Far from the council hall, the forest was breathing heavily.
Inez stood outside the RV. As she was wearing slippers, her toes were digging into the damn earth as moonlight spilled through the canopy. Her eyes were closed, and her head was tilted back slightly as though she were listening to a sound that no one else could hear.
The song beneath the world was wrong. The air itself felt as if there was something subtly wrong floating within it.
Inez could feel it faltering between the trees, as well as in the little tremor that slithered through the ground like a warning. But it was spoken so lightly that no one could hear it. With the ocean close to her, her siren senses were stretching outward, slipping past the forest boundaries and past the wards that were lingering around them. Old and broken.
Something was coming.
Not wolves. Not rogues. Not any other shifter.
Something wrong. Something hungrier.
Something cruel and inhuman.
