The Devil's Throat Files/A Utah Shadows Thriller Bonus Material

The Bored Man with the Clipboard

A Silent Mandate companion scene · Niamh · the night before the founding

Niamh went in at 19:40 as a man delivering folding chairs, and the trick, as always, was that she was actually delivering folding chairs.

That was the part the clever ones never understood. Matt would have built a legend, a false manifest, a story with seams. Emily would have read the guard and found the thing he wanted to hear. Niamh did neither. She had spent the afternoon on a real...

The First Honest Morning

A Vale & Ward Files bonus scene · Jessie Clark

Set the week after The Honest Man. Ethan Ward’s point of view. ~1,550 words. Newsletter reader magnet.

Ward woke before her, which almost never happened, and lay still so he wouldn’t wake her, which never happened at all.

The snow had finally stopped sometime in the night. He could tell without opening the blinds; the light coming through them had changed from the flat gray churn of a storm to the clean hard white of a...

Bonus Scene: The Eleventh Door

The facility did not appear on any map, which was how Aether knew it was real.

She had learned to read the absence of things. A road that ended at a gate and then resumed two miles later, as if the land between had been edited out. A power draw on the regional grid that did not match any listed tenant. A water bill paid by a shell company that paid for nothing else. The program had taught Cass to structure memory the way writers structured plots, and Aether had...

The Cold Coffee

A Vale & Ward Files bonus scene · Jessie Clark

Set during the week after The Cold Hour. Ethan Ward’s point of view. ~1,450 words. Newsletter reader magnet.

Ward had made her a promise about a week, and he was three days into keeping it and learning, the way he learned everything about Cass, slowly and by watching, that the hardest part of giving a woman like her a week was that she did not know how to receive one.

The town was called Harnett, four hours north, where the...

A Quiet Evening at The Loose Leaf

A Crestwick Chronicles bonus chapter — a few weeks after Something Wicked This Way Brews

The town decided I was a heroine, which was worse than being a suspect.

When they thought I’d done it, at least they left me alone. People crossed the street. The bell over my door stayed quiet for whole afternoons, and I got a great deal of inventory done. But the moment the truth came out — the moment Crestwick understood that I had been the one to see what no one else...

Editorial Note
The following pages were recovered from Natalie Jones's field notebook, motel stationery, phone transcripts, and loose case cards. They cover the weeks before the events of Canyon Ghosts, when Natalie followed a pattern of missing hikers into the red rock country around Redrock Falls.
Some names and locations appear more than once because Natalie was still cross-checking conflicting reports. She did not yet know which details were mistakes, which were lies, and which ones had...