Excerpts dark academia Read an Excerpt From We Who Have No Gods by Liza Anderson In a world of witches, a human woman must hunt or be hunted… By Liza Anderson | Published on December 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from We Who Have No Gods, a new dark academia fantasy by Liza Anderson, out from Ballantine Books on January 27, 2026. Vic Wood has her priorities: scrape by on her restaurant wages, take care of her younger brother Henry, and forget their mother ever existed. But Vic’s careful life crumbles when she discovers that their long-missing mother belonged to the Acheron Order—a secret society of witches tasked with keeping the dead at bay. What’s worse, Henry inherited their mother’s magical abilities while Vic did not, and he has been chosen as the Order’s newest recruit.Determined to keep him safe, Vic accompanies Henry to the isolated woods in upstate New York that host the sprawling and eerie Avalon Castle. When she joins the academy despite lacking powers of her own, she risks not only the Order’s wrath, but also her brother’s. And then there is the imposing, ruthless, and frustrating Xan, the head Sentinel in charge of protecting Avalon. He makes no secret of wanting Vic to leave.As she makes both enemies and allies in this mysterious realm, Vic becomes caught between the dark forces at play, with her mother at the heart of it all. What’s stranger is that Vic is beginning to be affected by the academy—and Xan—in ways she can’t quite understand. But with war between witches threatening the fabric of reality, Vic must decide whether to risk her heart and life for a world where power is everything. I The Acheron Order maintains the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Behaviors and individuals that threaten this balance are to be eliminated. —William Ruskin, A History of the Acheron Order (New York, 1935) That man, there, was looking at her funny. Having worked in this restaurant for the better part of a decade, Vic Wood knew the weight of men’s eyes on her back well. Most of the time she hardly noticed the touch of a curious glance between her shoulder blades. This was something else. A mousy man of about sixty sat alone at the bar. To the untrained eye, he looked profoundly normal. Dashes of gray streaked his brown hair, and he wore a crisp button-down under a suit the color of drab carpeting. But pallid tweed spoke as loudly as any other clothing. He was rich. The outfit—dull and perfectly tailored—was the kind of plain pricey the wealthy deployed to avoid undue attention from the masses. Where the nouveau had not yet learned the dangers of flaunting their luck, old money hid itself well. Best to fit in and keep your head attached to your shoulders. Vic clocked him on sight. A useful skill, when tips paid the rent. Isolating the haves from the have-nots. When her mother died eight years ago, Vic had taken the first job she found that would hire a sixteen-year-old lying about her age. She spent two years waiting tables in a shitty restaurant for half-decent pay. Hands up her skirt and dirty jokes were part of the game, and Vic learned to play along. She got tough and hoped that one day her and her brother’s survival wouldn’t depend on her ability to smile when she wanted to scream. Once they moved to Austin, she upgraded to Le Curieux Gastropub, an upscale fusion joint that sold lifestyle as much as food. The restaurant hired for hot, young, and cooler-than-you, so Vic looked the part. She left her curly black hair loose around her face and learned to ignore it when it fell in her eyes. When a new makeup style came into vogue, Vic practiced in front of a mirror until she could apply it without thinking. She amassed an all-black wardrobe fit for the uniform requirements but interesting enough to push the envelope a little. Vic rose through the ranks quickly. It didn’t hurt that most of the staff worked on a temporary basis. College kids crammed service jobs into the gaps between semesters. Vic enjoyed the descriptions of campus life they brought with them, even if she felt a twinge of jealousy at their adventures. In all her years of waiting tables, hundreds of men had sat at that bar, and hundreds of eyes had watched her from across it. None of them had felt quite like this. Henry would have called her paranoid. That was a favorite word of his to describe her. Suspicious, cynical, always looking for the worst and usually finding it. The man at the bar was just a man at the bar, her brother would have said. As if Vic didn’t have good reason to be wary of strangers. This man was too clean, too pressed, too pale. Muted, like a photo printed without enough ink. His eyes, as nondescript as the rest of him, followed Vic with too sharp a precision—as though she were a specimen ripe for dissection. Buy the Book We Who Have No Gods Liza Anderson Buy Book We Who Have No Gods Liza Anderson Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The familiar warning sounded in the back of her brain. She approached him, her spine pin-straight, and slid a rag across the bar to give her hands something to do. “Can I get you something to eat?” Vic spread her service smile wide, and an expression flashed across the stranger’s face as fast as an animal darting in front of a headlight. Recognition, she would have sworn, if it had appeared on any other face. Was this the man she’d been waiting for? Had the time finally come? “I am not staying.” He had an odd voice, Vic thought. Accented in a way that avoided accent, as if he had taken great pains to excise any hint of identity from his speech. “You let me know if you change your mind,” Vic replied. The hair on her neck stood on end, and she turned to leave. A clammy hand slipped around her wrist and gripped tight. Vic tamped down the urge to wrench her arm