SHADOWS OF THE LAMP • BOOK 2

The Alchemist of Westgrave Street

By Vesper Starforge

In gas-lit Victorian London, one disgraced sorcerer and one stubborn scholar must trust each other with their secrets — or watch the city turn to stone.

Edwin Blackthorn has built a careful life among his books. A medieval historian with an inconvenient inheritance and a flat full of other people's chaos, he has spent his career keeping the supernatural at arm's length. But when Scotland Yard delivers a body transmuted entirely to granite — and the victim's stone fist clutches a perfect replica of Edwin's family signet ring — the past refuses to stay buried. Someone has been watching him. And they want him to know it.

Julian Thorne is everything Edwin was taught to distrust: a guild-exiled sorcerer with storm-fire in his hands and a fugitive's instinct for danger. Their partnership began as necessity. Their shared flat became something neither man planned for. But when a corpse rewritten in granite points directly at Edwin, Julian's hard-won discipline begins to crack — because protecting Edwin from whatever hunts them may cost him everything he has left to lose.

The killer is methodical, brilliant, and grieving beyond reason. Each victim is a step toward a resurrection that will require an innocent soul as fuel. As Edwin and Julian trace the horror from fog-choked Whitechapel alleys to the gilded secrets of the Apothecaries' Guild, the conspiracy unfolds far wider than either dared imagine — and someone far more dangerous than a rogue alchemist is pulling the strings from Grosvenor Square.

But the deadliest threat is the one between them. Julian has already sold his freedom to save Edwin's life, striking a bargain with his greatest enemy in a moment of pure, reckless love. Edwin refuses to accept any price that costs him Julian. And in Victorian London, love between men who fight monsters together is its own kind of defiance.

A forced-proximity gothic MM romance featuring forbidden magic, soul-consuming alchemy, and two men who burn brighter together than either can survive alone.