If I Stopped Haunting You

Prologue

PEN

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

Pen wondered how drunk she must have been when she accepted this invitation, because it was a disaster in the making. Her sales had never been great, but she couldn’t simply revitalize them with a Book Con appearance and some plastered-on smiles, not when he was in the room with her.

She sweated through the polyester of her blazer as she fiddled with the warped corner of an annotated copy of her book. The edges had since yellowed, and the flags denoting her favorite passages poked out from between pages that were bent and ripped. She’d thought it would make a nice giveaway, but the audience didn’t even care that she was there.

All they cared about was him . She peered nervously down the table at the other participants in the Indigenous Fiction panel, at their smiling faces and stacks of books. Unlike her, the other woman on the panel wore beaded earrings that dangled and tangled in stray strands of her hair, and many of the men had long, thinning hair twisted back into slim braids. The only other author who stood out was Neil Storm.

While Storm’s dark curls barely reached his ears, Pen’s hair was long and thick, pulled into a messy bun at the back of her head. She wasn’t proudly representing her heritage with beads or braids. She couldn’t even slip out a Cherokee tribal identification card to prove her Nativeness. Pen didn’t belong among them. But Storm? Storm belonged everywhere he went, and he knew it.

“Neil, this question is for you.”

He leaned forward on his elbows, smiling. “Of course.”

Pen had once fallen for that smile, for a grin that felt like it was just for her. But she knew better now.

“You’ve found your groove, so to speak,” the moderator continued. “You have mastered dark, Indigenous modern horror that features men looking for their place in a world taken from them. I’m sure you hear this often, but what inspired you to write For What Savages May Be ? Where did this idea come from?”

“Oh, here and there. I’ve always wanted to reclaim the cowboy stereotype, you know. Trent is a man searching for something, and it’s not until he crosses the reservation line that he realizes what it is he’s searching for.”

“A whole lot of nothing,” Pen muttered, too low for the audience to hear.

“Penelope Skinner,” Neil drawled. “You’ve been awfully quiet today.”

Her head snapped up in surprise. He was everything she hated about publishing, manifested in one smirking, attractive man. Damn him, did he have to be attractive? Neil Storm’s gaze was steady, but his nostrils flared as he leaned toward his mic, dark curls falling into those emerald eyes.

“You haven’t exactly been quiet about your distaste for my writing, though. If I recall from a certain Writer’s Digest interview, you think my writing is ‘pathetically palatable.’ You use that word a lot, ‘palatable.’”

Someone snickered in the audience, but she refused to look away from him.

She straightened in her seat, ignoring the curious glances from their fellow panel members. “I struggle to relate to your stories. They feel…” She hesitated. His eyes were a captivating green, and it was difficult to focus.

“It’s okay, you can say it.”

“You set up Trent to be a wayward Native in search of a home, experiencing the horrors off the reservation, but instead you wrote a—”

“Let me guess, palatable?” Neil interrupted.

“— tasteless book that paints our people as the bad guys. You attempt to reclaim the word ‘savage,’ but only continue to promote its usage. We are not savages, we were never savages. That imagery is from a white lens. Why would you ever want to reclaim a word that has only done us harm?”

“Is that so?” he ground out.

Pen looked from his face to the table before him. For What Savages May Be was propped up, a critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling dark horror about what the world expects of modern Indigenous populations. But his main character, Trent—a play on the traditional white cowboy—was cocky, sexist, and racist, all wrapped up in a bow and quiver full of arrows. Neil Storm had played into every stereotype possible in a book he claimed shattered them all. He was a joke, a phony, but to the white book world, he was palatable.

Pen, on the other hand, was simply too much. Had always been too much. Too much prose, too much Nativeness, too much whiteness. Too much.

Grinding her teeth, she said, “Yes. Trent is supposed to be the hero, but you literally titled it For What Savages May Be . You don’t care if we are painted as the hero or the villain.”

“That’s a serious accusation,” the moderator warned.

“Great, because it’s true.”

“Why do you get to say that?” Neil demanded. “What entitles you to that opinion? We should be supporting one another, not tearing each other down.”

“Maybe if you cared more about your people than your wallet.”

