Cold Iron Halo

He answered a prayer he was not sent to answer. It has cost him four hundred years, and it is not finished.Mercy Sackett has twelve working days to condemn a church.She is a restoration architect. She is very good at it. And she has not set foot inside St. Brannoc's since she was twenty years old and asked for something and got nothing back.On the second day, something in the west wall speaks to her.It does not ask to be freed. It asks her to bring the building down, and it will not say why, because it knows that if she understood, she would refuse.He calls himself Remiel. He says he was an angel of the watching orders, sent to observe a starving settlement in the winter of 1624 and forbidden to intervene. He has no wings, no power, and no proof. He cannot lift a cup. He does not eat or sleep, and no living soul has seen him in four centuries.On the last night of January 1624, a seven-year-old girl stood by a failing fire in a room with two dead children in the corner of it, and prayed that nobody else be allowed to die in that place.He was not sent to answer her.He answered her anyway.Nothing has ended on that hill since. No wound closes. No fever breaks. The boundary is spreading at eighteen inches a year, and twenty-two feet beneath the floor of the church there is a child who has been counting the days in piles of gravel since the twelfth of March 1624.Mercy can measure every part of it. She has the thermal readings, the crack monitors, and four hundred years of parish ledgers. Every number checks out. Not one of them will move the thing that matters.Because there is only one way out of that wall, and it is not engineering. It is the one thing Mercy Sackett gave up at twenty, and has never once been able to get back by wanting it.Cold Iron Halo is the first book of the Cold Iron trilogy: a slow burn gothic love story set on a granite ledge above a working harbor in coastal Maine, for readers who want a fallen angel with no powers at all, a heroine who fights a miracle with a tape measure and a notebook, and a romance built entirely out of being listened to.A note on heat. There is no sex in this book and no kiss. Remiel and Mercy are never once in physical contact, here or in the two books that follow. What passes between them is talk, presence, and four hundred years of somebody finally answering. If you need heat, this is not your book. If you have ever wanted a love story carried entirely on the words, it very much is.Book two, Cold Iron Vow, follows.