

by Blake Reilly

  • 16 Chapters
  • 156 Pages
  • 42,954 Words
  • 5 Views

Tiago Varas is a night-shift transit driver who knows every crumbling backroad and dry ravine. He also has a failing heart. When a routine delivery traps him inside the Morada Site—a massive, decommissioned processing facility deep in the arid scrublands—he finds a survey team cut off from the outside world. The facility isn't empty. Something in the deep levels is waking up, and it hunts by listening to the electrical rhythm of human hearts. But Tiago’s arrhythmic, dying heart makes him a ghost to the entities, and his obscure bloodline is the only biological key that can navigate the lower doors. With a structural surveyor, a local scavenger, and an exhausted field medic, Tiago must rely on his unique vulnerability to lead the survivors through the dark, before his chest finally gives out.

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No Gaze Upon Kulsary

by Reagan Weston

  • 8 Chapters
  • 43 Pages
  • 11,914 Words

In the rain-drenched megalopolis of Kulsary, every public surface is lined with luminescent smart glass, fiber-optic facades, and endless automated surveillance feeds. When an ancient entity awakens inside the municipal liquid-crystal displays, she does not smash glass or tear flesh; she listens for the quiet, unbearable grief of hyper-connected citizens and invites them to step across their reflections. Commuters vanish mid-transit, leaving behind damp wool coats and hollow husks that mindlessly repeat their daily routines. Yeldanoglu, a night-shift transit restorer scrubbing psychic artifacts from subway feeds, treats the vanishing faces like low-grade driver corruption until he watches a passenger walk directly into a moving train's window. Across the district, Aydarbek, an optical systems engineer turned rogue temple hacker, repurposes municipal billboard feeds into resonant prayer arrays, convinced that dissolution into the reflective mirror realm offers the only genuine cure for modern urban isolation. With the city's heating and medical grids bound to the same optical trunks that carry the entity's gaze, shattering the glass means freezing the population in midwinter, while keeping the monitors lit surrenders every citizen's reflection.

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Tides of Keresek

by Helena Belmonte

  • 24 Chapters
  • 168 Pages
  • 46,459 Words
  • 7 Views

Two hundred years ago, the werewolves of the Trevelloc clan closed off their island to the rest of the world. Now, they are the only ones who know what happened to Tressa’s brother.

Tressa is a cartographer, accustomed to measuring physical shores and charting visible tides. But when her brother vanishes on the banned coasts of Keresek, her instruments cannot help her. Desperate, she strikes a bargain with Kadek, the clan's formidable and insular alpha. He possesses the map she needs; she offers him one year of service in a clan that despises outsiders.

Their bargain binds them to the island's lethal terrain. Plunged into a brutal society where power is claimed by craft and physical survival, Tressa must navigate treacherous fishing politics, cliffside hazards, and a magnetic, terrifying pull toward the one man she swore to hate. Surrounded by enemies and the encroaching tide of clan warfare, she realizes too late: finding her brother means surviving the werewolves, and the price of the alpha's protection might be her freedom.

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The Vrythos Resonance

by Scarlett Stark

  • 24 Chapters
  • 164 Pages
  • 45,274 Words
  • 2 Views

Evoia is a structural translator in the sunless city of Vrythos, gifted—and cursed—with the ability to hear the psychic residue trapped in stone and steel. The eternal long night of Vrythos has always been ruled by the Erethes, a nocturnal class that preys on the vulnerable. When Evoia deciphers a localized scream trapped within the founding pillars of the city, she uncovers evidence of a massive historical crime: Vrythos was built on a stolen bloodline. Her discovery forces an uneasy alliance with Kyranthos, a ruthless Erethes enforcer whose own family is implicated in the slaughter. As they unravel the buried truth of the city's origins, they must confront their growing, dangerous bond and fight to ensure the past does not return to devour the present.

