Place in the Mythos
The Gentle Shadow is an adult cozy-goth vampire horror-comedy about a village girl who survives an impossible bite, spends five hundred years being far too kind for the darkness, and enrolls in modern high school with a werewolf best friend and a vampire sire who still thinks honey cakes are a threat.
Rowan Whitaker should have died in 1527. Viktor came to Elden Hollow for a quiet feeding. Instead, Rowan looked at the monster at her throat and worried that he seemed lonely.
He faltered. She survived. Worse, she stayed herself. Sunlight stings. Mirrors lose track of her. Hunger has rules she keeps rewriting with honey cakes, mending baskets, and a terrible habit of licking wounds clean.
Five hundred years later, Rowan is a high school junior. Again. Now she hides her ghost-thin reflection from bathroom mirrors, knits impossible scarves for overlooked girls, keeps a golden-retriever werewolf out of trouble, and builds the kind of found family ancient vampires find deeply offensive.