Wesley Doyle: Stories

Arkansas hills, 1887. Hettie Vail lays out the dead, and for two years she has kept quiet about the thumbprint on a drowned wife's throat. Mocked by the killer on Halloween, she sets a silent supper. The gravedigger walks in barefoot, asleep. The dead wife takes the third chair. By All Saints' morning, Hettie will speak.

A The Wanting Series Story
Six weeks ago, Cora accidentally summoned an incubus with a candle her sister mailed her. Now she has to break some news to that sister: the candle worked — and Margot mass-produced two hundred and thirty-nine more of them, and sold them at a craft fair. Somewhere out there, 239 strangers own a demon-summoning candle and don't know it. A standalone entry in The Wanting Series — dry, warm, and unreasonably funny paranormal romance with real heat under the comedy. 18+.

A The Wanting Series Story
Ash is a nine-hundred-year-old incubus, summoned twice a week by people who want something. That leaves a hundred and sixty-six hours—and lately he wants just one thing: to be expected instead of wanted. So he applies for a job at Costco. No papers, no legal existence since Henry the Second, just a résumé reading "Available immediately." A warm, funny, aching short about a creature of appetite who'd trade eternity for a torn red vest.

Sweetwater, 1874. They dared the widow to ride bare as Lady Godiva. The photographer was the only man who looked at her kindly. / (Reviews)

A The Wanting Series Story
Ten weeks in, Margot brings over a shoebox: the brass stamp she used on all two hundred and forty candles. Fourteen ninety-nine, free shipping. Ash turns it over and the room goes cold — because what's on it isn't a sigil. It's his name. From there the chain unspools: an 1878 clergyman's book, a rubbing of a floor stone in Northumberland worn by centuries of feet, a man in Doncaster with a cat and a laser engraver, 1,406 units sold. A funny, aching story about a name that was never secret — nobo

A The Wanting Series Story
I lit a candle and got an incubus. Now I'm taking him to my sister's engagement party, where he'll need a human name, a cover story, and enough restraint to stand in a room full of people in love without feeding. My ex is also invited. That turns out to be his problem, not mine.

Roy Sutter never worked with a partner, until Nadine out-conned him in a Tulsa bar. Now they run one last game on the healing-crusade preacher who bled her dying mother for a "seed offering" — and the night before it, two liars finally run out of lies.

A The Wanting Series Story
Six weeks after she accidentally summoned an incubus, Cora's problem isn't the demon — it's that he's discovered Costco. A warehouse-sized romantic comedy about love, bulk croissants, and the logistics of dating something that used to be a legend.

A The Wanting Series Story
Cora inherited exactly one thing from her mother: a flat voice that delivers devastating news without a flicker. So when Ellen turns up with one of the scattered candles on her mantel, Cora knows lying to her is hopeless — and that her mother has already clocked that her daughters are hiding something. She races across town braced for catastrophe, only to walk into Ellen's kitchen and find her mother and a nine-hundred-year-old incubus sharing the good teacups.

A The Wanting Series Story
Cora Delaney brings a lasagna to a stranger's door—a widower her incubus visited on a summons weeks ago, and never mentioned. Peter buried his wife forty-one years into a marriage that started as an argument about a hedge, and he has something to teach a woman six weeks into loving a nine-hundred-year-old man who will never age: the arithmetic of forever-with-an-ending never works, and you do it anyway. A quiet story about mortality, the deal everyone takes, and choosing it on purpose.