Fire & Clay

Charlie Feeney has forty-seven days sober and eleven years behind the same bar in a Texas town nobody visits on purpose. He's good at the job. He remembers what you drink and when to stop pouring it. He's learned to be the kind of man a room stops noticing. Then a woman he's never met sits down, puts a piece of carved stone on the bar, and tells him what the marks on his arm mean. An hour later a regular is dead on the asphalt outside, killed by something that walked through him, and Charlie is running north with a stranger who knows more about his mother than he does. What he finds is four thousand years of record. A hidden court that counts bloodlines. An organization that has been quietly managing his existence since he was two years old. And a woman in a stone archive who has been waiting a very long time for someone to ask her what actually happened. Charlie can make things into other things. He can look at a fence post and tell it that it's glass, and it will agree, and it will never be wood again. The trouble is what that costs. The trouble is what his mother did every night for thirty-one years to keep him ordinary. And the trouble is that the only thing standing between Charlie and the man he's afraid of becoming is the same thing that got him through forty-seven days: the discipline of sitting still when everything in you wants to reach. Fire & Clay is the first book of The Walkers Above — a contemporary fantasy about inheritance, addiction, and the people who hold the line for us without ever saying so.