THE CASQUETTE CONTRACTS. A Story of Inherited Vows and Eternal Service - Amy Wertz

France is starving.

When seventeen-year-old Haileigh Rousseau enters a convent lottery meant to "save" her family, she knows the truth beneath the blessing: she is being traded for bread. Chosen alongside other girls to become brides in the New World, she leaves behind everything she knows for a promise of survival that feels indistinguishable from sacrifice.

But the convent is not a sanctuary.
And the voyage is not a passage.

The contracts they sign are older than the Church. The trunks they are given are not empty. And the hunger waiting for them does not simply consume-it inhabits.

As their ship disappears into a fog that erases the world behind them, the girls begin to change. Some weaken. Some break. And some-like Haileigh-learn to listen to what moves inside them. What begins as possession becomes something stranger: a negotiation between vessel and entity, between survival and surrender.

Waiting at the center of it all is Lamashtu-ancient, patient, and endlessly hungry.

By the time they reach Louisiana, the girls are no longer what they were promised to be. The colonists recoil from them. The Church hides them. And the system that brought them across the ocean begins to reveal its true purpose: not marriage, not salvation, but cultivation.

Years pass. Centuries. Haileigh becomes something more than a survivor-she becomes a Keeper, the one who maintains the balance between hunger and restraint, between feeding and collapse. Beneath the city, a hidden vault fills with those who can no longer pass as human. Above it, a civilization grows-fed in ways it cannot see.

But systems do not last forever.

When the floodwaters of 2005 tear through New Orleans, the boundaries that held everything in place begin to fail. What was buried awakens. What was contained begins to choose. And for the first time, the girls who were sold for survival must decide what they will become now that they are no longer bound.

In the modern world, Haileigh walks among the living, no longer a vessel, no longer a servant-but not free of hunger. The contracts have changed. The system has evolved. And the question that remains is no longer how to survive it...

...but how to live with it.

THE CASQUETTE CONTRACTS: A COVENANT OF LAMASHTU is a literary gothic horror novel about survival, transformation, and the systems we build to live with what should never have been allowed to exist.

For readers of Mexican Gothic, Annihilation, and The Year of the Witching.