Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and from Where We Go at Night by Ikwo Ntekim, which releases on October 27th 2026.

To name a thing is to see it, and no one can see the folk if they don’t want to be seen.

As far as seventeen-year-old Trixie Godfrey is concerned, her hometown of Woods Crossing would be perfect —if not for the dark world of fae and magic lurking in the shadows. Growing up, her grandfather, Pops, never allowed her to get close to them—those aberrations, Mama used to say.

But on graduation night, when Trixie sneaks home past curfew she witnesses Pops’ brutal murder in a moment so sudden, so inhuman she can no longer avoid the fae. Those without the Sight will blame wild animals, calling Pops’ death an accident, a tragedy, but Trixie knows the truth because she has the Sight. She spent years burying her “gift”, but she needs to revive it now.

Determined to get justice for Pops and rid Woods Crossing of its monsters, Trixie ventures into the intriguing but deceitful world of the fae—only to find herself caught in a power struggle between ancient families more terrible and crueler than hers could ever be. Or so she thinks….

EXCERPT

PROLOGUE
TEN YEARS AGO

I was seven the first time I saw an aberration, though at the time I didn’t think of her as something to be feared. I had a habit of wandering in the surrounding woods when Mama was too busy homemaking to play with me. Not that I needed much encouragement at that age; all she had to do was flick her cigarette in the direction of the back door for me to go running out. “Keep the swing in sight,” she’d holler after me from the kitchen table, Daddy seated nearby with his arm around her waist as she rolled out dough. Mama and Daddy were each other’s biggest focus and distraction; they couldn’t bear to be apart. It didn’t take long to notice they either checked in on me during the first fifteen minutes or not at all.

My favorite thing to do on days like this was explore the East Woods. If I walked thirty minutes against the afternoon sun, through the bramble with only my shadow to keep me company, I’d reach a clearing where sunlight filtered through willow branches and neon leaves. It was there I went to talk with the trees and share my seven-year-old burdens. Until they started talking back.

She walked out of an oak tree, but for years I told myself she came around it. After all, when she appeared, it had been too bright to see exactly where she’d come from.

She was striking, taller than Mama and—to my embarrassment I admitted—much more beautiful. Angelic, even. I thought perhaps Mary mother of God had come all the way down from heaven to scold me for daring to disobey Mama and leaving the yard. Her crown was the first thing I registered, haloed around her head—seven, no, eleven copper spikes connected at the tips by a string of fire opals. Silver threads and strings of citrine and black pearls were so finely woven into her kinky tar-black hair I couldn’t tell where her jewels began and her hair ended. Her gown, despite having adopted the same color and texture as the tree she came from, ridges and all, swayed in glittering shades of bark when she moved. And her skin—her skin was not tan or brown or anything common, but bronzed and impossibly smooth. She was a belabored carving polished to perfection with oil.

No brown woman had any business looking that ethereal. She

had to be a fairy-tale princess. The kind of princess found in books Daddy once tried to get me to read before he began tossing them behind my bed, calling them fools’ tales.

“Miss, are you lost?” I had asked her, never frightened, only amazed.

She tilted her head and mimicked me. Her words came out fragmented, as though from a broken speaker. As though she weren’t used to speaking. “Miss, are you lost?”

“What’s your name?” I tried again. “What’s your name?”

“Mama calls me Trixie, but I don’t think I like it.”

She considered this carefully, drumming her fingers on her chin. Each fingertip was encased in a filigreed claw ring sharp enough to carve out a heart. “Tricks-y?”

“No, Trixie. Like, ‘Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.’ I mean, that’s not why they named me that. I like Trisha just fine, but—”

It happened like a skipped beat.

One moment she was across the clearing, the next right in front of me. My words halted in my throat, lodged like a stuck chicken bone. Thinking back, I was probably her height now, but back then she seemed absolutely giant. She bent so close I could taste her breath, honeyed. She put a claw to my lips, cool despite the day’s heat. “You should know better, little one.” She tsked. “You smell of Daniel Godfrey, so you should know to always keep your name to your person.”

I blushed furiously. I tried to focus on her words.

Keep my name? I thought.

“Your name in its entirety,” she responded like she could read my mind. “You may be wondering, What’s in a name but letters and spaces? To us, they are entire lives lived and everything that transpires in between.”

“I don’t . . . Do you mean like a secret?” I managed to ask.

“Like a secret,” she confirmed with a long, sharp-toothed smile. “Well, then how would people know what to call me?”

“Give them a different name. Or a half name. Any name that doesn’t show who you are.”

“I don’t think Mr. Petrelli is gonna go for that.” I giggled, imagining telling my second-grade teacher to call me something new. “What do I call you, then? If we’re to be friends, we should have names for each other.”

“Friends?” Her face split into a wide grin; she was even more beautiful. “Yes, let us be friends! I’ll be your Auntie Hattie and you’ll be my Trixie.”

I’ll never know how it happened, but I turned up at home with twelve hours behind me and a furious trio of parents before me. “I wasn’t gone that long,” I cried as Mama spanked me with a switch from Pops’s oak tree. He said he’d planted it himself when he was a boy, but just last week Mr. Petrelli told us oak trees took hundreds of years to get that big, so Pops must have been fibbin’.

Whack!

“It was one hour! I checked my watch the whole time.”

Mama’s anger could not be contained. I hollered so loud, Jesus himself would have said it wasn’t that serious, but still I wailed and eventually Daddy had to step into the hallway before calling the sheriff’s office. He had to let them know I’d made it back home safe and sound.

