Baxter Payne has spent his young life as an apprentice to Gideon Payne, a monster hunter out of time in a world with increasingly less room for their kind. Their latest quarry is somewhere in the Briarwold, far from civilization. A beast that is too cunning to be a wolf, too vicious to be ignored, and too dangerous to be left alive. Baxter steels himself for the danger and difficulties of the hunt. But he couldn't prepare himself to fall for the quarry.