The Coven’s Last Human

A Steamy Sapphic Paranormal Witch Romance
by Maeve Hollow

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The Coven’s Last Human book cover by Maeve Hollow

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Witch × Reporter, Immortal × Mortal, Age Gap (390 Years), Ice Queen, Small-Town Secrets, Gothic, Forced Proximity, She Always Asks First, Power Exchange, Light Bondage, Touch Starved, Found Family, Standalone

Every thirty years, the town keeps one woman. This year it chose me.

Anya Serrano doesn’t scare. She’s an investigative reporter with a recorder that never stops running, and the last editor who told her to drop a story became the subject of one.

Then her friend Leah, an archivist in a tiny Vermont town, goes missing, and a scheduled email arrives with three names, two photographs, and one line: If I’ve stopped answering, go. Don’t let them be kind to you.

Thornwick is the kindest town Anya has ever seen. Everybody smiles. Everybody gives her bread. Everybody says Leah left. And every woman in town has an iron lantern with her name on it, waiting for the Vigil on the last night of October. Every one but the empty hook by the church door.

Rhea Thorne keeps Thornwick. She’s tall and cold and wears thirteen river-stone rings, and when Anya asks her age on the record, she says three hundred and ninety. Nobody laughs.

She also asks before she touches. Every time. Out loud.

Something under the church has learned Anya’s name. A black tree is growing over her heart. The town has started calling her the Last Human, and Rhea knows exactly what that means, because she’s the one who writes the tags.

Anya came to find one missing woman. She’s found seven. And she’s falling for the witch who signed for every one of them.

The Coven’s Last Human is a high-heat sapphic paranormal witch romance with an ageless witch matriarch and the reporter who won’t stop asking questions, a small town with a terrible secret, consent as the magic system, a 390-year age gap, forced proximity, an orchard that blooms in a blizzard, a lot of on-page spice, and a guaranteed HEA. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A 390-year-old witch matriarch who says “May I?” before every single touch
✅ A reporter heroine who records everything, refuses to be anybody’s sacrifice, and makes her love interest go on the record
✅ A Vermont town of lanterns, apple orchards and unlocked doors, with something very old breathing under the church
✅ An ice queen whose weather breaks when she does: hail from a clear sky, thunder in the snow, forty trees in flower
✅ Consent as the magic system: every yes said out loud, every no finally heard
✅ Ward-light restraints, edging, “plain words,” and a strap-on hand-turned from an apple tree in 1924
✅ Real accountability: no easy forgiveness, a confession in her own handwriting, and “you don’t get to keep the one you like”
✅ A whole town learning to say yes, or no, for itself, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including a strap-on, magical restraints, edging and orgasm control), consensual power exchange, a town ritual that selects women to be sacrificed, women held captive and kept alive underground, magical coercion and attempts to compel consent, the erasure of a character’s memories, the abduction of a side character, the death of a secondary character, references to past domestic violence, nosebleeds and physical collapse, rapid magical aging, and strong language. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One

Twenty-eight nights to the Vigil.

Leah Whitcomb had been missing for eleven days when her email told me to come and find her.

It was a scheduled send, the kind you set up when you fully expect to be around to cancel it. It landed at 6:02 that Saturday morning with no subject line, and I read it standing in my kitchen with one sock on. I’d read it maybe forty times since. I read it again now, parked in a gravel pull-off on a mountain road with the engine ticking and the heater blowing burnt dust at my shins, because the next bend was Thornwick and I wanted the words fresh.

Three names, typed in a column.

Opal Greer. Dot Kessel. Ruth Calder.

Two attachments. The first was a scan of a studio portrait, sepia, the corners foxed, a date penciled on the mount: 1911. A woman of about fifty in a high collar, hair pinned up, a face like a locked till. Handsome. Not kind. The second was a phone picture of a newspaper page, the Thornwick Courier, autumn 2019, a ribbon-cutting outside a town hall. Same woman, third from the left, holding the scissors.

