The swamp was supposed to be the sanctuary.
It was for everyone who came before — the freedom seekers, the hunted, the desperate. Generations of the lost had vanished into the Great Dismal Swamp and lived. The water hid them. The roots held them. The dark kept them safe.
That was before it found the roots.
Grace Pritchard has faced what lives beneath the earth before. She knows how entities move, how they feed, how they wait. She knows the rules. But the thing distributed through miles of black willow and dark water has been here since before any rule she knows was written. It doesn't inhabit a place. It is the place. Every tree. Every root. Every whisper beneath the surface of the water.
And it has been waiting for her specifically.
When Grace and her team enter the swamp in early spring — the willows bare, the catkins drifting like pale ash, the muttering already rising at the edge of hearing — they believe they are hunting. They are not. By the time they understand the difference, one of their own is gone, the maps have stopped making sense, and the only guides left are the voices of the dead. The same dead that have been trapped here for centuries.
The people the swamp was supposed to save.
Saileach Dubh — pronounced "SAL-akh Doo" — is the seventh book in R.D. Parrish's Darkwood Legacy series. It is a horror novel about a living trap that has been closing for two hundred years, a team that may have finally found the one thing they cannot outlast, and a woman whose power has been building toward something none of them fully understand.
The branch was floating upstream when they arrived.
They kept paddling anyway.
What they didn't know was that the trap was already closed.