Once a notorious outlaw, Alasdair Keary rode the legends of his death at the hand of bounty hunters all the way to freedom. He and his father found safety and community in the town of Never under new names and a new way of living, but Alasdair will always be an outlaw at heart.
Aaron Baylis came west from the Midwest in search of freedom, fresh air, and a new start. He traded the crowded streets of the city for the open skies of New Mexico, thinking the job of sheriff in a small, quiet town like Never would offer a slower pace and a chance to settle into his own skin. But Never is anything but ordinary.
Still new to the role, Aaron is adapting to the town’s oddities — Strange behavior, unusual disappearances, the occasional unexplainable event — with the kind of steady patience that makes him well-liked by locals. He doesn’t yet realize the town hides supernatural forces in plain sight, but he’s beginning to suspect there’s something off about Never. Oddly enough, it’s a feeling he doesn’t mind. Perhaps it’s because Aaron himself is no stranger to secrecy. Quietly gay in a time and place that offers little safety for it, he’s learned how to guard pieces of himself from the world.
As the mysteries around him grow deeper, Aaron begins to wonder if this strange, watchful town might be the one place where a man like him — One with secrets, heart, and hope — might actually belong.
Jo Dove was born into the wrong shape. She’s known that as long as she’s known anything, and almost as soon as she understood that fundamental fact, she learned how to hide it. Boys weren’t interested in fabrics. Boys didn’t pay attention to fashion. Most of all, boys didn’t cry when they got their hair cut short or got their face shoved into the mud or got a whipping by their papa for all those sins combined. Boys kept their chin up and said Yes’m and Nossir and did their chores and ate their scraps and were grateful, dammit, for every word that didn’t come with a slap. Smart boys kept their mouths shut and their eyes open, until they could steal enough money to disappear.
If boys-who-were-girls couldn’t steal enough, sometimes they found a way to make a deal, and they disappeared anyway. Jo’s deal put her in debt to a demon, but it also opened a door out of Mississippi and straight into a new life. Never might fall short of paradise, but it’s miles better than where she came from, and it brought her to the first taste of home she’s ever known in the arms of the Silk Rose and Madame Dellaphina Jones. She still has a debt to pay. Someday, the devil’s going to collect. But until then, she’ll make the best of this life with her voice and her body and all the charm the good Lord gave her.
