No one knew where she had come from. A scrap of a girl clinging to a black cat with eerie yellow eyes. A lost child or an orphan, maybe. It was a miracle she had survived on Eden Mountain at all.

Suddenly strange things began to happen in placid Ruger County, bizarre killings that the police couldn’t solve. Horrifying accidents that the people couldn’t comprehend. An insatiable beast was stalking their intimate hideaways, their swimming holes—and their children.

No one noticed how quickly the little girl’s pale cheeks turned pink with health. How her frail body filled out with sleek, lithe muscles and feline grace. And no one noticed that at night her innocent blue eyes turned an eerie, evil yellow . . .