It began with a scream.
Not a human scream — not the sharp, articulate cry of a person in pain or fear. This was deeper. Older. The sound the earth makes when something is being torn from it by force — a grinding, tectonic moan that rose from beneath Silver Fang's compound at three in the morning and shook the foundations of every building, rattled every window, knocked every sleeping wolf out of their beds and onto floors that were vibrating like the skin of a drum.
Arvella was awake before the sound reached the Alpha house. She had been dreaming — not the normal dreams of a sleeping mind processing the day's anxieties, but the other kind. The Moon Touched kind. The dreams that came wrapped in violet light and smelled like ozone and starlight and carried the weight of something divine p
