SOUTHERN GOTHIC HORROR · THE THIRTEENTH CHILD SERIES · BOOK 1 OF 3

Killing Rabbit

The Thirteenth Child: One survived to break the curse

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He didn’t just survive the fire. He absorbed it.

Twenty years ago, twelve children burned in ritual fires across the Louisiana parishes. Theodore “Rabbit” Roosevelt was supposed to be the thirteenth — the final flame in a cult’s decades-long obsession with crossing into something eternal. He survived. No one knows how.

Since that night, Rabbit has lived on the run — drifting through foster homes, riding freight trains, and trusting the strange gift that warns him when danger is near. When that gift leads him to New Orleans, he finally stops running. In a decaying hotel on Chartres Street, he builds something he has never had before: a home. A family. A refuge for the lost and forgotten.

But the past isn’t finished with him. White rabbits appear where they shouldn’t. Chalk symbols stain the walls. Messages slide beneath locked doors. The cult that murdered his siblings has found him again — and they aren’t trying to kill him. They need him. The ritual that failed twenty years ago demands completion, and Rabbit is the only one who can finish it.

With the winter solstice approaching, Rabbit must confront the truth about who he is, what he carries, and the parents who put him in that burning shed — or lose the fragile life he has built and everyone he loves.

The thirteenth fire is still waiting. So is the man it made.

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