The Deadsong

Read The Deadsong Storyline:

Gina Starkweather lives
in Hemming, a rural Tennessee town where thirteen children die each year
from snakebite. It has been an expected phenomenon for nearly twenty
years, and only the victims' mothers suspect why. They wouldn't have had
children at all, had a stranger not appeared and promised them the gift
of life. These desperate mothers finally bore children without knowing
their offspring would never reach adulthood. It has been written off as
myth, a local legend that speaks of one called the Keeper of Serpents
who comes in the night with his army of snakes to claim those born under
the stranger's contract before their eighteenth birthday. When Gina
learns of her own mother's deal with Death, she and her brother set out
to find the Keeper before her time runs out.