Bonus Stories & Scenes

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Between Hour

A Jennie Wren Foster bonus story

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Odile's shop sat on the last human street before the world went strange, and she sold candles to people who were trying to find their way back to something.

That was the trick of the place, the thing her grandmother had taught her with flour on her hands and moonlight on the sill: a candle could be poured to hold more than wax. You gathered the right small hours into it, the smell of a kitchen at...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

Orientation

A Coven General bonus scene. Mr. Grieve’s POV.

Free reader bonus (~1,600 words). The first day, from behind the laminated badge. Jennie Wren Foster.

I arrived at 7:40 on the Monday, which was twenty minutes early, which was deliberate and which I will defend.

A man who arrives on the hour has been waiting somewhere out of sight in order to arrive on the hour, and people can tell. A man who arrives twenty minutes early has simply arrived, and...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Room Next Door

A Coven General bonus scene. Osric’s POV.

Free reader bonus (~1,800 words). Forty-one years, through a wall. Jennie Wren Foster.

The rule was never written down, which is how you know it was serious.

Madame Blackwood did not write things down. She had a horror of it, the way some people have a horror of birds. Everything in her house ran on what had been said in a room, once, to your face, and on the certainty that you would remember...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

What the Ice Remembers

A Midnight Auction bonus scene — after Oath of the Second Forge

Jennie Wren Foster

A free scene for readers, set in the last quiet days before the road to Vesren: a lake past the second waystation, ice thick enough to trust, and a promise finally kept.

The ice held.

I had not been entirely certain it would, walking out onto it with Lira's mittened hand in mine and Thessaly's warning still ringing in both our ears — it froze thick...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Names We Choose ### A bonus scene from The Blood and the Forge #### Kindred's POV

I have had three names now, and only one of them was ever truly mine.

The first was given to me by people who loved me and did not know what they were handing over when they handed it to a god. Ysolde. A soft name, a river-sound name, the kind of name a mother says to a child half asleep. I do not remember the mother. I remember the sound the name made in my own...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Corrected Line

A bonus scene from The Boundary Line (Crabapple Antiques Mysteries, Book Four)

Franny Doyle called the shop on a Tuesday, the first week of December, to say the county had a stamp for it now, and did I want to come watch.

I did not entirely understand what there was to watch. A stamp is a stamp. But Perry was already reaching for his coat before I’d finished relaying the message, which told me this mattered to him in a way that had...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Names of Things

A Midnight Auction bonus scene — after The Broker’s Mask

Jennie Wren Foster

A free scene for readers, set in the days after the last page: the north house at the third lock, the garden going in, and the first morning a freed woman lets herself learn the names of the things that grow along the wall. Riven’s POV. Closed door. ~1,600 words.

I woke, the fourth morning, and did not reach for the count.

That was the thing no one warns you...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

THE MIDNIGHT AUCTION — Bonus Scene ## "Two Cups" ### A free reader bonus, set after Book One · Nox · Jennie Wren Foster

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The mornings are the part I did not know to want.

That is the thing no one warns you about, when you spend a life costing a house to the week and never once letting yourself stand inside it: it is not the lock you end up grateful for. It is the hour after the lock. The grey coming up clean over the river that runs clear here, the...

By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Whispering House

Bonus Content: Nathaniel's Story

A Note to Readers

Thank you for your love of The Whispering House! Many of you have asked about Nathaniel's past—the tragedy that bound him to the house and the love that refused to let him go. This bonus content explores the events that shaped Nathaniel Whitmore into the protective spirit Clara encountered.

Part One: Before the Fire

Chapter 1: The Architect's Dream

Spring 1887

Nathaniel Whitmore stood...

WHAT THE DESK REMEMBERS A Crabapple Antiques Mysteries bonus story Jennie Wren Foster

Kettlebrook, Vermont — October 1966

I have been an archivist for thirty-one years, and the first thing they teach you, if anyone teaches you at all, which they did not teach me, is that a record is only as safe as the person willing to keep it.

I learned that the hard way, the way I have learned everything. You would think, given the work, that I would have a horror of fire, of flood, of the slow brown rot that...

The Watcher

A Coven General bonus scene — Rourke’s POV

Free newsletter exclusive (~1,550 words). The first night, from the other side of the bond. Jennie Wren Foster.

I had been sent to confirm a rumor, and I did not expect the rumor to be tired.

That was the first thing I noticed about her, before the silver, before the rest of it: the woman in the pink scrubs was running on nothing. I have watched a great many humans over a great many years, and you learn to read the body the way you read...

THE LAST LIBRARY OF THE GODS

Bonus Scene — The Cataloguing of Small Things

A deleted scene from the new life, for readers of the Celestial Fold. Valeriana’s point of view.

There is a particular cruelty to mornings, and no one warned me about it in three hundred years of never having one.

For three centuries I woke the way an empire wakes, all at once and already at war, the day’s threats arranged in my mind before my eyes had opened. I did not lie in beds. I rose from them. There is a difference,...

THE FIRST MORNING A bonus scene from The Broken Script of the Stars Kindred’s point of view

This scene takes place the morning after the library came home. If you have not finished the book, know that it will spoil the ending.

I had forgotten what my own weight felt like.

That was the first thing the sun taught me, and it taught me at the treeline, because I could not yet bear the open courtyard. A thousand years is a long time to be a note in a chord instead of a body in a place, and when Soren...

A Quiet Sale

A free bonus scene from The Auction House Affair (Crabapple Antiques Mysteries, Book Three) · Jennie Wren Foster

Kettlebrook, the week after Christmas. For everyone who wanted to know whether the register and the desk ever learned to share a counter.

The week between Christmas and the new year is the only week of the year Crabapple Antiques makes no sense as a business, which is exactly why I keep it open. Nobody buys antiques between the holidays. People return them, or they...

In the shadowed halls of the Hollow Court, where books bite the unwary and rooms rearrange themselves according to political necessity, the Archivist has built a careful life among secrets that aren't hers to keep. But when a mysterious message appears in silver ink that moves across ancient pages, her world of dusty tomes and whispered knowledge collides with forces far older and more dangerous than court intrigue.

Summoned by the enigmatic Adjutant—a man whose true name makes oaths nervous—...

She never believed in magic. He's been protecting her magical bloodline for centuries.

Lyra Nightshade has spent twenty-five years believing she's perfectly ordinary—until silver flames erupt from her fingertips and shatter her carefully constructed world. When mysterious dragon shifter Kieran Shadowmere appears at her door, claiming to be her sworn protector, Lyra discovers she's the last of a powerful magical bloodline that dangerous enemies will kill to possess.

Kieran has waited three...