Not a similar woman. Not a great-granddaughter with the family chin. I’d put the two faces side by side on my laptop and zoomed until the pixels gave out. Same notch in the left eyebrow. Same crooked incisor showing in the same closed, grudging almost-smile. A hundred and eight years apart, and she hadn’t picked up so much as a crow’s foot.

Under the attachments, one line.

If I’ve stopped answering, go. Don’t let them be kind to you.

That was all of it. No Dear Anya, no sign-off. Leah was an archivist. She labeled her leftovers. In the fourteen months I’d known her she had never sent me a message without a salutation and a properly formatted date, and she had helped me pry four years of sealed coroner’s files out of a county that would have preferred to burn them. If Leah had skipped the niceties, she’d written this fast, or frightened, or both.

I’d called her cell. Voicemail, and then a full mailbox. I’d called the Thornwick Municipal Archive and gotten Leah’s own dry voice on a recording, reciting the hours. I’d called the town clerk, who told me Ms. Whitcomb had left her position, and no, she couldn’t say where to, and wasn’t it a lovely time of year to visit.

So here I was. Visiting.

Nobody knew it but me. That’s the freelance life. No desk, no editor expecting me Monday, a mother in Tucson I spoke to at Christmas, and a landlord who’d notice I was gone when the rent bounced. I used to count that as freedom. On that road, with the spruce pressing in on both sides, it felt more like a description somebody else might find useful.

I put the phone face down on the passenger seat and checked the recorder in my jacket pocket. Red light, steady. It’s a little Sony, older than my last three relationships combined, and it runs from the minute I get out of bed on a working day until the minute I get back in. People call that paranoia. People have never had an editor look them dead in the eye and say, I don’t recall that conversation.

I pulled back onto the road.

The mountains up here weren’t the postcard kind. They were close and dark and furred with evergreens, and the maples that should have been showing off had already dumped their leaves in the ditches. The sky was the color of a nickel. The rental’s dashboard said thirty-one degrees, and the grass on the verge stood white and stiff with frost at two in the afternoon.

Then the road came around the shoulder of the hill, and there were roses.

I took my foot off the gas.

They climbed both sides of a stone arch that straddled the road, a great heaped tangle of them, red as a cut thumb and wide open. In October. In northern Vermont. Every petal carried a rim of ice, fine and white as sugar on a glass, and they were blooming straight through it as if the frost were somebody else’s problem. I rolled the window down. The scent came into the car so thick I could taste it, and under the sweetness sat something colder. Wet stone. Apples kept in a cellar.

A painted board hung from the keystone.

THORNWICK. FOUNDED 1692. WE KEEP OUR OWN.

“Sure you do,” I said, for the benefit of the tape, and drove under the arch.

The recorder screamed.

Not the polite chirp it makes when the card’s full. A burst of static, loud, right against my ribs, as if I’d driven through a live wire. I swore, swerved, and slapped a hand over my pocket. Then it quit. I dug the thing out on the next straight stretch with my pulse banging in my throat. Red light, steady. Timer ticking over. Perfectly fine.

In the mirror the roses nodded on their arch.

There wasn’t any wind.

Thornwick had one main street, and it took me forty minutes to learn that everyone on it used the same two words.

“She left,” said the woman behind the bakery counter, tucking a loaf I hadn’t ordered into a paper bag and waving off my wallet.

“Left,” agreed the postmaster, with a small downward nod, the way you’d confirm a death.

“Oh, Leah? She left.” That was a man repainting the hardware store’s trim, who then climbed down his ladder to tell me my rear tire looked soft and to fill it for me from a compressor without being asked.

Nobody said where. Nobody said why. Nobody asked who I was or what I wanted with her, which in a town of four hundred people is the strangest thing of all. They smiled. They gave me things. They were, every last one of them, extremely kind.

I wrote don’t let them on the back of my hand in ballpoint and went to find a bed.

The Hook & Lantern stood on the east side of the square, three stories of white clapboard with pansies frothing out of the window boxes, purple and gold and glazed with ice. The woman who ran it was on the front desk with her boots up, eating a pear with a paring knife. She was tall and red-haired and wrapped in a cardigan roughly the size of a horse blanket, with a pencil stuck through her bun and a laugh I’d heard from the porch.