Pops eventually wrestled the switch from Mama. “Can’t beat the melanin out of her, Nicky.”

“That’s not—” Mama dropped her voice to a whisper, and peered around the corner to make sure Daddy was still on the phone. “She’s seen that Black Madonna. I know it. I can feel it in my gut.”

“Please, Nicky, we both know how Sightless you are,” Pops scoffed. “My Sight may not be twenty-twenty, but I’ve seen enough to know that . . . that she ain’t holy. She is not good. A-and Brad does not approve of your goings-on. He says we should have her baptized.”

“If he’s that bothered, Brad and his God are welcome to find a new house to live in like he’s been promising for years.”

“Keep your voice down!” Mama hissed.

Pops continued unfazed. “You wouldn’t know the Black Madonna, as you call her, from one of Trixie’s dolls. Now, unhand my baby girl.” Tucking me into bed that night, Pops kissed me on my forehead and whispered, “Don’t be too mad at her. We do silly things when we’re scared. But tell me, you really saw them, didn’t you?”

Who was them? I shook my head, Mama’s beating still fresh in my mind.

“Young lady, if you learn to lie this young, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?” He tsked at my silence. “You saw them, didn’t you?”

This time I nodded. “Just one lady.”

Maybe Pops would tell me what I had seen and help me make sense of Mama’s explosion. Maybe he’d know where I had been during those lost hours.

“Trixie, I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said as he smoothed my covers, tucking me in further. “Your mama is right on one thing— there are no innocent faeries, and you’d do good to remember that. The best of them will steal your socks from your feet and say you weren’t wearing them in the first place; the worst will set your feet on fire so you never get the chance to steal them back. But the last thing you want to do is be afraid of them. Spend enough time with them and you’ll find they’re just children who never outgrew their playtime follies.”

“Faeries?” I said, my heart galloping. “So faeries . . . are real? Auntie Hattie is a faerie? Or is it Black Madonna?”

Pops tousled my head. “She told you to call her Hattie?”

“Well, Auntie Hattie,” I clarified. “But why does Mama call her the Black Madonna? She’s very brown, if anything.”

“When no one is lookin’, your mama can be a little superstitious. Even with her poor Sight, she once caught a glance of your Auntie Hattie without her jewels and beauty, and it frightened her because she couldn’t make sense of what she saw.”

“Mama needs glasses?”

“A special kind of prescription. Without it, her own shadow makes her jump. But at the end of the day”—Pops leaned in and I stilled, ready to receive the secret—“Auntie Hattie is more girl than monster, not from heaven but from the soil itself. She is without teeth; she will not harm you. That you saw her in the first place means your Second Sight is quite powerful. Or perhaps she was in a playful mood and let you gaze upon her. Either way it takes courage to see what’s in front of you.”

I was beaming at being called powerful and brave by the most powerful man I knew. “I have a Second Sight.”

“We Godfreys have that ability to see what may not want to be seen, even if they layer on the heaviest of Glamours. I have it, and you have it too. The Second Sight is a gift that has to be used, and if you go years shoving it down as your mother has, it will do what unwanted things do and simply disappear.”

“I want to see where Auntie Hattie lives.”

Pops peered at me from the top of his glasses, contemplating. “One day, when you’re a little older. I need to get some things ready before I take you. Make sure it’s fit for a visit from the likes of Trixie Godfrey. Until then, let’s keep this faerie talk our little secret. Yes? Promise?”

“Promise,” I said, spitting in my palm like I’d seen the big kids at the playground do and holding it out for Pops to shake.

But over the next four years promises would be broken and everything would change. Daddy would die, and a year after that, Mama would up and leave. In the months after Daddy’s untimely accident, it became clear Mama couldn’t or wouldn’t lift a finger to take care of me, and I grew lonelier, living in the cloud of her sadness. It fell on Pops to raise me, but he was barely around himself. He was always disappearing on long afternoon walks and evening strolls. When he’d return, he’d be wearing odd clothes made of rich materials I’d never seen around the house, and I imagined Auntie Hattie had gotten her faithful subjects to weave them for him, custom made in her magical kingdom. As far as I was concerned, Pops was living in a fairy tale, and I could maybe join him if only I was on my best behavior.

But try as I might, Pops never honored his promise to take me with him to Auntie Hattie’s. To combat my requests, he always had an excuse followed by another. First it was “My knee is acting up again,” and then “Who’ll keep your mama company?” and finally “Auntie who, now? You ain’t got any aunties.”

There was a time living with him that I fully thought I was going crazy, and the only way to keep my sanity was proving for myself Auntie Hattie had indeed been real, and not a figment of my imagination. So, not unlike Pops, I began sneaking away to the clearing where I had first seen Auntie Hattie. She hadn’t left a calling card, but I knew in my gut if I practiced patience and kept going to the place we’d first met, I’d inevitably run into her again. And that’s exactly what happened. Auntie Hattie visited me in the clearing time and time again. She, like Pops, refused to show me her home, but it was no matter because I grew content with the knowledge she had indeed been real. To not rouse suspicion, I’d go to the clearing every other week and we’d play all sorts of games and trade stories. We did this through the summer until one day without warning she failed to show up. And no matter how many times I returned, she never did.

Spending time with Pops became everything. Sure, I had to

share that time with his unknowable world, but my options for company were limited, and you know what they say about beggars and their options. The moment Pops set foot in the house, it would be as though the sun came out and Mama’s depression had no place to hide. Laughter, light, and normalcy could always be found in Pops, and when he got home, I’d be standing there with open arms saying, Welcome back. I have missed you.

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