Some things return wrong.

Twenty years ago, Maya Holloway and her boyfriend vanished into the Virginia woods without a trace. Search teams found nothing. Her father became the prime suspect. Sheriff Hank Branson—Tess Branson’s father—devoted the rest of his life to the case until the day he died of a heart attack, his body discovered in the very woods Maya was taken.

Now, on a storm-soaked night, Maya walks out of those same trees.

Unaged. Unchanged. And unable to remember where she’s been.

Maya’s father weeps with relief. The town reels. And Sheriff Tess Branson—haunted by the case that destroyed her family—opens the investigation her father never got to finish.

But days after Maya’s miraculous return, Tess uncovers a new horror: the body of Maya’s boyfriend, buried upright in the forest soil, as if planted there by something that doesn’t understand what humans are.

As fragments of Maya’s memory surface—flashes of blinding light, distorted voices, and a black pyramid rising between the trees—Tess realizes the truth didn’t die with her father.

Something took Maya.

Something brought her back without understanding what it was returning.

And something in those woods is waking up again.

A Southern Gothic supernatural thriller novel steeped in cosmic dread, where every answer only deepens the nightmare—and the Black Pyramid is far from finished.