The Blackthorn House Chronicles-The Names Beneath

Sarah, Ryan, Mateo, and Lucia have been at Blackthorn House long enough to believe they've found its secrets. They know the sealed room now. They know what's hidden behind its walls. What they don't know yet is that the house was never the only place keeping something buried.It starts small. A school assignment, a local history project, an excuse to spend an afternoon at the county archive instead of at home. But the four of them don't do anything small anymore, not since the Kindling. Tucked inside an old donation ledger, they find four names listed together, decades ago, for no reason anyone bothered to explain. Four names. Four kids. The same as them.The deeper they dig, the stranger the trail gets. A newspaper article that doesn't add up. A handwriting sample that leaves Lucia shaking when she touches it. A sharp-eyed archivist named Ms. Odera who notices exactly which box the four of them keep circling back to. And someone else, a man who has been asking about those same four names for a lot longer than any of them have.His name is Weller.As Sarah, Ryan, Mateo, and Lucia piece together what happened forty years ago, they start to realize the original four kids didn't just disappear from the record. They were scattered on purpose. One of them died young, in circumstances that don't sit right with Mateo's power at all. One of them left something behind, hidden inside something ordinary, like she knew someone would eventually come looking. And one of them, according to a property record nobody was ever supposed to find, might still be alive.Getting to her before Weller does becomes the only thing that matters. But finding Rosa means confronting how much Ms. Ferro has been keeping from them, how far Weller is willing to go to get there first, and how much the four of them are willing to risk for four strangers who lived this exact nightmare before they were even born.The Names Beneath is Book Three of The Blackthorn House Chronicles, continuing the found-family supernatural series that began with The Ones Who Remain and The Locked Room. The mystery widens past the walls of the house for the first time, out into the archive, the town, and a past nobody ever really finished explaining. Sarah, Ryan, Mateo, and Lucia came looking for a school project. What they found was a forty-year-old promise nobody ever got to keep, and a man who has been waiting a long time for someone to dig it back up.