Chapter 1
The forest screamed.
Not with voices—though those came later, howling through the ancient pines of Blackhollow territory—but with the raw, electric tension that preceded change. Kaelen Vane felt it in his marrow, in the hybrid blood that made him both more and less than the wolves who served under his command. His mother’s Lycan lineage gave him the wolf; his father’s ancient, cursed line gave him something else entirely.
Something the pack whispered about in fearful tones.
Shadow-born. Death-walker. The Hollow King.
He stood atop the precipice known as Widow’s Tooth, granite fingers clawing at a bruised and swollen sky. Below, the Blackhollow territory sprawled in autumnal decay—thousands of acres of old-growth forest, mist-shrouded valleys, and the village where thousands of souls lived, loved, and bled for their alpha.
For him.
The Blood Moon would rise in three days. Every century, it called forth the ancient bonds, awakening dormant powers and, for those unlucky enough to bear the mark, triggering the Mating Call.
Kaelen had never felt it. In thirty winters, through countless females who’d offered themselves to the hybrid alpha, hoping for power, status, or simple pleasure, his blood had remained cold. Controlled. Dead, some said, though never to his face.
But tonight, something stirred deep in his core. His wolf was calm, but his other side... His forbidden side... It clawed for something. Something he didn't understand. Something he didn't want to acknowledge.
A vibration in his chest. A phantom warmth was spreading through limbs that had known only winter for so long. Kaelen pressed his hand against his sternum, feeling the arrhythmia of a heart that suddenly, impossibly, wanted.
"What are you?" He demanded silently, reaching through the pack bond to touch the consciousness of every wolf under his protection. "Who dares wake what sleeps?"
Thousands of minds flickered against his awareness—loyal, fearful, devoted, resentful. But nothing new. Nothing that explained this... hunger.
He would find it. He would find her. And he would know why, after a lifetime of perfect control, the beast inside him suddenly paced its cage and demanded to be fed.
