Burning Insanity

Briarwood has always felt wrong to Shade Morrigan - a quiet, heavy wrongness that only sharpened after her sister's mysterious death. Hoping to escape her grief, she agrees to a weekend camping trip at Rosswood Park, but the woods are worse than the town: too still, too watchful.

On their second night, something attacks the campsite. It's fast, violent, and nothing human. Shade and her friends are seconds from being killed when another figure appears - the killer haunting Briarwood's recent disappearances.

He's unmistakable: long black hair, unnaturally pale skin, and a permanent, jagged smile he carved into his own face long ago. He saves them, but not out of kindness. Something else was in the woods that night, something older and far more dangerous, and for reasons Shade doesn't understand, it wanted them alive.

When the police dismiss her story and her friends refuse to speak, Shade searches for answers - and the killer finds her first. Up close, he's even more unsettling, yet there's a strange humanity beneath the horror. He knows what attacked them. He knows what stalks Briarwood. And that the entity he serves is losing a hidden war against a darker force rising beneath the town.

Shade is not a bystander. She's part of whatever is coming.

The killer was sent to protect her because she matters to the entity he serves. But the more time he spends with her, the more he begins to defy his orders. Shade should fear him, yet she's drawn to him - to the fractured person behind the carved smile, to the way he looks at her like he recognizes something inside her.

As the darker force tightens its grip on Briarwood, Shade must decide whether to trust the monster who saved her... or risk becoming prey to the one that wants her claimed.