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A Halloween romantasy. Part two of two. Masquerade, monster romance. The Mourning Masque is a hunt. It has always been a hunt. The masks bind four hundred of the old and the hungry into mannered human shape for one evening, and at the stroke of twelve the binding breaks, and the Host feeds on the chase.The Stag is one of them. He has worn a borrowed face at this party for two hundred years. And his plan, the kindest thing he can think of, is to get me to the gate and vanish before I ever see what he actually is. Save me, and stay a mystery.I have spent my whole life being handled by people who decided what I could take. I am not doing it again tonight, not from him, not from anyone.I don't want to be saved. I want to be let in on it.Eleven fifty. Four hundred monsters. One mask-maker who knows exactly what a mask is actually for, and one face she has not shown anyone in nine years.The conclusion of The Masque. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

Part One: "Masks On"A Halloween romantasy. Part one of two. Masquerade, monster romance, one night only.I make masks for a living, and I have worn one to every event for nine years, so that nobody has seen my actual face. That is not a tragedy. That is a system, and it works.Then a letter arrives on paper heavy enough to feel like a slap, commissioning me to restore forty-four antique masks for something called the Mourning Masque. The money is absurd. The masks are older than anything I have handled, carved from something that is not quite wood and not quite bone, and when I clean them they warm under my hands like they are glad to be touched.The Host invites me to stay for the party. One rule: no names until midnight, when everyone unmasks at once.And across a candlelit room there is a man in the stag mask I carved myself, who says the eyes are set wrong, and when I tell him they are set alive, goes very still. We talk for three hours. He tells me almost nothing. And then, on a cold balcony, he begs me to leave before twelve.Twenty minutes to midnight, I finally understand what my finest work was for.Part one of two.  Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

Fated mates. Werewolf pack. Declaration. Happy ending. The severance is at moonrise, in the same clearing, and Sadie has dressed it herself, because she cannot help it. At three in the morning on the floor of a hallway, with a cup of coffee he left her while she was leaving him, she finally reads the pack's oldest line the way she reads a contract, and finds the clause four hundred years of wolves have missed. But knowing the truth is still being handed something. And Sadie is done being handed things. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

A storm, a dead generator, and a woman who has run a reception through a hurricane taking command of a room full of apex predators. Somewhere in the rain Sadie stops asking whether it is the magic, because she already knows the answer: she is not resisting a spell, she is resisting a man, and she is losing. For thirty-six hours she is happy. Then an aunt says the old pack line at dinner, the one about the bond only binding where it is meant to, and the word she has hated since she was twenty-six detonates everything. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

Fated mates. Werewolf pack. Forced proximity. Only one house. Slow burn. Twenty-eight days in a manor where everyone can hear her heartbeat, and Sadie has a plan: treat her own severance like a client wedding, build the best un-bonding in pack history, and walk out free on the full moon. The plan does not survive Cal, who refuses to pull on the bond at all, tells the pack she is free to leave, and courts her the slow human way instead, leaving coffee at her door at exactly the right temperature. Worse, he says her own cynical creed back to her: it isn't real if you didn't choose it. Then she overhears what cutting the bond will actually cost him — and that he has known the whole time. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

Fated mates. Werewolf pack. Human heroine. Forced proximity. Slow burn. Sadie plans weddings for a living and believes in exactly none of them, which makes her the ideal person to stage the Thorne ceremony: three hundred guests, an estate with no cell service, a florist who works only in wolfsbane, and a bride and groom she has never met. She delivers the most beautiful work of her career. Then the officiant says words that were not in the approved script, something enormous moves through the clearing looking for a place to land, and it lands on the woman at the back holding the clipboard. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

Eleven years she thought the art was the gold. It isn't. The gold is only what lets you do the actual thing, which is to stop pretending the break didn't happen. You cannot mend a bowl by gluing it back into the shape it was. That bowl is a lie, and it will crack along the same line forever, because the break is still in it, denied. You mend it by making the break true — this broke, this is where, and now it is part of the shape. She has been laying counterfeit gold for three years. Her own longing. A beautiful lie. And a beautiful lie is exactly what the far side is made of.So she goes and gets Wes, and the three of them stand in the shop in the gray morning and lay down the real gold instead. The finale of The One Who Came Back. Part 4 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

She wakes cold from the bone out. Her hands — the surest thing about her, eleven years without a tremor — are shaking, and there is less of them than there was. Something is set behind her sternum with a long line running out to sea, and it is taking in the slack.Wes finally tells her the whole of it, at the empty grave, in the fog. What happened on the hull. What his hand did.Her grief was the rope. Three years of refusing to let go became a line running into the dark, and Jonah climbed it — but nothing crosses back whole. He came back dissolved worst around the one truth nobody would say, and something has been seeping into that gap ever since.Then, in the dark, she cannot tell which one is touching her. The real Jonah came back with a wound in him, and a wound makes a man hesitate. This is fluent. This has no catch at all — because it isn't made of his love. It's made of hers, read off her skin and handed back flawless.Part 3 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

