We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell, a YA Black sapphic vampire romantasy out from Wednesday Books on April 1st.
Once long ago, a girl named Favre sacrificed her wings for love. Thana, the young goddess she so willingly gave them up for, sacrificed that same love for power. But everything has a cost.
Favre never got over the loss of her wings. And Thana’s choices led to a life of eternal night, and later, their destruction. Favre has bided her time ever since, waiting for the chance to resurrect the girl she loves who turned her into the creature she hates.
Now, a thousand years later, Leyla, the crown princess of a vampire nation, must travel to Nekros, the island of the dead, when her best friend is captured during an attack on her nation’s capital. But nothing is as it seems. The closer she gets to her goal, the more she risks awakening an ancient evil and destroying everything she holds dear.
Chapter One
Favre
Present Day: Nekros
I place my back flat against the wall of a long corridor outside of the manor house’s great hall, watching and waiting for her. The corridor has no light, making it the perfect place to disappear into the shadows.
Souls drift into the hall, one after another, single file, heading to their final resting place. They’re translucent. Some have symbols inked on the back of their necks, denoting what they once were: Vampires. The humans have no such symbols.
I can’t see into the hall, yet I know every feature. Long ago, this house was mine—my sanctuary, my home, the last place Thana and I were together. Hands float from the wood-paneled walls, each gripping a rusted candelabra caked with wax. The wax drips slowly onto the stone floor and the vines snaking through the cracks.
When I first arrived here, I wondered… thieves’ hands? The hands of those who’d wronged the gods? I thought of my life growing up in the Heavenly Realms, of the many cautionary tales Mother used to tell me. The gods punish first and they never forgive, she’d say. And, for once, she was right.
After the gods trapped me, I learned there is no point in wondering. Things happen how they happen; fate is on your side, or it’s not. My mother thought she could change her fate, she thought that she could control it. Instead, she ended up in an early grave, brutally abandoned by the god she served and loved.
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Where Shadows Meet
Where Shadows Meet
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The line of souls grows shorter, until the sun dips below the horizon and darkness seeps into the sky, until there are no souls left at all. Finally, the goddess of the dead leaves the judgment hall. Eyes barely open, the goddess stretches her arms out wide and yawns. Moonlight slips in from cracks along the walls, bathing her brown skin in midnight’s blue.
Eventually, she makes her way to her chambers.
I wait, and then I follow, wrapped in a cloak of shadows.
* * *
Slowly, we climb the spiral staircase to the house’s second floor. My bare feet grow cold against the stone stairs, a breeze from an open window slicing through my tattered dress. The stairs are splintered with cracks, and the railing groans as we ascend. Whereas I stumble, trying not to make a sound, adjusting to legs I haven’t used in centuries, the goddess glides from stair to stair, her gown fanning out behind her, cutting a stretch of darkness, velvet indigo atop white marble. She holds her head high, as if she is the mistress of this place, not just a tool of the gods. I sneer. Easy to be replaced.
Soon, we reach the top and head down a long corridor. Like the hall, it’s dimly lit with candelabras held by floating hands. Wax drips and pools beneath them on the chilly floor.
A shadow flickers before us, and the goddess hesitates, clutching her hands, gripping them until her knuckles pale to yellow. My eyes flit back and forth before they still—there’s nothing there. This place has a way of taking root deep within you. Creating images only in your mind. Planting suggestions you know to ignore but don’t. That’s what happened to the goddess of the dead before this one. And to be honest, the one before that one, too—they lost all sense of what was and what wasn’t and had to be replaced.
Finally, we reach her bedchamber. I stop well before and press myself within a nook in the wall. I make myself small, like I did as a little girl. Only, instead of hiding from Mother, lest she drain a pint of my blood for a spell, it’s the Reapers I need to avoid. They stand guard on either side of the door, putting themselves between me and my plans. They hover over her, nearly as tall as the corridor’s vaulted ceiling is high. Ligaments gnarled like a tree. Nails sharp like a beast’s, which I suppose is what they are with their fleshless faces—all bones except for a slender, red tongue that flicks out between two long fangs.
The goddess says something inaudible to them, closing the door behind her as the Reapers turn back the way we came, walking right past me. I hold my breath until they’re gone. Then I walk to the goddess’s door and turn the knob.
“Hello?” she calls.
I swing the door open.
The goddess sits, brushing her hair in front of a dressing table. She looks at me and gasps. Her brush clatters to the ground. A mirror is beside her, but I don’t need it to know the truth. I look like something the swamp spat up. My black lace gown barely fits where it should, my eyes are blood red, and my hair is terribly matted. A far cry from the girl I once was.
I can smell her fear, and it awakens something deep within me: the taste for human blood.
I feel my fangs as they descend, as they hunger with a thirst I haven’t been able to quench in centuries.
The goddess falls from her chair. Quickly, she pulls herself up and glances out the window, searching for it: a tree separate from the woods surrounding us and right in front of the house. A peculiar tree, adorned with bottles instead of leaves. Bright blue bottles that gleam under the moonlight and clink together in the wind.
Clink. Clink.
Her heart rate quickens. The bottles sway in the wind.
She gasps. She’s seen it. The glass shattered underneath the tree. She looks at me. She stumbles back. A wicked grin spreads across my face.
The color leaves hers as she puts it all together. “H-how? It’s impossible.”
I step toward her. I once thought the same. A thousand years I hoped and prayed. A thousand years I called upon every ounce of my magic. A thousand years I was trapped there.
How? I’d wondered, as I’d tumbled to the ground. As I was suddenly free. As fate was on my side once more.
I take another step. She grabs her brush and holds it before her like a sword. I throw my head back and laugh. Her knuckles pale.
“Y-you can’t open it. They cursed it. Protected it. You seriously think you’re the first to try?” Her voice wavers as she references to the real reason the gods created her role a thousand years ago, after they locked me and Thana away. The gods told the people of the lands of the living that there is a goddess of the dead. That she lives on an island named Nekros, a place where all souls go at their end. There, she sits atop a gilded throne in a manor house where she judges the dead, ushering them, one by one, to their final resting place. I snort, suppressing a laugh at the thought. The spirits would go wherever they go regardless of her. It’s just more lies spun by the gods to keep people from seeking out this island, to keep them from finding out the truth: what’s really hidden here.
Her heart rate quickens, and her breath grows shallow. Her veins pulse under her skin, the blood calling to me. I step toward her.
“I know I’m not,” I say with a grin. “But unlike the rest, I was there that night—I know how to free her.”
From Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
