Gorgons Halfway Home

She has been called a monster for three thousand years. She has decided to do something useful with it.

Meda Stone runs a registered supported-living home for vulnerable young adults in a 1930s semi-detached with a garden that grows things it shouldn't, ward-marks in the skirting boards, and a front door that opens from the inside without a key.

She is also Medusa. Former temple servant. Former prisoner of the ruins. Former weapon. Currently: warden of a found family she has spent ten years building from scratch, and the lock on a primordial force that has been sealed inside her for three thousand years — and is finally starting to wake up.

She does not need anyone complicating this.

Callum Vane arrives at her door with the wrong briefing and centuries of baggage. He has been sent to monitor her arrangement. He is, according to his organisation, a dangerous entity's keeper. He is, in his own recent history, a man who made a mistake through certainty rather than incompetence and has been operating at half-throttle ever since. He was supposed to watch, report, and feel nothing.

The house has other ideas.

In a kitchen that seats eight, with a mythology-obsessed teenager and a rogue grove nymph and a hedge witch who is slowly learning the practice she thought a coven had taken from her, Callum begins to understand that the briefing was not just wrong — it was built on three thousand years of intentional mischaracterisation. And Meda begins to understand that the weight she has been carrying alone since the seventeenth century does not, in fact, have to be carried that way.

The slow burn is real. The found family is earned. The ending is not what either of them expected.