"My dear cousin and lover, I sport here three in a bed, with two wolves – who have recently devoured the flesh of a young girl..."

To a distant corner of France comes Christian Dorse to claim his inheritance where, his beauty enhanced by his consumptive pallor, Christian prepares himself to surrender to premature death.

But Christian is close to the forest where the de Lagenays live, a mother and son that both servants and village people mysteriously avoid mentioning. Are they, as he comes to suspect, the children of the wolf? And are they the ones who, when darkness falls, throw out exquisite seductions which he cannot resist?

Award-winning author Tanith Lee's spellbinding novel mixes eroticism and fear in a fantasy laced with surprise, enchantment and the evil of spoilt beauty...