The work
Urban fantasy about linguistics, the African diaspora, and what it actually costs to survive your own life — and what it gives you, if you do.
Debut novel
Dr. Ciara Foster is a neurodivergent non-binary linguist who has spent her career studying the origins of vampire mythology across linguistic traditions, Old Church Slavonic, West African oral histories, Haitian Creole ceremony texts, Vodou ritual language. When she submits a paper arguing the convergence points are too precise to be coincidence, she expects professional ridicule. She doesn't expect to lose her best friend, her autistic safe person, the job that was the architecture of her identity, and very nearly herself.
What follows is grief in its fullest, most brutal form. Loss compounding on loss. The specific devastation of suicide. The impossible complexity of loving someone who hurt you — and trying, even through the pain, to understand why. Ciara doesn't come out the other side of this quickly. She barely comes out of it at all.
She is recruited, in this wreckage, by a private research institute that wants her expertise in Creole linguistics and the oral traditions of the African diaspora. She takes the work because she needs it. She doesn't understand yet what she's actually being asked to translate, or why the woman who runs the institute — ancient, powerful, and carrying her own unimaginable losses — looks at her like she already knows the ending.
What unfolds takes Ciara from grief into New Orleans and Haiti, through secret societies and supernatural politics and Vodou ceremony and the deep histories of the African diaspora that academic linguistics has always gotten wrong. It takes her into a found family of misfits — witches, werewolves, vampires, Vodou practitioners, every kind of person the world decided didn't fit — and into a love more consuming and more honest than anything she allowed herself to imagine. A love that is polyamorous, that is complicated, that is exactly what she never knew she was allowed to want.
At the center of it all is a mystery. And at the center of the mystery is a question about healing: what happens when the people who have survived the most choose, finally, to let someone in?
Creole. Vodou. Hoodoo. West African oral tradition. Haitian history. The African diaspora encoded truths in language and ceremony that dominant culture dismissed as folklore and those truths turn out to be the key to everything. Ciara's expertise, the thing she was mocked for, is exactly right.
Suicide thoughts and the loss it leaves behind. Loving someone who caused harm. The grief of losing an autistic safe person. Polyamory as something real and tender and complicated, not a plot device. Love that costs something — and gives something back that nothing else could.
The supernatural beings in this book are not metaphors for otherness. They are beings who have been othered; who have survived centuries of being feared, hunted, misunderstood. The found family Ciara discovers is built from survivors. That is the point.
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