The Halcrow Debt

Lila Halcrow didn't believe in ghosts. Then she inherited one. Three weeks after her grandmother's funeral, Lila arrives in Whitby to clear out Raven's Rest—a gloomy Victorian guesthouse perched at the top of the famous 199 steps. She expects dust, clutter, and fourteen porcelain cats. She doesn't expect the basement to breathe. Or the temperature to drop. Or a boy to walk out of the dark wearing a Smiths T-shirt and a 1987 death date. Jax has been waiting thirty-seven years for someone to ask questions. He doesn't remember drowning. Doesn't know why he's still here. All he knows is that something else lives in the cellar beneath the cellar—something old, something hungry, and something that knows Lila's name. The thing wears voices like costumes. Her grandmother's. Jax's mother's. It whispers about a debt. A deal made in 1703. A Halcrow who walked into the sea and never walked out—but never really left either. Now the collection beneath the house is stirring. The scratching at the wall is getting louder. And the only way to break a three-hundred-year curse is to learn the one thing the thing in the dark has spent centuries forgetting: Its true name.