Twilight Deception (Part II)

Synopsis

Riley Thorn wakes before dawn to a forest that will not speak to her, and she has learned enough these past weeks to know that its silence is not rest. The night she broke the pact, the power tore loose out of the wolves and the wood and out of the world, and the crescent-moon pendant at her throat went dead as a river stone. She has stopped expecting the warmth. She has not stopped reaching for it. Below Edgewood the whispers have thinned to almost nothing, and what is left has begun to sour — a pressure far down, the way a headache lives behind the eyes before it becomes pain. She said it aloud to Elias that night and she was right: she opened a door. The village and the Lunar Wolves are bound now by a truce younger than the harvest and about as sturdy. Wolves in human shape walk between the wooden houses and the villagers step wide of them, herding children behind carts. One hard season, one bad omen, and it comes apart in their hands — and the omens have started arriving daily. Out in the wood, under a low red moon, someone else has been listening to the same silence. Mara walked out of the Hollow Den swearing there were things in this world that trade power for a willing hand. Where the rest of the pack went hollow, she went hungry; where they felt an absence, she felt a coal kindle behind her eyes and stay lit. Something woke when Riley cut the bolt, and of the whole pack it reached for the one who was still reaching back. Marcus Thorn left a warning in his field journal about exactly this kind of thing: it thrives on fear and ambition, it twists but cannot create, its power is borrowed — and it always takes back more than it lends. If what is in Mara is borrowed, then somewhere underneath there may still be a Mara to give it back. Riley means to go into the wood alone and find out, before the truce breaks and the village decides which of its neighbors to blame. Book Two of the Midnight Heiress series.