Killing Time Paperback – April 22, 2026

In a city built on iron and secrets, thirty-two years of perfectly ordinary misery are about to be unmade.For thirty-two years, Gabriel Altman’s biggest problem was the crushing monotony of data entry and a faint, shimmering skin condition he couldn’t explain. Gabriel lives a profoundly ordinary life in Cleveland, Ohio, processing insurance claims and hiding in plain sight. Raised by his human adoptive parents, Helen and Roy, he has spent his adulthood carefully ignoring the world's strange edges and unexplained sinkholes. But his carefully managed existence shatters when he meets Sylvia Vane, a mysterious woman in a coffee shop who knows his full name before he even introduces himself. Sylvia isn’t just a stranger; she is a fae field agent who has been secretly surveilling Gabriel for twenty-five years on behalf of the hidden Court. She reveals a terrifying truth: the old myths are real, and Gabriel is entirely fae. Worse, the shimmering iridescence on his forearms is actually the mark of an ancient, potent bloodline known as Unraveler's Stock, granting him the rare ability to dissolve and unmake constructed magic at its source. Now, Gabriel is the prime target of a radical fae architect named Mordecai Voss. For thirty years, Voss has been secretly building a massive magical Working in the iron-rich bedrock beneath Cleveland, a machine designed to forcefully tear down the barrier between the human and fae worlds. To trigger his catastrophic machine, Voss needs the raw, panicked discharge of Gabriel's unique unmaking power. Hunted by Voss's extraction teams and the bureaucratic enforcers of the fae Court, Gabriel must navigate a dangerous new reality. Teaming up with Sylvia—who has gone rogue to protect him—and Rook, a disgraced former enforcer operating out of a hidden neutral zone called Harrow Street, Gabriel has mere hours to act. Together, they must descend into the Underlap—a secret, color-drained realm beneath the human city—to dismantle the Working before Cleveland is destroyed. Gabriel has spent his whole life letting things happen to him, but to save the only world he has ever known, he must finally choose what to unmake. Read more