The Fifth Number

After twenty-year-old Tien loses her best friend Stuart to a terminal illness, she abandons her aspirations to become a professional writer and moves to a
remote section of Virginia to start her life over with her older sister Astrid, who's a drug addict living in their grandparents' house. When it comes to Astrid,
Tien finds herself completely out of her element, but soon, she has a great deal more to worry about when her dreams lead her to an old plantation house on
the property adjacent to Astrid’s. It is there that she encounters Kirby Báin whom could be a teenager, a vampire, or just a ghost unable to move on from the
earthly plane.

Desperate to extricate herself from the frightening position of having to thwart his fascination with her, she likewise discovers she’s inexplicably drawn to his
sad, peculiar father, Larken, who’s hired her to work in his store. Then, after a horrific turn of events leaves Astrid dead and frozen in the woods, it becomes
clear that Tien’s unsettling admirer Kirby entertains insane notions that her sister’s death was brought about by a curse exacted by Berlynn MacChesney, the
young girl he accidentally killed when he was thirteen.

When he reveals to Tien what he took from the abandoned MacChesney house, and what Berlynn was up to before she died, Tien’s skepticism gives way
to terror. For it seems that young Berlynn MacChesney was a practicing sorceress who had, prior to her death, written a spell, one that comprised five
numbers, each number representing a phase of the curse, the fifth number fatal to the recipient of it. And the name Berlynn has scribbled hundreds of times
on the parchment that comprises the spell is one that Tien is very familiar with. It is a Vietnamese name that means fairy and it happens to belong to her.

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