Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Pale Dreamer: A Bone Season novella
    The Pale Dreamer: A Bone Season novella
    The Pale Dreamer: A Bone Season novella
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    The Pale Dreamer: A Bone Season novella

    By Samantha Shannon

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A dreamer is born – the exhilarating prequel to the New York Times Bestselling Bone Season series.

    In the perilous heart of Scion London, a dangerous and valuable poltergeist is on the loose - and it must be caught before chaos erupts on the streets of the capital. Here, the clairvoyant underworld plays by its own rules, and rival gangs will stop at nothing to win such a magnificent prize.

    Sixteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working for Jaxon Hall, the most notorious mime-lord in the city. He thinks she is hiding a powerful gift, but it refuses to surface. Maybe this is the opportunity she needs to secure her position in his gang, the Seven Seals…
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateDec 6, 2016
    ISBN9781632869067
    The Pale Dreamer: A Bone Season novella
    Author

    Samantha Shannon

    Samantha Shannon is the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Season and The Roots of Chaos series. Her work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. She lives in London. samanthashannon.co.uk / @say_shannon

    Read more from Samantha Shannon

    Related to The Pale Dreamer

    Titles in the series (5)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Fantasy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Bone Shard Daughter

      Sep 9, 2020

      RELEASED 10 SEPTEMBER 448 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Andrea Stewart Publisher Orbit Books Epic fantasy has long had a thing for One True Kings. You know the drill: a dreadful tyrant is murdering people for fun and generally imperilling t

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Duplex

      Jun 9, 2020

      I moved to Los Angeles to sing. When was this? August? June? I was twenty-nine, and those were shapeless months, when the days blended together and I refused to pull them apart. My landlord was unusually close to her adult son. His name was Jeffrey,

      21 min read

    • Article

      The heartbeat OF PARIS

      Apr 10, 2024

      The heartbeat OF PARIS
      9 min read

    • Article

      All Of Us Here

      Jun 4, 2020

      All Of Us Here
      6 min read

    • Article

      Intelligent Creatures

      Jul 6, 2023

      Intelligent Creatures
      19 min read

    • Article

      Penny

      Jul 2, 2020

      Penny
      6 min read

    • Article

      LOVE Is The Word

      Jan 3, 2023

      LOVE Is The Word
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Money Box

      Jun 10, 2022

      This is not a morality tale. It’s simply a story. It began innocently enough, over a lunch of beef pho in the Financial District, when my friend Paolo first mentioned the Money Box. Paolo was a pupa of industry then, waiting to emerge as a titan. He

      19 min read

    • Article

      Make A Stand

      Jan 17, 2024

      Make A Stand
      6 min read

    • Article

      Come with Me

      Dec 1, 2022

      Come with Me
      12 min read

    • Article

      A Temporary Arrangement

      Oct 2, 2023

      A Temporary Arrangement
      19 min read

    • Article

      Lost for WORDS

      Sep 23, 2020

      Lost for WORDS
      6 min read

    • Article

      His Brilliant Career

      Mar 19, 2023

      His Brilliant Career
      9 min read

    • Article

      Murder Most Fowl

      Mar 12, 2023

      Murder Most Fowl
      2 min read

    • Article

      St. Patrick’s Day

      Apr 10, 2022

      At university, I said I hated Nate Moore. It was an annoying-sibling hate, the kind exclusive to teenagers. I remember once we were in the living room of my and Jen’s townhouse-style dorm in the fall of my sophomore year, drinking Kahlua with coffee.

      17 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Sep 1, 2022

      First prize 10 and under Tang Li, age 9 Palmetto Bay, FL My name is Anisa. I was in Hawaii on vacation. I enjoyed sipping refreshing drinks, overlooking the turquoise ocean, and dancing with others, before I overheard that the priceless Fire Ring wa

      10 min read

    • Article

      Echo

      Jan 10, 2024

      Once, during a depressive episode, Stanley cut out thirteen small paper stars and taped them to the ceiling of his cluttered bedroom. They were made from the construction paper left over from his youth, stored away in a basket on a shelf in the basem

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Last Friend on Earth

      May 4, 2023

      It was as if Doreen Saunders had been waiting for me, passing the time until my arrival. She might as well have been sitting in a rocking chair, knitting needles clicking, jam tarts cooling on the side, the door wide open, waiting for the next visito

      6 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      J. Jezewska Stevens

      Dec 15, 2017

      The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair. Oh, but then I can see around. The gauzy curtains, pushed by

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Man I Should Have Married

      Dec 29, 2019

      The Man I Should Have Married
      11 min read

    • Article

      LOVE, Virtually

      Feb 16, 2020

      LOVE, Virtually
      5 min read

    • Article

      Penny From Heaven

      Feb 27, 2020

      Penny From Heaven
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Freshening

      Sep 15, 2018

      My cashier’s black hair was beautiful. Though not unlike mine, it was shinier and thicker, and hung glamorously down to her waist. It looked strong, too, like Christopher Reeve’s in the Superman movies. A strand of Superman’s silvery hair could hold

      21 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Pale Dreamer

    4/5

    59 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      An all-too-short prequel to The Bone Season, in which we get the backstory on Paige's first days with Jaxon Hall and his gang. Good stuff, but is it enough to tide us over until The Song Rising? It'll have to do!
    • 3/5
      Interesting prequel to the Bone Season and I actually read it in a new edition that has this as an addition to the end (but I didn't re-read the Bone Season). Shows where Paige finds her place in the gang she joins and hunts a ghost, using a lot of research and logic as well as her clairvoyant abilities.
    • 4/5
      What a great start to the Bone Season series. I've gotten to know the characters a bit, and have a sense of the world. I'm excited to continue. If there's even a hint of found family I will be quite satisfied.

