For as long as humanity has ruled the earth, skinwalkers have existed right beneath its nose. A race of shapeshifters, they live secretly in the lands untouched by civilization. Their only contact with the human world is to find other skinwalkers an...
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Chapter One
Death hung heavy in the air that night.
The stench of rot, waste, and sin was carried through the forest by a hot and humid breeze. The woods were still. Every living creature, from the birds to the lone bear that called it home, had fled the moment that scent had touched their noses. But the woods were far from silent. A cacophony of noises unimaginable to the sane echoed between the trees. The woods were remote, the nearest town over a dozen miles away, but more than one person woke up that night with sweat stained bed sheets and a deathlike chill in their veins.
The source of the noise lay in the very center of the woods, in a vast clearing where eldritch shadows churned like storm clouds that had been tethered to the ground. The new moon hovered over the clearing, invisible, as if God himself had covered his eye to block out the unholy scene below.
Suddenly, light flooded the glade, illuminating the nightmares it contained. To call them creatures would have been an insult to all other living things. Monster was the only word that could sufficiently describe them. They stood between six and seven feet tall each, made even taller by the skeletal antlers that jutted from their skulls. Almost-deerlike noses sniffed the air hungrily on the ends of almost-deerlike snouts, above their gleaming, massive, un-deerlike fangs. Beady yellow eyes rolled madly in their sockets, and the beasts anxiously clawed the ground, whining, growling, and howling as they fought to keep control of themselves.
Before them lay the cause of their rabid frenzy: twenty men and women, stripped naked and chained by their necks to the ground like dogs. A feast.
The captives who weren't struck dumb by the sight were frantically trying to break their chains, not knowing that their frightened tears were only salting their flesh.
The light came from an enormous mansion situated at the far end of the clearing. Its back door swung open, and the temperature in the forest immediately dropped by several dozens of degrees. Frost formed on the windows and the grass near the door. Three figures emerged into the night. The first was a man who could more accurately be called ancient than old. He was seated in a wheelchair and dressed in a fine red bathrobe and pajamas, as if he were going to bed rather than into a horde of unspeakable horrors. In his lap sat a small cage, but the light wasn't strong enough to illuminate whatever was desperately clawing at the bars.
The second figure, who was pushing the first one's wheelchair, was dressed in a fine black suit and a red bowtie. He did his best not to look at the nightmarish creatures that filled his master's backyard, but nothing could stop him from feeling their eyes crawling all over him.
The third figure was just a boy, no more than fourteen. The old man held the young one's hand in his own, like a grandfather taking his grandson on a late night walk. The boy didn't seem to know how to feel. Fear, revulsion, and a strange, morbid excitement flashed across his face in equal measure.