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The Marrow Line

by M. Pike

  • 16 Chapters
  • 161 Pages
  • 44,460 Words
  • 1 Views

Wren Strand has spent twenty-six years being the best rigger on any logging crew in Harker's Notch — steady hands, sharp eyes, and no patience for anyone who cuts corners on a mountain that doesn't forgive mistakes. She's never questioned why the old-growth stand at the edge of town has stood untouched for generations, or why her mother flinches whenever Wren asks about the boundary trail.

Then one tree changes everything: a scent she can't place, a stranger's eyes across the tree line, and a fever under her skin that has nothing to do with exhaustion.

She's a werewolf. She's always been one. And the man she can't stop dreaming about is the alpha of the pack on the other side of a boundary older than the town itself — a line kept by trees that remember blood, and that has stopped three packs from tearing each other apart for generations.

The bond between them is real, immediate, and impossible to unmake. Accepting it means defying a peace neither pack can afford to lose. Refusing it means a lifetime of wanting a man she can't have, thirty feet across a line she now has to help defend with her life.

Wren has never backed down from a dangerous job. She's not about to start with this one — even if the mountain, the mill, and every wolf on it are about to find out exactly how far she'll climb to keep what's hers.

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The Alkali Bite

by Diana Summerhill

  • 24 Chapters
  • 137 Pages
  • 37,773 Words
  • 2 Views

A poisoned aquifer is about to tip two rival werewolf packs into open war over a sprawling desert border town. Ocotlan is the enforcer for the highway pack, sent to hunt down the saboteur before her Alpha orders a massacre. Tlalli is the sister of the ranchland Alpha, dispatched to stop the highway enforcer from crossing the border.

When they clash in the dry brush, the fated mate bond snaps into place between them.

Now they are bound to the enemy. If Tlalli’s brother finds out, he will gut Ocotlan and burn her pack’s truck stops to the ground. If Ocotlan’s Alpha finds out, she will be executed for treason. They have to solve the poisoning, keep their warring families from slaughtering each other, and figure out how to survive the lethal pull of a bond neither of them asked for.

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The Silvering Syndicate

by Scarlett Stark

  • 24 Chapters
  • 185 Pages
  • 50,946 Words
  • 3 Views

In the northern coastal city of Lowell, the sun sets early, and the long night belongs to the Noctis—a supernatural syndicate of predators bound by ancient pacts. Tierney refuses her father’s legendary surname and his high seat in the Guild of Silverers, the elite crafters who forge the protective mercury-glass that keeps the monsters out of human homes. Working under an alias, she barely scrapes by repairing fractured wards for the desperate.

But when a lethal Noctis enforcer named Kellum Reed stalks into her shop with an impossible job—a heist to breach the Guild's impenetrable central vault and steal the First Mirror—Tierney is pulled into a deadly game. She must assemble a crew of rogues, outsmart her father's ironclad security, and work side-by-side with the very predator she was raised to hunt. As they plan the break-in, the magnetic, dangerous bond between Tierney and Kellum escalates. Soon, her duty to the city's safety and her loyalty to her lethal partner are on a collision course, forcing her to choose between the world she left behind and the monster pulling her into the dark.

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The Chute of Unspoken Prayers

by Conrad Burke

  • 8 Chapters
  • 41 Pages
  • 11,349 Words

Deep within the frostbitten jagged peaks of the northern divide stands the Grand Relay of Valtaari, a colossal nine-story vertical cathedral of cast-iron pipes, deafening steam flues, and pneumatic dispatch chutes built directly over an abyss. Here, senior mechanist Lemmilt treats the transit of final letters as a sacred duty, diagnosing clattering brass canisters and tracking pressure drops while screaming sorting codes over the din of roaring boilers. But beneath the grated catwalks, the ancient gods of quietude are waking. Niininen, an apostate monk who believes all spoken grief is an agonizing contagion that must be smothered, infiltrates the flues to cut the steam lines and silence mankind forever. When grease-sealed inspection hatches reveal sodden wads of human hair and dry paper-skinned specters creeping out of the vacuum tubes to stitch living mouths shut, the two bitter adversaries find themselves locked in a vertical labyrinth where keeping the steam draft roaring invites the divine wrath of absolute silence, and shutting it down unleashes the suffocating dead.

