Healing comes at a price—that’s the godfearing truth. Growing up on a farm in the foothills, Sierra Branham is used to that bitterness in her granny’s folk magic and father’s addiction. But when her dad misses her graduation after finally getting clean, she’s sure it’s something darker than his usual pills.

After tracking her dad’s last-known location to a methadone clinic, Sierra meets Blight, an intoxicating and infuriating nonbinary caseworker. With Blight comes answers about Sierra’s dad and questions about her sexuality as they work with the clinic’s harm reduction program. While exploring their relationship and the opioid-riddled underworld, they discover a disease creeping through users’ veins like kudzu—and it looks a whole lot more like Granny’s magic than any ordinary infection.

Though her family’s folk healing seems to be at the heart of the outbreak, Sierra hesitates to take on her dark inheritance. Sure, it might give power and privilege enough to confront the drugs and disease, but it’s also what fuels cycles of addiction, abuse, and exploitation. As infectious iron rusts through the bodies of those she loves and surging kudzu threatens to bury the family’s hateful history once and for all, Sierra must decide which monsters to slay and which to become.

This book received a grant from the National YoungArts Foundation which allowed me to research and reside in rural Appalachia. I have been involved with harm reduction activism and worked in pain management, seeing opioids and addiction in many different lights. Growing up queer in Appalachia was a major influence on this book, though the first spark of inspiration came while pulling kudzu from the moonshine stills on my family farm and wondering if one day we'd immortalize the burnt spoons and orange pill bottles the same way.