She doesn't ask how. She gets him warm with her hands, reading him scar by scar like a page — and the checking becomes something else, the way it always did with them.There is a particular devastation in being touched by someone who already knows every part of you. No learning the map. His hands know the map. By morning the town knows, and the town can't decide. Some weep and call it a miracle. Some cross the street, because there is something in people that knows what is allowed, and a man three years drowned walking in the sun is not allowed. Only Wes says it out loud. Wes was in the water that night. Wes is the one who came back. And underneath the joy, the seams begin to show. Jonah cannot remember their first summer. He remembers that he is supposed to remember it. And the bowl that mended itself has a new crack running across the gold. Part 2 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

She fixes broken things for a living. Eleven years of kintsugi — you never hide a break, you fill the seam with gold and make the wound the most beautiful part of the bowl.Three years ago the cove took Jonah, and gave back no body. They buried an empty box because the town needed somewhere to put its grief. A death you can bury is a break you can mend. A death with no body is a bowl with a piece simply gone.So she kept him. His place at the table, set every night. A lamp burning in the front window. And one bowl — the last thing they made together — that she mends in gold and takes down and breaks again, every night, because finishing it would mean letting him be finished.She thought she was mourning. She was pulling.Now the tide is returning things it should have kept, her mended pieces are cracking on their own, and there is a shape standing offshore in the fog where the water is over a man's head.Part 1 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

The cutover was scheduled for the coldest night of the year. He told her four nights. It turned out to be one. He called in an hour early, and the calm was gone from the first word — no dispatcher voice, no flat even hand pressed over the panic. Just a man saying her name into the dark, and then the sentence he had never in eleven years been able to make himself say. I'm calling in an emergency. The emergency is me. So she did the one unforgivable thing. She left the board mid-shift, put the last live channel on reroute, and drove sixty miles into the worst cold in thirty years, following copper nobody had touched in decades toward a place the map swore didn't exist. He stayed on the line as long as the line lasted. The finale of Cold Line. Part 4 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

The emergencies start sounding personal on the ninth night. A man alone in a cold building. Someone who hasn't eaten because the roads are closed. A car that won't start in the deep cold. He calls them all in the same flat, even voice, always on somebody else's behalf — and every address drifts a little closer to the Hollis base than the last. There was never anyone else out past the ridge. The man who has kept a county breathing on nights for eleven years cannot make himself say the one sentence: the person who needs help is me. Frankie knows the shape of that wound. It's her own, wearing a different coat. So she stops protecting the line. Part 3 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

The thing erasing her is the only reason she can hear him. Frankie stops pretending it's atmospheric skip and goes looking for the man who built the board. Sal Ferreira is seventy-six and the last person alive who remembers the copper — and he knows the frequency by name. The linemen called it the ghost line: the old mutual-aid channel between two small stations that used to cover each other's worst nights, so neither one ever had to be alone in it. Both stations are being torn out in the same cutover. Same contractor, same week. And in the gap between one disconnection and the next, the copper is still live. He isn't a ghost. He's the last dispatcher at the twin station, sixty miles away, running out the same clock. Then she says something true, and the signal starts to eat itself. Part 2 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

Frankie works the overnight board at North County dispatch — the last desk on the last frequency in a building the county has already decided to close. Eleven years of talking strangers through the worst minute of their lives, and never once finding out how it ended. It is the coldest winter in thirty years, and the copper is already coming out of the ground. Then, at seven minutes past three, on a channel that was cut and half dismantled three weeks ago, the dead static goes warm. A calm, competent man's voice asks her to roll someone warm out to the Hollis ridge. The vehicle is there. The driver is there. He never is. Part 1 of 4. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]

The dome finally breaks — Nora sees the rain coming three days out, and with it, the clock on the one wish she can no longer hold back. She knows that any night now she'll go under and dream Theo into staying, and wake to that washed-away smell and a man she can no longer remember falling for. She could keep him forever, made and warm and safe. Or she could do the one thing two people who live by scripts have never once done: refuse to build it, stand out in the open with no read and no exit, and find out — like everyone who has ever loved anyone — whether he stays on his own. The finale of the Wishful arc. There is no model that verifies a life. You stop trying to make them stay, stand out under a sky with no lid on it, and find out. Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Media! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app.  Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show! Get more info from Caloroga Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is [email protected]