    Book preview

    The Pale Dreamer - Samantha Shannon

    Shannon

    The Grisly Case of Anne Naylor

    London, 2056

    If you were to ask me what I liked most about being an up-and-coming criminal in the year 2056, I’d probably point you to the simple things. Drinking coffee before daybreak in the den, listening to the capital stretch itself awake around me. Sitting beneath the blossom tree in the courtyard and leafing my way through a stack of forbidden novels. Sneaking into Jaxon’s room to listen to blacklisted music.

    Strange, I know. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t have done things like that before I was employed by Jaxon Hall. Maybe not the blacklisted music and forbidden novels, but I could have found a tree to read by, or made coffee before daybreak, under other circumstances. They were ordinary moments in my newly extraordinary life—and they, in turn, became extraordinary.

    As a dreamwalker, I was meant to be a great clairvoyant; a rare one, at least. Jaxon was certain that I was hiding spectacular powers; that I could leave my body, possess other people, and dance them around like mindless puppets if I so desired. But after three months in his employ, I still couldn’t do it. Not for want of trying, I should add—I just didn’t know how, and nobody agreed on how to teach me.

    I first learned of the grisly case of Anne Naylor in October of that year. One Monday afternoon found me in the office in our den, where an old oak desk was piled with paperwork. The den was a three-story maisonette on Monmouth Street in the small district of Seven Dials. It had three permanent residents—me, Jaxon, and Eliza. Nick had his own apartment, but he often stayed with us.

    Since I had moved in, I had come to love the den. It was cluttered and dusty and the boiler was useless, but that only made it feel snug and lived-in. Jaxon had gifted me my own room and told me to do as I pleased with it, so I had painted it wine-red and filled it with trinkets from the black market, where I hunted for antiques and curios in the evenings. It was nothing like my room in my father’s sterile, ultra-modern apartment, which the government had given him.

    Thinking of my father let a butterfly loose in my stomach. After I had left school, I had told him I was living with a friend, looking for a job in the service industry. He was still disappointed that I had decided against applying for a place at the University.

    He would be even more disappointed if he knew the truth.

    I tapped my pen against the ledger. Jaxon had asked me to find out who in the district hadn’t paid their rent, and how much they owed. Mind-numbing work. Not like what Eliza and Nick got to do. Those two were always out hunting spirits or confronting rival clairvoyant gangs—the sort of thing I had envisioned doing when Jaxon had first invited me to join his gang, the Seven Seals. They had worked for him longer than I had, but I still felt impatient—mostly with myself. I longed for an assignment of consequence; something that would really test me.

    Not that I would ever ask for it outright. Jaxon Hall could be courteous, even charming, but he was mercurial. Pressing him at the wrong moment could make me look ungrateful for the work, and I couldn’t lose this job. I got the feeling that if you were exiled from the voyant underworld, you wouldn’t come back.

    I couldn’t take that gamble. Now I knew this world existed, I would not risk being banished.

    My eyelids were heavy. I glanced up from the figures, massaging the sore base of my neck.

    The sun was low and copper-gold. Ensconced in here, it was easy to forget that our beloved government could have me hanged if they ever learned what I was—an unnatural. That was what they called clairvoyants.

    I sat up straighter and adjusted my jersey when I saw Eliza through the window. She was flushed and bright-eyed, her hair unsettled by the wind.

    Eliza Renton was twenty years old and had worked for Jaxon for over a year. From what I had observed about her—I did a lot of observation in between rounds of paperwork—she was both street-smart and absentminded; a dressmaker, an artist, a voyant. Today she wore a silk dress, the same light green as her eyes, covered by a velvet coat. She had braved the cold to get us lunch, saying she had an errand anyway and I deserved a break from the endless food-and-coffee runs—but her hands were empty.

    No caffeine? I said as she came up the stairs. But she was already gone, her face set. Eliza?

    Jaxon!

    Her boots clicked on the stairs at speed. I deserted my post and followed her. Any excuse. By the time I reached the second-floor landing, she was knocking on the door to Jaxon’s study. She was all nervous energy, tilting her weight from one foot to the other.

    The door creaked open. Jaxon Hall stood in his lounging robe, his black hair free of the oil he often used to smooth it back.

    Did you bring that coffee, darling? he asked. There were grayish circles under his eyes.

    I hate myself for saying this, Eliza said, but we don’t have time for coffee.

    She slipped past him. I entered next, giving him a no idea look. He twirled a burning cigarillo between his fingers.

    I wasn’t sure what to make of Jaxon. I wasn’t even sure whether or not I liked him. All that was clear was that my employer was a man with secrets. He was eccentric, to say the least, and intimidating, with a smirk that promised mayhem and milk-blue eyes that saw through everything. Feared and loved in equal measure, he was the most famous mime-lord in the underworld—so Nick said, anyway.

    As head of the gang, Jaxon had the best room in the building. It boasted large sash windows, an antique desk, a record player, a stained-glass lamp, bottles of absinthe, and shelf upon shelf of black-market books and ornaments. Nick was already here, lying sprawled on the chaise longue.

    Nick Nygård was Jaxon’s mollisher, or second-in-command. He was the one who had uprooted me from my old life, introduced me

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1