Lira and the touch of death

After the crash that took everything, there was only St. Jude's.A cold house at the end of a long road. A place for children no one comes back for, where the sisters keep to their rounds, the doors stick shut at night, and the new girl is told, again and again, not to mind the noises in the walls.Fifteen-year-old Lira minds the noises.Ever since the accident, she has been able to see the dead - and St. Jude's is crowded with them. She tells herself the orphanage is only cold, and only old, and only sad, the way such places are. But the bruises keep coming, and they always have an explanation. She fell down the stairs. She slept wrong. It's a drafty old building; these things happen.The longer Lira stays, the harder it becomes to ignore what the explanations are covering for - that something beneath the house has been feeding on its children for three hundred years, that it is patient, and hungry, and almost finished waiting.The children of St. Jude's have always disappeared quietly, one at a time, for reasons no one is left to remember.Lira is the first who can see them go.A chilling gothic horror novel of ghosts, dread, and the things that wait in old houses - perfect for readers of slow-burn supernatural horror and haunting folk terror.