Hunted by the Lycan

The camera is staked fifty yards up an old logging road, where the Douglas firs thin into alder. Callie Hendricks lifts it off the tree and the housing comes apart in her hands, strap chewed through, seal already pried at. The card still reads. She clicks through two months of deer and raccoons and one bobcat with a limp, and then she reaches day thirty-eight. A wolf walks up to the lens. Pale, heavy, unhurried. It stops. It stares into the camera, not past it, at it, and it does not blink. Then its jaws open and close around the glass, and the footage goes black. Callie is a freelance wildlife biologist on a six-month contract studying gray wolf migration through the Cascades. She is also a Hendricks, and her mother Edith raised her on one sentence. *They are not animals, Callie. They are monsters wearing skin.* She presses delete. The next morning a man from Wildlife Management takes the chair across from her in the diner, with six other tables empty, and tells her that her permits need his signature. Dain Redmond has amber eyes and a scarred brow, and Marge behind the counter says he is the one who keeps the peace between the town and the other side of the mountain. Callie has seen that brow before. She was twelve when she found a wolf cub in a rusted iron trap, worked the jaws open, and carried him down to the stream to wash the blood off his leg. The trap's teeth caught her on the way, three pale lines from wrist to elbow that she has been explaining away ever since. He remembers all of it. *You opened the jaws. You carried me to the stream. You washed the blood off my leg.* Everything Callie was told about her father's death is wrong, and the man who actually pulled the trigger is still in Wolf's Hollow. Rowan Kestrel walks with a limp and a gray beard, wants Dain's place at the head of the pack, and wants the old ways back. *He wants the old ways. Secrecy. Fear.* He has not been working alone. And Maya, Callie's nineteen-year-old sister, has been slipping out to meet a lycan named Finn and thinks the whole thing is a fairy tale. And Edith Hendricks is coming down out of the pass with twenty loyalists, silver bullets and wolfsbane, on a timetable set by the full moon. What stands against that is a cave under the Hollow, a door in the north that opens only at the full moon, and a bloodline Callie never knew she carried. A paranormal shifter romance with a suspense spine, told in Callie's voice, closed-door, ending with a hunter's daughter and a pack alpha walking toward the treeline hand in hand.