If Mina stared long and hard enough at the harsh fluorescent lighting, she could disappear into the abyss of all the other times she burned under its harsh whiteness–she could forget where she was, how old she was, who she was. Mina wondered if these self-proclaimed staring contests with the lights were the cause of her headaches, or if there was something actually wrong with her.

My name is Saghani, which means Raven in our tongue. Some say with a name like that, I’ve been cursed since the day I was born. Perhaps they are right.
At eighteen years of age, I was already a widow, gathering fish from the nets alongside the other members of the widows’ colony, knee-deep in the frigid water of the Nilak River.

Wade saw the roofline of the house while he hiked along the edge of the forest. He walked past it initially, but the tall spires and darkened stained glass windows’ Gothic look weren’t to be ignored. He’d never seen a real Gothic mansion before—only what he’d seen in movies and knew about from what he read in books.

In 1925, the seven hundred forty-two citizens of Mañana celebrated the town’s third anniversary as an incorporated city in the San Joaquin Valley. A dream of Alexander Jason “A.J.” Ryan—an emigrant from Ohio—he purchased the North Madera Ranch in 1912, then worked with the Secretary of State’s office in Sacramento to establish a town…