We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from When They Burned the Butterfly, Wen-yi Lee’s fierce, glamorous adult fantasy debut, publishing October 21 with Tor Books.
Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight—a girl with a butterfly tattoo—she discovers she’s far from alone.
Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline’s mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she’s dead, Adeline’s bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother’s killer and the gang’s succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls’ dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian.
But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.
A sharp pain flared in Adeline’s chest. In front of her, the cabbie swore.
Adeline looked up.
For a moment she couldn’t quite absorb the sight. Her vision was still overlaid with the flickering of her own little flame, which seemed at first to have imprinted on her pupils and bled over into the glass. Then her head cleared and she realized it wasn’t an af- terimage at all. True fire was tearing open the black sky, and it was coming from her house.
Adeline’s fingers mashed against the knob of the door lock, drag- ging at it until it gave, and she threw herself out the door.
The night roared. Heat slapped her in the face as she ran toward the inferno—their neighbors were already clustering on the street, both escaping and gawking at the fire currently pouring out the Siows’ windows.
“Girl, what are you doing?!”
Smoke engulfed her, gritty and stinging and scorch-sour-sweet. Adeline stumbled through it onto the driveway. Up close it was like the sun had crashed to earth and broken its ribs, light brighter than anything she’d ever seen. There was the smell of blazing incense caught up in the smoke; she was overcome with the sensation of having been swallowed into the bottom of an offering bin, enclosed in a world with nothing but this mangled mass burning almost sweetly, wafting, incinerating, sending its offerings to hell.
The door opened. It broke off its hinges and spat out a blackened figure that stumbled out in smoke and gold. Her hands were alight with fiery veins and clutching at her stomach. Adeline’s mother lifted her chin, met Adeline’s eyes, and then pitched to the ground and did not get up again.
Adeline’s limbs unlocked. She lunged forward, screaming, knees hitting the paving stones. She didn’t know if her mother could hear it—she couldn’t hear herself over the roaring fire. Inside, the sound of glass shattering, something falling, something straining and groaning and then collapsing. Coughing, Adeline grabbed her mother’s shoulders to turn her over, try to drag her out to the road away from the smoke.
Her mother’s blouse disintegrated under her hands. Shocked, Adeline let go. Her mother hit the ground again, unmoving. “Mom?” Her voice rose until she couldn’t recognize it at all. “Ma!” Her eyes darted over her mother’s body, not even sure what they were look- ing for. Movement. Life.
There, on her mother’s stomach, where her hands had fallen away, was the bloody outline of a butterfly.
Adeline felt the moment her mother died. A vicious pull in her gut, a blinding flare, her vision fracturing. For a moment there were a dozen burning houses, a dozen dead mothers, a dozen pairs of blazing hands reaching toward that reddened butterfly and cupping it in a cage.
Sirens spliced her consciousness. Her vision snapped back into one, and with it, all the other senses: the acrid bite of ash, gravel digging into her knees—and the smell of burning meat. She looked down at her hands that were still alight, and realized she’d burned away the butterfly on her mother’s skin. It filled her nose just as suddenly: charred meat and hair and metal and blood.
A man, shouting in the distance: “Sir, stay back! Let us handle this!”
Adeline’s breaths chased themselves, unable to take hold. She extinguished her flame and stumbled away, thinking only that she couldn’t explain this, she couldn’t stalk or talk or dress her way out of this, and then only thinking butterfly.
Then she ran.
Excerpted from When They Burned the Butterfly, copyright © 2025 by Wen-yi Lee.
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When They Burned the Butterfly