“You’re the reporter,” she said.

“Journalist.”

“Is there a difference?”

“About eleven thousand dollars a year. In the wrong direction.”

That got the laugh again, full and unembarrassed. She swung her feet down and offered me a sticky hand. “Tamsin Fen. I’ve put you in four. It’s got the good bed and the bad radiator. Three has the good radiator, but three also has a man who sells septic systems, and he’s paid through Friday and I’ve grown fond of him.”

“I didn’t make a reservation.”

“No,” Tamsin agreed, and turned the register around for me to sign.

I let that sit while I wrote my name. The page above mine went back two weeks: the septic man, a pair of leaf-peepers from Ohio, a birding club. No Leah, but then Leah had lived here. An apartment over the archive, she’d told me once, with a view of a church that had no roof.

“I’m looking for Leah Whitcomb,” I said.

Tamsin cut a slice of pear and ate it off the blade. “Leah left.”

There it was. Same two words, same little dip of the chin.

“So I keep hearing. Where to?”

“Away.”

“That’s a direction. I was hoping for a place.”

“It’s a wonderful direction, though. People speak very highly of it.” She said it lightly, and her eyes were green and friendly and gave me nothing whatsoever. “You’ll want supper. I do a chicken thing on Saturdays that’s made grown men propose.”

“When did she go?”

“Couldn’t tell you the day.”

“Did she say goodbye?”

“Leah wasn’t a big goodbye person.”

“Was. Wasn’t.” I capped the pen. “You’re all very comfortable with the past tense.”

For half a second the knife stopped moving. It was a tiny thing. If I hadn’t spent eight years watching people decide whether to lie to me, I’d have missed it.

“Left her bike, though,” Tamsin said.

Then she looked faintly annoyed, as though her own mouth had gone and done that without clearing it first. She dropped the pear core in a saucer, wiped her fingers on the cardigan, and came around the desk with a brass key on a wooden fob.

“Stairs are murder, the hot water takes a minute, and if you hear scratching it’s the cat. His name’s Gerald. He bites people he likes.”

“And people he doesn’t?”

“Ignores them completely. It’s very hurtful.”

I followed her as far as the front window and stopped.

The square was a long rectangle of grass gone silver with frost, an iron hand-pump in the middle, a brick town hall with a clock on the west side. A mustard-yellow emergency siren sat on a pole beside it, the old civil-defense kind with a horn like a tulip. At the north end stood the church, or what remained. Four stone walls and a tower, open to the sky, with a rowan growing up through the place the altar used to be.

All around the green, men on ladders were hanging lanterns.

Iron and glass, big as birdcages, one to a bracket. There must have been two hundred brackets, bolted to every lamppost and porch rail and shopfront, and from each lantern hung a paper tag on a twist of red thread, turning in the cold.

“What’s all this?”

“Lantern Vigil. Last night of the month.” Tamsin leaned on the sill beside me. She smelled like woodsmoke and pear. “One for every woman in town. We light them at dusk and stand around feeling significant, and then there’s cider. Mine’s third from the pump. It has my name on it and everything. I feel very catalogued.”

“Every woman?”

“Every one.”

“Since when?”

“Since ever. Since before the inn.” She shrugged. “It’s pretty. You’ll see.”

I was counting. I can’t help it; I count exits, I count the cameras in a lobby, I count how many times a sheriff says to the best of my knowledge. The men worked clockwise and they’d nearly closed the loop. Lantern, lantern, lantern, each on its bracket, each with its fluttering tag.

Except one.

Nearest the church, on the last post before the ruined doorway, an iron hook stuck out over the path with nothing on it. The ladder had gone right past. No lantern leaned against the post waiting its turn.

“They missed a spot,” I said.

Tamsin looked where I was looking. Her face did something complicated and brief, a door opening on a room and shutting again.

“Someone’s always running late,” she said, and went to see about the chicken.

I was out there at dusk reading tags when the square went quiet.

