The few souls still left in the dying mining town call it Milestone, but a better name might be Purgatory, for it is nothing less than a prison for those who have done wrong. They are the damned, condemned to murder other sinners for a chance to escape, though escape never comes. For the patrons of Eddie's bar, who live in the shadows of their own tragic pasts, tonight will be different. Tonight, there will come one shot at redemption for those brave enough to take it. Featuring an incredible cast of characters united by desperation, this is the novella that inspired the critically acclaimed novel CURRENCY OF SOULS.

Welcome to Eddie's Tavern, the only functioning waterhole in a near-dead town. Among the people you'll meet tonight are: Tom, Milestone's haunted lawman, who walks in the shadow of death; Gracie, the barmaid, a wannabe actress, doomed to spend her hours tending bar in a purgatory of her father's making; Flo, the town seductress, who may or may not have murdered her husband; Cobb, a nudist awaiting an apology from the commune who cast him out; Wintry, the mute giant, whose story is told only in cryptic messages scribbled beneath newspaper headlines; Kyle, the kid, who keeps a loaded gun beneath the table; and Cadaver, who looks like a corpse, but smells real nice, and occupies his time counting stacks of pennies. And then there's Reverend Hill, who will be in at eleven, regular as clockwork, to tell them who's going to die, and who's going to drive. Welcome to Eddie's, where tonight, for the first time in three years, nothing will go according to plan.

(Previously published as "When the Shadows are Hungry & Cold") Bryce Carrigan is a deputy in a dying town, a flawed man anchored to a violent past and struggling to create for himself and his pregnant wife a future he is no longer sure he wants. On the night he encounters a strange woman at the scene of a car accident on the border of Milestone (a mysterious town famed among the locals for its high volume of inexplicable car wrecks), everything changes. For what she does will leave Bryce possessed of the conviction that the woman is no mere woman at all...but something as impossible and terrifying as the town in which she stands.

Milestone is not a town that can be found on any map. Those who are aware of the place avoid it, and those who call it home treat it with a respect borne from fear. A once thriving mining town, the legends of myriad horrors operate as a warning to those who seek to cross its borders. After his friends disappear, Warwick Tanner, an old man whiling away his days outside a liquor store, is forced to go find them, which means crossing into the dreaded town for the first time, a town marked by a sign that proclaims that: THERE ARE NO MIRACLES IN MILESTONE. But Warwick will quickly learn that there are plenty of miracles in Milestone, and plenty of horrors, all of which he will encounter in his search. Trapped within the town's fog-shrouded borders as the few remaining citizens, both living and dead, natural and supernatural, prepare for Milestone's anniversary, Warwick will realize that his coming here was not an accident. Because the town knows something about Warwick that he has chosen to forget. A secret that perfectly qualifies him to become part of Milestone's accursed, and inescapable history.