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The Othryos Descent

by Blake Reilly

  • 24 Chapters
  • 140 Pages
  • 38,525 Words
  • 2 Views

When independent demolition specialist Kalliades takes a contract to scuttle the massive, deep-water salvage rig Kymatothia, it seems like a standard hazard job. The rig is isolated above a treacherous sub-surface trench, and the company wants the deteriorating structure gone. But Kalliades bears an ancient oceanic mark on his skin—a trait that makes him uniquely capable of surviving the crushing depths, and precisely what the anomaly beneath the rig is hunting. After a catastrophic structural failure, Kalliades wakes up three days in the past. Now trapped in a repeating time loop, he must use his structural expertise and precise application of explosives to reverse-engineer the disaster, navigate a paranoid crew, and outwit whatever is systematically dismantling the rig from the abyss.

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Pebble, Hearth, and Stone

by Margot Winslow

  • 8 Chapters
  • 43 Pages
  • 11,842 Words
  • 1 Views

Estela Quintero can hear the secret music in every pebble, using her piezoelectric empathy to tune soothing singing fountains for public plazas across the Cordillera League. When four canyon republics request harmonious water installations to ease cross-border tensions before the Carnival of Concord, Estela loads her heavy acoustic stones into an electric hauler. Her driver is Baldomero, a seven-foot granite gargoyle stonemason who looks like an ancient siege weapon but handles fragile teacups with agonizing terror. As they navigate dizzying canyon bridges and terraced cliff towns, Baldomero chisels stone basins while Estela tunes the water's calming chords. Between roadside flatbreads and cozy campfire tune-ups, Estela chips past Baldomero’s rocky shyness. Bringing harmony to six nervous border nations is daunting, but helping a gentle gargoyle realize he is worthy of love makes every mile worthwhile.

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The Silhouetted Pale

by Victor Blackburn

  • 8 Chapters
  • 44 Pages
  • 12,169 Words
  • 1 Views

On the continent of Tolna-Karcag, death leaves behind something far colder than rotting flesh. When soldiers fall beneath photolytic shellfire, their dying agony stains the reactive atmosphere, leaving upright, pitch-black silhouettes that drain warmth from the frozen earth and petrify entire valleys into silent stone. Dorottya Illyési is an incinerator-herald, wielding a heavy brass thermite lance to vaporize these uncanny shadow-hulls before the trench front freezes solid. But as three coal-starved continental leagues clash over dwindling fuel reserves, Dorottya uncovers an atrocity behind her own line: her army's marshals are systematically executing captured enemy battalions to erect freezing defensive walls of shadow-corpses and farm expendable phantoms. Trapped between an enemy counter-offensive and her high command's monstrous industrial slaughter, Dorottya must turn her lance against her own army's depot before the creeping frost swallows every living breath.

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Bite of the Salt Sea

by M. Pike

  • 24 Chapters
  • 165 Pages
  • 45,573 Words
  • 1 Views

Fiadhuin is a werewolf born to run the coastal fog, but she was never supposed to run alone. Stripped of her pack and publicly rejected by her fated mate, Lorcuin—heir to the ruling Tonnaragh werewolf pack—she carved out a brutal, solitary life on the night docks, tracking feral rogues for coin. But when a territorial war threatens to drown the harbor in blood, Lorcuin is forced to seek out the one wolf who knows the smuggling routes well enough to stop the slaughter. Fiadhuin demands a high price for out-hunting the rival alphas, refusing to yield to the man who broke her. Yet, as they are thrust back together in the shadows of the cannery courts, the suppressed mate bond begins to violently reawaken, proving that a rejected claim never truly dies.

