The Long Dark: A Moonflower Skin Novel (Book Three)

Some summers you remember because they were happy. This one I remember because it was the last of something, and I did not know it while it was happening. That is the cruel part. You never know it while it is happening.Mary is thirteen the summer the smoke comes over the ridge.Somewhere east of the mountains, a wildfire has burned a whole people out of their home. Sixty-three wolves are walking toward the last green valley with water still in it, led by a man who carried every one of them out of the flames and will do anything to keep them alive. They are coming for Hollow Pine. For the river. For the meadow. For the only home Mary has ever known.An old law says a pack that has lost its land may take another's by force. Mary's mother could meet them with teeth. Instead she offers something far more dangerous: a way for two peoples to stop being two peoples. To braid into one. To carry strangers as kin.It is the most extraordinary thing Mary has ever watched anyone do.Not everyone wants to be carried. Among the newcomers is a man whose grief has turned to something harder, who would rather burn than belong, and who is sharpening a quiet certainty that this valley owes him for everything the fire took. Mary's mother says he can be reached with patience. Her other mother says patience is going to get someone killed. The whole pack is about to find out which of them is right.Across one long autumn, Mary changes for the first time under a hunting moon, falls into a careful first love with a boy from the other side, and learns the work her family has always done in the dark: the keeping, the carrying, the holding of a people together when everything is pulling them apart. She does not yet know how much that work is about to cost. She does not yet know that by the first snow she will be asked to make a promise no child should have to keep.The Long Dark is the final book in the Moonflower Skin series. It is a story about the people we choose, the strangers we take in, and what it means to belong to something larger than yourself. Some books you read. This one you carry.

Pages: 161, Paperback, Independently published