I’d worked my way around maybe sixty of them with my phone, photographing each little rectangle of card. Eleanor Pruitt. Wynn Abara. Tamsin Fen, sure enough, third from the pump. All in the same hand, a slanting copperplate in black ink, the kind of penmanship nobody’s been taught in a century. I was thinking that somebody had sat down and written two hundred women’s names without a single blot, and wondering who, when I noticed I could hear my own breathing.

The hammering had stopped. So had the talk. A dog that had been barking at a ladder for ten minutes shut its mouth and sat.

I turned around.

She was crossing the green from the west side, not hurrying, and Thornwick rearranged itself around her as she came. I don’t have a better way to put it. A man took off his cap. Two women with a pram drew to the edge of the path and stood. The fellow up the nearest ladder climbed down and held it steady with both hands, though nobody was on it. Not one of them looked afraid. They looked the way people do in church when the organ starts: sorted.

She was tall. That was the first thing. Tall and straight-backed in a black wool coat that fell to her boots, with black hair drawn off her face and one stripe of pure silver running back from the left temple. Forty, I’d have said. Forty-one. A long severe mouth. Cheekbones you could have opened a letter on. She wore no gloves, and her hands were bare and pale in the cold and heavy with rings. Grey stone, brown stone, river-smooth, stacked two deep on some fingers.

Thirteen. I count things.

She walked straight to me and stopped a little closer than strangers stop.

“Miss Serrano.”

Her voice was low, with an accent I couldn’t place, something that had been English a long time ago and then been left out in the weather. She didn’t raise it. She didn’t need to. The whole square was holding still to hear.

“I didn’t catch yours,” I said.

“You didn’t ask for it.” A beat. “Rhea Thorne.”

“Thorne. As in—”

“As in.”

Up close she smelled of rain on slate and those same cold apples I’d caught at the arch. Her eyes were grey, very light, and they went over me without any hurry: the wet boots, the rain shell, the ballpoint on the back of my hand. They paused there. I resisted the urge to put the hand in my pocket.

“Tamsin has you in four,” she said. “Ask her for the second quilt. She’ll claim there isn’t one.”

“You know my room.”

“I know your room. I know the plate on your rental and the name of the man who owns the agency. I know your piece on the Marlow County coroner.” Her head tipped a degree. “You were unkind to him.”

“He lost four women in a filing cabinet.”

“I didn’t say he hadn’t earned it.”

I’ll be honest about what was happening to me, because I try to be, on tape and off. I’ve interviewed senators. I’ve sat across a prison table from a man who’d done things with a hacksaw. I do not get rattled by people with power, I get interested, and interest is a cool, dry feeling that lives behind my eyes.

This wasn’t behind my eyes. This was a slow, hot, stupid pulse that had started somewhere under my navel the second she said my name and was now working its way down. My nipples had gone tight against my shirt. I could feel the seam of my jeans. She was a stranger, she was almost certainly why I was here, forty people were watching, and my body had looked at all that and decided what it wanted was to find out how those rings felt.

I filed that under later and absolutely not.

Her gaze dropped to my jacket pocket. “Has it been running since the arch?”

“It’s always running.”

“Good. Then you’ll have me exactly, and we needn’t argue later about what was said.” She folded those hands in front of her. When she did I saw the scars: a pale ridge across each palm, old and straight, as if she’d once closed both fists around a blade and pulled. “You’ll want to ask me something rude, Miss Serrano. Go ahead. I find it saves time.”

I had a dozen. Where’s Leah. Who’s the woman with the scissors. Why does your whole town recite the same two words like a catechism. Every one of them would have told her what I was holding.

So I asked the one that would tell me something about her.

“How old are you?”

Behind me, somebody dropped a hammer.

Rhea Thorne didn’t so much as blink.

“Three hundred and ninety,” she said. “In March.”

I laughed. It was a good line, and she’d delivered it without a flicker, and I’ve always had a weakness for a woman who can be funny with a straight face.

Nobody else laughed.

Not a smile. Not a snort from the back. Forty-odd people in a frozen square, and the man with the ladder studied his boots, and one of the women with the pram reached down and tucked the blanket in tighter. My laugh went out over the grass alone and didn’t come back.

I’ve been in rooms where a joke died. This wasn’t that. This was a room where nobody had heard a joke.