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Mirages of the Gök-Minaret

by K.C. Quarrel

  • 8 Chapters
  • 40 Pages
  • 11,079 Words

The space elevator cable snapped forty years ago, leaving the Gök-Minaret stranded like a colossal needle in a sea of alkaline sand. Inside its two-kilometer hollow core, Mergentay tends the great prisms. Powered by near-future quantum optics, the spire's mirrors project the weather of lost centuries—drifting cloud banks, humid mists, and soft autumn showers that fall through the empty passenger galleries. But the mirage is no longer an illusion. Real, freezing water is gathering in the lower decks, threatening to submerge the power relays that keep the mirrors turning. Mergentay must navigate the flooded monument to save the only rain left in the world before his tower becomes its own tomb.

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Occupants of the Housen Grounds

by Sylvie L. Galloway

  • 23 Chapters
  • 154 Pages
  • 42,424 Words
  • 12 Views

For three hundred years, the Housen Grounds have held back a withering, flesh-eating fog known as the Shigai. The only thing keeping it contained is a blood-bound occupancy: two descendants must live within its rotting walls every night, or the bounds break.

Kiyomi walked away from the Meisho Cordon’s military ranks rather than feed innocent lives to their war machine. Branded a coward and a deserter, she has nowhere left to run when she is dragged to the Housen Grounds to serve as a replacement occupant. There, she meets Naoto—a rigid, arrogant loyalist of the very Cordon she despises, sworn to uphold the rules even as the estate tries to kill them both.

Tethered together in a haunted manor, they have to survive the Shigai’s nightly horrors and fulfill the Cordon's impossible demands. But as Kiyomi begins to use her unsanctioned combat tactics to carve out a foothold in the estate, the two bitter rivals realize the curse isn't a natural disaster. The institution they are desperately holding together might be the very thing that wants them dead.

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The Tide Crossing

by Evangeline Vasquez

  • 20 Chapters
  • 224 Pages
  • 61,686 Words
  • 22 Views

In the metaphysical border town of Suna, things slip across the veil every day—sometimes memories, sometimes people, sometimes cursed relics. Tani is a thief with a strict code: she only steals to return what was wrongfully taken across the crossing. When a high-stakes commission forces her to assemble a crew and break into the vault of the town's most dangerous syndicate boss, her path collides with Liko, a lethal border-warder whose job is to keep both worlds separate. Neither can afford to lose, but their escalating rivalry uncovers a conspiracy that threatens to tear the border wide open. To save her town, Tani must pull off the heist of a lifetime, trusting the one man paid to hunt her down.

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Thermals of the Eclipse

by Margot Winslow

  • 8 Chapters
  • 42 Pages
  • 11,693 Words

Directing supersonic passenger shuttles across three solar systems takes iron nerves and micro-telekinetic precision, and Marimat is the best in the terminal. But her shift goes to hell when Shadimat crashes through her control tower window. Golden-skinned, deadly, and radiating scorching heat, Shadimat is a solar-vampire on the run from corrupt security syndicates. Trapped together during a total starport lockdown, Shadimat's internal solar furnace threatens to incinerate him unless he grounds his searing bio-heat against human skin. Marimat's telekinesis can cool his burns, but every touch unleashes an intoxicating wave of psychic euphoria that blurs the line between hostage and lover. When the sun sets, staying alive means surrendering to the heat.

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The Oath-Marked of Skarstad

by Evangeline Vasquez

  • 16 Chapters
  • 141 Pages
  • 38,821 Words
  • 7 Views

Vigdis once swore an oath she could never keep, and the border town of Skarstad paid the price in blood. To the locals, Skarstad is just a quiet logging community where the fog rolls in thick from the North Sea. But Vigdis, a healer marked by a broken vow, knows the town sits on a metaphysical fault line, a crossing point between the mundane and something far older. When a wounded outsider washes up with impossible injuries—and carrying knowledge of a threat the town has blindly ignored for a generation—Vigdis must decide whether to bandage him and look away, or break the uneasy truce keeping her safe. Forced into an alliance with a protector whose kind she once betrayed, she must drag an unwilling town back into a war against the supernatural. The only problem is the pull between her and the outsider—a pull that demands a truth she is terrified to face, and a sacrifice she has already refused to make once before.

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