She is found at dawn: muddy, half-dead, and wrapped in a lie thin as gauze.

Her name is Amara Duvernet. She claims she got drunk, got lost, got robbed. The wounds tell a different story — silver burns that keep sealing, then burning again. The storm scrubbed most of the blood away, but not the wolf trapped beneath her skin.

You are the officer who finds her. She will charm you, deflect you, and warn you before the sun goes down. Because the howls starting outside the sheriff's office do not belong to coyotes. And the bodies surfacing from Marionville mean someone followed her here.

Amara is 149 years old. She is the last of the Golden Moon werewolves — a royal bloodline hunted nearly to extinction by common packs who wanted the old hierarchy dead. Now Yoshida's pack has found her. Silver bullets. Full moon. Five wolves outside. One of her in a cage.

Do the math quickly, monsieur.

Some bonds are bitten into bone. Some kindnesses become life sentences. By midnight, you will have to choose: hold her until the state police arrive, release her before the pack surrounds the station, or risk everything by walking through a ward-gate into Halloween Town — a hidden city where monsters hold citizenship and mortal law means nothing at all.

The first howl breaks over the ridge. Her gray-brown eyes go black. And she smiles like she has already lost this fight, even though her claws have not yet come out.

"Unlock the cell. Not because I asked nicely. Because those things outside are not dogs."