The sky didn't just turn dark three hours after the last Hollowed fell—it bled.
Not a soft dusk or a gentle twilight, but a bruised red that drenched the canopy in crimson.
Below it, the pack moved like ghosts through the shadows, their faces painted in red illumination, too exhausted and terrified to pretend everything was fine.
Rhea stood at the edge of the perimeter, her arms wrapped tight across her chest against a chill that had nothing to do with the wind.
Behind her, the camp smelled of the sharp, chemical stench of scorched dirt. Isla had ordered the bodies burned the second the fight ended. Nobody argued. Nobody wanted to risk whatever poison had filled those creatures leaking into the soil—or worse, finding a new host.
Yet even with the flames dead and the ashes cold, a bi
