The Girl Who Summoned Death

Anwen has been dead for three years, and she is terrible at it. Her family is packing up the house she was born in. Her little brother leaves for college. Her best friend walked into the sea and moved on, the way every ghost eventually does. Anwen tried the ocean too. It wouldn't take her.

So she does the only sensible thing a dead girl can do. She reads a borrowed manual, steals some candles, gathers eleven smooth stones, and draws a summoning circle on the floor of a burned-down library on Token Street. It works. Death arrives in a wrinkled suit, in a foul mood, and informs her that manual service was discontinued ages ago. One problem: her circle is wrong in every way that matters, the letters swapped, the lines crooked. Instead of sending him home, it snaps a binding around them both. Until Anwen can let go of everything she ever loved, Death cannot leave, and neither of them can get more than three hundred feet apart.

The fix is six steps. Possessions. Beliefs. Ambitions. Places. Hatred. People. Each step asks her to surrender something she isn't sure she can spare, and each one burns. Somewhere in the middle of giving herself away, she notices things about her cold, insufferable warden. He cooks alfredo and leaves the second bowl where she'll find it. He apologizes exactly once, and means it forever. And he is breaking the first rule of his own company: never fall for a client. He broke it once before. The woman he loved moved on and forgot he existed, and he never stopped paying for it.

Then a hex comes for Anwen wearing her killer's face — the drunk driver who ran her car into the lake and stood on the bank while she drowned. He is dead now too, by his own hand, and his last note blamed her. Stranger still: the steps should be making Anwen fade. Instead she is becoming solid. Visible. Warm.

The truth is that the steps were never meant for a ghost. Anwen carries the Phoenix curse — a reaper somewhere in her family tree, a bloodline that dies and comes back in fire. Her resurrection takes her name, her city, and everyone she loved, and drops her across the world with red wings, a heartbeat, and two maddening guardians who answer to a Half-Blood Society the reapers despise.

But Death is not done with her. When the reapers' Justice Board moves to erase the one reaper who betrayed her orders to save Anwen's life, Anwen walks into a marble hearing room to stop a memory-wipe that is already signed for. She has a fake identity, a temper that sprouts wings when it burns, a CEO who reads appliance manuals and keeps impeccable records, and a hand-copied ledger of every mind the Board ever cleaned.

This is the story of a girl who refused to disappear and the man who kept her eleven botched summoning stones cataloged on his study floor. A romance that burns hot and always closes the bedroom door. Because the real hook of Death's rule was never the falling.

It was the staying.

The Girl Who Summoned Death — summon badly, love carefully, keep your crystals close.

Content note: strong peril and tension; intimate scenes fade to black.