Bone Covenant - Kate Seger

England, 1348. The Black Death has taken half the village. Then it takes Elsbeth.

Else-healer's daughter, herbwoman, the last person in Ashenmere still boiling water instead of praying-dies of plague and is thrown into a mass grave.

Three days later, she claws her way out.

The buboes are gone. Her blood runs dark beneath her skin. And when she touches the dying, they heal.

The Church sends Brother Callum to investigate-a monk with bruised knees and a faith held together by discipline alone. He expects a fraud. He finds a woman covered in grave dirt, saving lives the Church has already given up on. He also finds something the Church cannot explain: an ancient stone beneath a ruined chapel, carved with symbols older than Latin, sealing away a force that has been waiting since before Rome, before language, before memory.

The plague is not just disease. It is the breath of something buried-something vast and patient and lonely-pressing against a seal that has held for centuries. Else's blood is either the lock or the key. And the Church would rather burn her than find out which.

As the dead begin to rise and whisper in a language no one recognizes, Else and Callum must uncover the truth of a covenant written in bone and blood while fighting an institution that will destroy them both before it admits holiness exists outside its walls.

Bone Covenant is a dark gothic fantasy romance set in the world of the Black Death-a story of forbidden love between a healer and a monk, a found family forged in plague and fire, and an ancient horror that isn't evil. Just forgotten. And forgetting is what woke it up.

Content note: Plague-era death and illness, religious persecution, body horror, on-page intimacy. Medium heat.