The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  The whales were still there. I saw them sometimes, swimming through the sky. So was Tom Minniq. Still sort of a demon, but diminished now. Small enough to exist in stasis.

  “I love you, Ronan,” he said.

  “I love you, too.”

  In the filthy mirror, I could see my mother and father crossing through the Sixth Street Park. Coming my way.

  “What would it look like to all these people,” he asked, “if I kissed you right now?”

  “As far as I can tell, people try real hard not to see any evidence of the . . . other side? So, probably by some magical coincidence, absolutely no one would happen to be looking in this direction when you did.”

  He leaned forward, kissed me soft and gentle on the lips. Wick laughed. No one else saw.

  “Fate is a fucking nasty son of a bitch,” Dom said, getting up to go. “For you of all people, who ran screaming away from Hudson the first chance he got, to be trapped here for all eternity.”

  “It’s not so bad,” was all I said. I’d already tried to tell him what I’d learned. More than once. And I failed, every time.

  It’s okay to love something that you hate.

  Just like it’s okay to hate something that you love.

  And we all have to learn to love the cages we’re in, because we carry them with us wherever we go.

  Acknowledgments

  First off, I must acknowledge that the Hudson of this book—while deeply rooted in my own experience growing up there—is not the Hudson of reality. No character in this book maps onto anyone in real life. No business mentioned in these pages is intended to mirror any actual establishment, even if they share the same name (except for the Pizza Pit, which really did make the best pizza on the planet, and which really has been gone for decades).

  I do owe some huge debts of gratitude to real people in the real Hudson, however.

  The Hudson Area Library is a magnificent community resource, and the staff was incredibly helpful in the course of researching this book—particularly when it came to accessing the archives in the History Room. Big gratitude to Brenda Shufelt, Emily Chameides, and Brigitte Gfeller. It is true that I’ve taken some dramatic liberties with my representation of how whaling happened in Hudson, but that’s not due to any deficiency in the archives—when the stories I’d heard as a kid conflicted with the actual history . . . I went with the stories I’d heard as a kid.

  Amber Kline gave me invaluable insight into the incredible work of the Columbia County Department of Social Services.

  The team of Kelley Drahushuk and Alan Coon have built a magnificent space for local artists at the Spotty Dog, one of my favorite bookstores on the planet. I’m profoundly grateful to them, as I am to all independent booksellers everywhere.

  Giovanni di Mola was generous with his time, and helped me understand the perspectives of some of the first-wave artist arrivals who set the stage for Hudson’s transformation. The blogs of Sam Pratt and Carole Osterink were similarly helpful.

  My mother, Deborah Miller, gave me free room and board when I needed to come up to Hudson to do research and reacquaint myself with the local ghosts. She also taught me how to be a writer.

  I owe Seth Fishman so much that it’s hard not to sound repetitious about it, but one thing worth calling out here is that when I went to him and said, “Everybody says the smart career move is to stick to one genre, but I have a creepy supernatural thriller I really, really wanna write,” he said what he’s always said: “Write what you want to write and let me worry about everything else.”

  Zachary Wagman made this book sparkle, knowing exactly how to slash and burn and streamline to bring the edgy thriller pacing to the forefront. Reading through the galleys for last-pass copyedits, I kept thinking, Damn, Zack, this thing is really humming!

  The Ecco team of Sara Birmingham and Martin Wilson and Co. have always made me feel confident that my work will get the support it needs to reach the people it needs to reach.

  The gentrification of Hudson is real—but so is the resistance. I salute the folks who’ve been fighting to keep low-income residents in their homes and preserve some of what has always made the city special—they’d never make any of the mistakes made by the 1,000 percent–fictional resistance in these pages.

  Ronan Szepessy is an only child, and maybe if he had an awesome sibling like my sister, Sarah, he would have turned out better. But having her as a cheerleader and friend when I was a lonely, bullied, miserable teenager made a huge difference, and I owe her much more than I can ever give back.

  Finally—and forever—I must acknowledge Juancy Rodriguez, my husband and my hero, without whom none of this would have happened.

  About the Author

  SAM J. MILLER is the Nebula Award–winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best book of the year) and Blackfish City (a Nebula Award finalist and a John W. Campbell Award winner). Sam is a recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Workshop. His short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He lives in New York City.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Sam J. Miller

  The Art of Starving

  Blackfish City

  Destroy All Monsters

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE BLADE BETWEEN. Copyright © 2020 by Sam J. Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Ecco® and HarperCollins® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.

  FIRST EDITION

  Whale illustration by Alex Rockheart/Shutterstock, Inc.

  Cover design by Elizabeth Yaffe

  Cover images by Steve Woods Photography/Getty (Whale); Bert Flint/Shutterstock (Ink)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miller, Sam J., author.

  Title: The blade between: a novel / Sam J. Miller.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020014152 | ISBN 9780062969828 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062969859 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Ghost stories. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.I55288 B58 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  Digital Edition DECEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-296985-9

  Version 10222020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-296982-8

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