“Well,” I said. My mouth had gone dry. “You don’t look a day over three fifty.”

That got me something. The corner of that long mouth moved a quarter of an inch.

“You’re kind.”

“I’m really not.”

“No.” She was looking at my mouth when she said it. Not coyly. She looked the way you’d read a line of text, left to right, and then her eyes came back up to mine and stayed there. “I don’t believe you are. It makes a change.”

The pulse between my legs turned into an ache. I was wet. Standing in a town square at thirty-one degrees in front of my best suspect, slick straight through my underwear from a look and a number. I would have paid real money for that not to be true.

I think she knew. I think that’s the part I couldn’t forgive her for, that first night. Her nostrils flared, very slightly, and something went through her face too quick to name, and then it was gone and she was a tall cold woman in a coat again.

“Come up to the house tomorrow,” she said. “Ten o’clock. Bring your machine.”

“What’ll I get on it?”

“Whatever I decide you can have.”

“That’s not how an interview works.”

“It’s how this one will.” She turned to go. The square breathed in, ready to start moving. Then she stopped, and spoke over her shoulder, and for the first time the level voice had a thread of something else in it. “Miss Serrano. Stay out of the church. The floor’s gone in places.”

“Is that a warning or a dare?”

She did look back then. Grey eyes, silver stripe, the last of the daylight going red behind her.

“You’d take it as a dare either way,” Rhea Thorne said. “I’d only like it noted that I asked.”

She walked on. The cap went back on the man’s head. The dog remembered the ladder. Hammers started up around the green one by one, and Thornwick went on hanging lanterns for its women as though nothing at all had crossed the grass.

On the inn porch, Tamsin was leaning in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder.

“Well,” she called. “She likes you.”

“That was liking?”

“She told you where not to go. Most people she lets find out.”

Room four had the good bed. It also had a second quilt, at the bottom of the wardrobe under a spare pillow, exactly where an innkeeper would hide a thing she’d sworn didn’t exist.

I lay under both of them around midnight with the radiator knocking and Gerald, a gray tom the size of a carry-on, kneading my shin. I had my earbuds in and the recorder on my chest. I always play the day back. You hear what you missed. The pause before an answer, the word somebody swapped out halfway through.

The arch first. I’d braced for it and still flinched: my own voice, sure you do, then that shriek of static, raw and huge, then road noise and me swearing.

The bakery. The postmaster. She left. Left. Oh, Leah? She left. Stacked up like that, with nothing between them, it sounded less like agreement and more like a line they’d all been handed.

Tamsin. Left her bike, though. I marked the timestamp.

Then the square.

Miss Serrano.

God. It was worse in my ears than it had been on the grass. Without the coat and the cheekbones and forty witnesses, there was only the voice, close and unhurried, right up against the drum. I shut my eyes. My hand had come to rest flat on my stomach, under the quilts, and it wasn’t thinking about journalism.

You’ll want to ask me something rude. Go ahead.

How old are you?

The clang of the hammer. A beat of open air.

Three hundred and ninety.

And under it, something else.

I opened my eyes.

I thumbed back ten seconds and turned the volume all the way up.

How old are you? Clang. Air. Three hundred and ninety—

There. Beneath her voice, tucked into the hiss, so near the microphone it might have been lips against the grille. A woman. Not Rhea; higher, softer, cracked at the edges as if she hadn’t used it in a long while.

Anya.

I played it again. And again. I pressed the earbuds in with both thumbs until it hurt.

Anya.

Nobody had stood that close to me. Nobody in that whole silent square had opened their mouth. I’d been right there, I’d have sworn to it in court, and the only sounds in the world had been a dropped hammer and a tall woman telling me the truth.

On the tape, patient as breath, the voice said my name a third time.

At the foot of the bed Gerald lifted his head, flattened his ears, and stared at the window.

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For the Record — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

The night of the last chapter, behind the bedroom door Anya always shuts the recorder off at, Rhea asks for the one thing she has never been given: leave it running. A hand-turned applewood strap, a full confession for the tape, and a playback neither of them will ever print.

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