Delphine went missing on a Tuesday in September, and by Friday the whole parish had decided she'd run off looking for something better. But Mama Celeste knows the truth: the girl's money is still under the floorboard. Her mother's locket is still behind the chimney brick. She didn't leave.

She was taken.

The man on the hill has had many names—Étienne Lemaire in the 1800s, Esteban Lamar later, Stephen Marsh now. The property records show the same descriptions across decades: dark hair, thin build, prominent cheekbones. The same man, seen by different census workers over sixty years, always looking roughly the same age.

Every thirty-three years, someone disappears. Someone who won't be missed. And the cycle starts again.

When Mama Celeste's grandson Marcus returns from the war, she tells him everything her grandmother's grandmother passed down: the ritual, the body-stealing, the binding that might stop it. Armed with bones carried from Africa through generations of keepers, they go to the house on the hill to end what should have ended long ago.

But destroying a monster is only half the battle. What do you do with its knowledge? What do you do with a book that won't burn, pages that won't tear, secrets that whisper immortality to a young Black man in 1920s Louisiana who has already seen too much death?

Some curses don't end when the monster dies. Some curses just change hosts.