The First Bite

In the frost-bitten Weald of Kent, veterinarian Jess Harper brings home one more broken creature - a tiny polecat-ferret kit with eyes too bright and a bite that won't heal.

As an unnatural sickness sweeps the countryside - foxes staggering in daylight, badgers with silver-disc eyes, deer smashing their skulls against iron - sixteen-year-old Mia tries to nurse the kit back to health in the dead of night.
What crawls out of the cage is older than the hop fields themselves. It wears the skins of Kentish omens: the black dog, the Hooden Horse, the watchers that have always lived between the skeletal poles and the black woodland.
It speaks with wooden jaws. It tastes human blood.
And it is no longer alone.

The First Bite - a raw, sensory horror origin story where the old things of the Weald finally come home.