Chosen

In Fontenot, Louisiana, where the cypress keep their own counsel and the graves remember, Solene Boudreaux comes home. Soft-spoken but razor-bright, the eighteen-year-old can hear and answer the dead, a gift that cost her father his life and drove her mother north to Chicago in the vain hope of quiet. Now Solene returns to begin college, to help in her family's funeral home, and to learn the boundaries of a power that refuses to be sedated. The dead greet her like kin. One of them, an ancestral spirit with unfinished business, fastens to her shadow.

Beauragard "Beau" Andrews is Fontenot's golden myth: twenty, blue-eyed, the town's favored son with a smile that opens doors and a legacy that opens vaults. He is also the Chosen, host and reincarnation of a forgotten European god whose seven hungers are beauty, fertility, magic, wealth, prosperity, war, and madness. The god wears Beau like a well-cut suit, whispering strategies, sharpening his charm, and marking Solene as the vessel required to continue its line.

As campus lights dim and the bayou fog rises, Solene's days knot into a private war: the ancestor tugging her toward reckoning, the town's courtesies masking old cruelties, and Beau's courtship, tender one breath, terrifying the next, conducted under the god's gaze. Desire becomes a trapdoor. Visions thicken in the air. Family histories surface like bones in rain-soft earth.

To survive, Solene must master the dead who claim her, confront the living who would use her, and choose whether to break a dynasty older than Fontenot itself or be bound to it, body and soul.