He stared at her, and a long silence settled between them. Pen looked out to the audience, to the few faces she recognized in the crowded hall. Her friend Laszlo had flown out to Seattle on a whim to see both her and Storm in their panel in what he claimed was a “momentous occasion.” He sat ramrod straight in the second row, shaking his head subtly, but before she could stop herself, her lips were moving.

“Get over your masochistic shit and write something with a soul for once.”

Pen would never know why she’d opened her mouth, never understood what had overtaken her in that moment, but the Prince of Horror had crossed a line, and she’d followed right after him. Maybe she was a self-destructive time bomb, and her clock had finally reached zero.

Maybe she just wanted to see how he’d react.

Her mother had always warned her that she wore her heart on her sleeve. And the publishing world had warned her it was a business, not an art, but she’d ignored both. She’d always thought that if she could just get her stories into the world, into the hands of readers like her, everything would sort itself out.

But that wasn’t how publishing worked.

Pen looked from Storm to the audience, her vision hazy as his fans started yelling at her. Someone was trying to quiet them down, and other panel members attempted to calm the crowd, to change the subject, but it was no use.

“Penelope—” Storm started.

Fuck. Why did she do this? She could feel it all slipping through her fingers—her career, her future, her life. Swallowing, she looked out over the audience, unfamiliar faces glaring back at her. She’d hurt the boy they loved—the Prince of Horror.

“I asked: What did you just say?” Neil demanded into his mic.

Pen licked her lips as the crowd fell silent, waiting, and her vision blurred with tears. Oh god, not here. “I said,” she started, voice wavering, “write something with a soul.”

They glared at one another.

He worked his jaw, eyes focused on her.

“Maybe we should take a quick break,” the moderator offered.

But Pen had had enough. She was done pretending that she deserved a seat, that she was of their caliber.

That he deserved a seat.

This table was full of Indigenous authors who had paved their way, and what did Neil Storm or Penelope Skinner have to offer but a forgotten novel and some lousy, white-centered bullshit?

Pen pushed back from her seat, picking up the single copy of her only novel, The Lies They Told Us . She needed to leave the hall before she did anything else or said anything else. People yelled obscenities at her as she moved to leave. And then she heard it, muddled in with “bitch!” and “worthless!”

“Racist!”

She was racist? She almost laughed. They hadn’t known; even on a panel for Indigenous authors, they hadn’t known who she was. And by calling out Storm’s hypocrisy, she was racist? With anger she hadn’t felt in ages, she leaned forward and ripped her mic from the table.

“You know?” She threw up her arm, the book still clutched in her sweaty palm. She wanted to tell herself to stop, but she couldn’t. “I’m sorry my characters are too Native for you, or,” she said, narrowing her eyes on Neil Storm, “not Native enough. I’m sorry I’m only mixed, and I’m sorry that I look like a bagpiper and a scullery maid fucked in a castle.”

Pen didn’t know where she was going, and she should have put the mic down, but she only clutched it tighter and leaned away as one of the convention volunteers motioned for it. “Someday, I’m going to write the best fucking horror novel you’ve ever read, and the name Neil Storm will be forgotten forever.”

He grabbed his mic, standing. “You think it’s been easy for me?” She turned to leave, but his voice only rose. “You think I walked into this market and had it all handed to me? Sometimes, we have to give up titles and characters and entire books before we get what we want, before we can write what we want.”

She turned on him. “Well, I wrote what I wanted.”

“And look where that landed you.”

Nostrils flaring and nerves buzzing, she dropped the mic on the table and turned to go. He wasn’t wrong, fuck, he wasn’t wrong, but she needed to go before it got any worse.

“And that, folks, is my competition,” Neil said, returning to his chair with a heavy sigh.

She should have left.

Pen should have fled, but her book was still clutched in her hand, and there was no one to hold her back. Sliding her left foot behind her, she turned and chucked her book at the cocky bastard. She watched gleefully as it smacked into the side of his temple, and he flew out of his chair, yelling obscenities.

There was a twinge of guilt in her gut as she watched blood trickle down the side of his face, but Pen stamped it down as people rushed forward to help the Prince of Horror and she was dragged backward out of the room by convention security.

Alone. She was alone.