from his grip. Eyeing the damp cloth hanging in Vic’s hand, he pulled away, his lip turned up in disgust. Her skin echoed the wet pressure of his palm. She shivered. His eyes clung to hers, and Vic couldn’t look away. “On second thought…” He slapped the counter like he meant to kill an insect. “Is there anything you recommend?” Vic couldn’t move. Why couldn’t she move? “Everything’s good here,” Vic heard her voice answer. “I’m partial to the ragout.” The stranger hummed a noncommittal note and kept his snakelike gaze on hers. “Have you worked here for a long time?” “Since I was eighteen.” The words fell from her tongue without hesitation. “Will you stay here?” Vic tried to break eye contact. She didn’t like the questions, the artificial calm in his voice. She didn’t like that she couldn’t stop her words from spilling out. “Will you continue to work in this restaurant?” the stranger repeated, an edge to his tone. “I don’t have any reason to leave.” A bead of sweat swelled on the stranger’s forehead. Glistening in the amber light of the bar, it rolled into his eyebrow and hung there, a dewdrop on the end of a rotten leaf. “You did not go to university, did you?” he asked. “No.” “Why not?” Vic tried to shake her head, but her muscles were locked. She wanted to tell the stranger to go to hell and take his prying questions with him. She wanted to scream in his face to leave her alone. But memories floated to the surface, and Vic could not send them away. “I couldn’t go to college,” she said, her voice weak and quiet. “I had to take care of my brother.” “Why?” “I’m the only person who can.” It had been eight years since Vic last saw her mother. Eight years, ten months, sixteen days, and about half an hour, to be precise. Meredith Wood had thrown a rushed “remember to feed your brother!” over her shoulder and slipped out the front door of their apartment for the last time. She worked the late shift at a nearby hospital, and her lifelong disinterest in punctuality left her practiced at hasty goodbyes. After three days of watching the door, Vic called the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, she hung up on an increasingly concerned hospital administrator, who explained in a deep Southern drawl that they had no record of a Meredith Wood. She was very sorry, dear, but she couldn’t find that name anywhere. Not a full day had passed before Henry, only ten years old and small for his age, sidled into the living room, chewing on his lip. He’d spilled their mother’s secret, and Vic’s life had fallen apart. Men were coming for Henry, people he said could do things Vic couldn’t. Witches, he’d said. Mom called them witches. “But surely you want more than this?” The stranger gestured to the space around them, though his eyes remained locked on hers. No, Vic wanted to say. She was happy, she’d swear. For the last eight years, Vic had done just as her mother had asked. Henry is special, her mother had told her again and again. Take care of him. Vic had been taking care of Henry even before their mother vanished. When Meredith dragged them across the country, lying about working long hours at whatever hospital needed the staffing that month, Vic had made him dinner and helped with his homework and made sure his clothes were clean. She’d stayed up with him when he was sick and walked him home from school every afternoon. Vic had done well. Henry would graduate high school in a few months. He was safe and happy and no strange men had come to take him away from her. And that was enough for Vic. The stranger’s lip twisted, his skin sallow in the light. “You’re nothing like your mother, are you?” No, Vic thought instantly. She was not. Where Meredith beamed bright and lively, Vic was combative and cold. Where Meredith had taken up as much space as possible, Vic had folded herself to fit in the cracks her mother left behind. But he shouldn’t know that. He shouldn’t know any of that. “How do you know my—” He cut off eye contact, and Vic dropped against the bar like a puppet with its strings cut. A nearby couple looked at her in alarm, but Vic righted herself quickly, backing away in confusion. “Are you okay?” one of her co-workers whispered as Vic passed. “It looked like you fell.” Vic couldn’t get her bearings. She’d been wrung out, hung to dry, and left behind. “Nothing happened.” Vic wiped sweat from her neck. Something had passed between her and the stranger who knew her mother. Looking at him had twisted her up inside. Only seconds later, and the memories were already drifting away. Vic couldn’t recall exactly what he’d said or how she’d felt, but she retained the slimy feeling in her gut. All her planning. Hiding, avoiding new people, keeping her life as small as possible. All of it had worked for a time. But it was over now. Vic could see that clear as day. Just as Henry had warned when he had been a frightened child, looking up at her like she could fix it. They had come at last. She cast a glance backward. The stranger rose from his seat. Reaching into his coat pocket, he extracted a thin leather wallet and removed a single bill. He folded it with care, running a blunt fingernail along the crease as if he had all the time in the world. He leaned forward to ease the bill under his half-empty wineglass, and Vic caught sight of a carmine stain against his crisp white sleeve. His cuff had come undone, revealing a thin strip of skin and markings more intricate and alien than any writing Vic knew. A circle, letters in an alphabet she didn’t recognize. Bloodied marks only just beginning to scab. They were carved into his skin. Vic bolted. Excerpted from We Who Have No Gods  by Liza Anderson. Copyright © 2026 by Liza Anderson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>We Who Have No Gods</i> by Liza Anderson appeared first on Reactor.