In this New York Times bestselling powerful and exciting fantasy set in the world of the Others series, humans and the shape-shifting Others will see whether they can live side by side...without destroying one another. There are ghost towns in the world—places where the humans were annihilated in retaliation for the slaughter of the shape-shifting Others. One of those places is Bennett, a town at the northern end of the Elder Hills—a town surrounded by the wild country. Now efforts are being made to resettle Bennett as a community where humans and Others live and work together. A young female police officer has been hired as the deputy to a Wolfgard sheriff. A deadly type of Other wants to run a human-style saloon. And a couple with four foster children—one of whom is a blood prophet—hope to find acceptance.   But as they reopen the stores and the professional offices and start to make lives for themselves, the town of Bennett attracts the attention of other humans looking for profit. And the arrival of the outlaw Blackstone Clan will either unite Others and humans...or bury them all. Praise for Wild Country “Captivating characters and rich detail...a satisfying urban fantasy.”— Library Journal Praise for Anne Bishop and the Novels of the Others   “Anything by Anne Bishop goes on my keeper shelf.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs   "Anne Bishop writes with a world-class blend of humor and chills. Her world is startlingly original."—#1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris   "Anne Bishop is so good at writing character development....I love this series and I NEED MORE!"—USA Today.com   "A stunningly original yarn, deeply imagined, beautifully articulated, and set forth in clean, limpid, sensual prose."— Kirkus Reviews   “The richness of the world that Bishop has created is truly impressive, and the perspective of the Others, including their view on humanity, makes these stories unique and unforgettable.”— RT Book Reviews   “Anne Bishop is nothing short of amazing!...The world the Others and the terra indigene inhabit is deadly and nightmare worthy- and yet it captivates me like no other world I've explored.”—Fresh Fiction New York Times bestselling author Anne Bishop is a winner of the William L. Crawford Memorial Fantasy Award, presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, for The Black Jewels Trilogy . She is also the author of the Ephemera series, the Tir Alainn trilogy, and the Novels of the Others--including Etched in Bone , Marked in Flesh , Vision in Silver , Murder of Crows , and Written in Red . She lives in upstate New York. Anne Bishop / WILD COUNTRY Chapter 1 Windsday, Sumor 25 Jana Paniccia followed the gravel paths through the memorial park. There were no cemeteries on the continent of Thaisia, no individual gravestones, no family mausoleums unless you were very rich. Cities couldn’t afford to waste land on the dead when the living needed every acre that they were grudgingly permitted to lease from the terra indigene who ruled the continent. Who ruled the world. They had smashed and torn that harsh truth into humans around the world, and only fools or the blindly optimistic thought there was any chance of things going back to the way they had been before the Humans First and Last movement had started the war against the terra indigene here in Thaisia and in Cel-­Romano on the other side of the Atlantik Ocean. Instead of gaining anything from the war, humans had lost ground—­literally. Cities had been destroyed or were no longer under human control. People were running to anyplace they thought could provide safety, thinking that the larger cities were less vulnerable to what the Others could do. In that, too, humans were wrong. The destruction of so much of ­Toland, a large human-­controlled city on the East Coast, should have taught people that much. But this wasn’t a day to think about those things. Jana found the large flower bed with the tall granite marker in the center. There were no graveyards, no gravestones, in Thaisia, but there were memorial parks full of flower beds and small ponds, with benches positioned so the living could visit with the dead. She looked down the double column of names carved into the granite until she found the two she’d come to see. Martha Chase. Wilbur Chase. The foster parents who had taken her from the foundling home and raised her as their own. There hadn’t been even a birth certificate left with her when the Universal Temple priests had found her on the temple doorstep. Just a printed note with her name and birth date. All bodies were cremated and the ashes mixed with the soil in these flower beds, the names carved in the granite the only acknowledgment of who was there. Martha had loved growing flowers, and Pops had always tended a small vegetable garden in their backyard. Jana was the one who had no skill with the soil, no matter how hard she