Breathe Underwater

Maverick and August aren’t running anymore.

They don’t have anything to run from.

The architect of their misery has been dead and buried for almost a year—for real, now—and they’ve spent that time productively, if not happily. Crisscrossing the country, honing their respective skills; black market under-the-table necromancy pays well, at the very least, and if it occasionally feels like they’re stuck in some weird no-man’s-land holding pattern, waiting for something else to happen, for something else to go wrong—well, there’s a bunch of other, weirder stuff already happening.

When they’re hired to Banish the spirit of a long-dead counselor at an old summer camp in a sleepy lakeside town in Idaho, the complications that almost immediately arise are as insidious as they are confusing. There’s Lance Radley, the guy who called them there, who has a psychic sister and a murky relationship to the dead counselor, and there’s the dead counselor himself, Brooks Beecher-Truman, whose own family history and murky relationship to ask a lot more questions than they answer.

There's also a pretty, distracting waitress and a slyly observant local cop, a thirty-year old murder to solve and a partial Raising to uncertainly prepare for, and the creeping, gnawing suspicion that Maverick and August’s reprieve—from danger, from Gatherers, from running—was always going to temporary, anyway.

sample | sequel to Gravediggers