The Second Coast

His father knew. His father never told him.

Five months after the closed Russian mining town of Severobor, Dr. Rafael Volkov steps off a plane in Salvador, Bahia, with a piece of seven-hundred-year-old parchment in his pocket and a body that no longer quite belongs to him. The silver ring in his iris is permanent now. His resting heart rate is fifty. His hearing has opened up in directions no pathologist's hearing should open. And somewhere in the Bay of All Saints, fishermen have been dying in a pattern the local police are calling a drug cartel.

His aunt Tia Marta is waiting for him at the airport with a small sentence she has been carrying for eighteen years. His father, the quiet Brazilian engineer who died of pancreatic cancer when Rafael was nineteen, was not only a quiet Brazilian engineer. He was a hunter. He hunted the thing in the bay that has been hunting coastal Bahia for four hundred years. He hunted it four times. He never killed it. He died without telling his son what he had done with his life.

In a *terreiro* in the Liberdade neighbourhood, a sixty-eight-year-old *mãe de santo* named Dona Izabel Souza has been waiting thirty-nine years to tell Rafael how much his father loved him. In the fishing villages of the inner bay, a priest with a dead language in his mouth is moving north through his seven-year loop. And in the rainforest interior of the Paraguaçu valley, in the ruins of a Jesuit mission that vanished in 1712, something older than Konstantin is watching from inside a strangler fig - something solitary, silent, and unbothered by sunlight.

By the time Rafael understands what his father was, a man he has come to love will be dead. By the time he understands what else shares the world with the upiry, he will understand that the work his grandfather began in 1934 and his father carried in 1987 has just become his own. And on the dying lips of a four-hundred-year-old Jesuit, in pre-revolutionary Russian he catches only in fragments, a place name is waiting for him:

Pietralta.

The Second Coast is Book Two of Calix Sanguinis - a propulsive, historically grounded horror thriller that carries Dr. Rafael Volkov from the Siberian polar night of Book One into the colonial cobblestones of Salvador, the Candomblé houses of Liberdade, and the living forest of the Bahian interior, toward a cave outside the former city of Ryazan, where a priest walked into the dark in December 1237 and never fully came back.

For fans of Justin Cronin's The Passage, Christopher Buehlman's The Lesser Dead, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, and Adam Nevill's The Ritual.

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