It started for pranks, fun, and forever memories.
A secret society – for the four of us.
The rules: Never lie. Never tell. Love each other.
We made the pledge and danced under the blood moon on the meteorite in the orchard. In the spot we found the dead girl five years earlier. And discovered the ancient drawings way before that.
Nothing could break the four of us apart – I thought.
But then, others wanted in. Our seaside town had secrets. History.
We wanted revenge.
We broke the rules. We lied. We told. We loved each other too much, not enough, and in ways we weren’t supposed to.
Our invention ratcheted out of control.
What started as a secret society, ended as justice. Revenge. Death. Rebellion.
Lana used to know what was real.
That was before, when her life was small and quiet. Her golden stepbrother, Ben, was alive. She could only dream about bonfiring with the populars. Their wooded island home was idyllic, she could tell the truth from lies, and Ben’s childhood stories were firmly in her imagination.
Then came after.
After has Lana boldly kissing her crush, jumping into the water from too high up, living with nerve and mischief. But after also has horrors, deaths that only make sense in fairy tales and terrors from a past Lana thought long forgotten:
LOVE, BLOOD, and MURDER.
Stella Cambren is the lucky one. When she was a kid, Stella and her friend Jeanie vanished while picking strawberries. Stella came back without any memory of what happened. Jeanie never did.
Eleven years later, Stella is over it—mostly. She can’t remember a time when people didn’t look at her with a question in their eyes. But she has a summer full of cove days ahead of her, a best friend with a devil-may-care attitude, and a maybe-crush on a gorgeous, popular guy. All Stella wants is to have the best summer of her life. Jeanie’s fate is lost in the black hole of her mind. It’s nothing but the past.
That is, until the fresh corpse of a little girl is found, one with eerie similarities to Jeanie, and Stella’s memories start coming back in fits and starts. As Stella begins to uncover the truth about the day Jeanie vanished, she discovers a bread crumb trail of disappearances going back generations.Stella thinks remembering what happened to Jeanie will save her. It won’t.
She used to know better than to believe in what slinks through the shadows. Not anymore. And before the summer is over, Stella will learn that if you hunt for monsters, you’ll find them.