The transition from waking to sleeping was not a gentle slide into darkness. It felt like falling through a sheet of thin, rotting ice, plunging Ariah into a suffocating, ink-black ocean.
When she opened her eyes, she was standing in the kitchen of the Blackwood pack house.
The air was thick with the suffocating scent of stale grease, burnt venison, and the rancid, cloying sweetness of Clara’s milk-and-honey pheromones. The walls were weeping a grey, oily condensation, and the floorboards beneath her bare feet were soft with rot. It was a distorted, decaying mirror of the home she had left behind—a manifestation of the decay that had taken root in the valley.
"Ariah."
A soft, desperate voice echoed from the hearth.
She turned slowly. Standing by the fireplace was Caleb. But he did not
