Closer Than the Dark (AETHAL Book 4)

Eli found his sister.

She told him to go home.

Three years after the accident that took her, Shelly is still out there — on the other side, in a world layered over the town that only Eli can reach. He’s spent months walking the gray alone, calling her name into the silence. Now something is finally calling back. It wears the faces of the dead. It knows how to sound like family. And it’s been studying Eli through the people he loves.

When the hunt for his sister forces the truth into the open, the wall between Eli’s two lives comes down for good. His father finally learns what the machine really did that night — and Richard Voss, the man the town wrote off as broken, may be the only one who can build a way to bring his daughter home. With Marcus turning a backyard shed into a listening post for the dead, and Nadia holding on to a version of Eli that slips a little further away with every crossing, the search becomes something none of them planned for: a race.

Because Eli isn’t the only one who found her.

Something else is out there in the dark between the dead — patient, hungry, and growing. It has taken everything it has ever touched. It cannot take Shelly. So it has latched on instead, drinking her light a little at a time, and every day there is less of her left to save.

Eli swore he’d bring his sister back or die trying.

He never thought to ask what it would cost to succeed.

AETHAL: Book Four.