Read Chapter 2: The Missing Doctor

The village of Bex smelled of woodsmoke and wet cobblestones, and the doctor’s surgery sat at the end of a crooked lane like a tooth that had forgotten to fall out. Étienne Marchand pushed the door open without knocking. The bell above it made a thin, apologetic sound.

The room was small, tidy, and wrong. A desk stood against the far wall, its surface cleared except for a brass lamp and a stack of patient ledgers. The examination table had been scrubbed. The instruments were in their glass case, gleaming and orderly. Death had been here, and someone had already tried to erase it.

“Can I help you?”

The voice came from a doorway at the back. A woman stood there, mid-thirties, brown hair pulled back in a practical knot. She wore a wool cardigan over a white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her eyes were sharp, tired, and not particularly welcoming.

“Étienne Marchand. I was told to speak with the doctor.”

“You’re looking at her.” She stepped into the room, wiping her hands on a cloth she’d pulled from her apron pocket. “Dr. Claire Fontaine. I took over this practice two months ago when Dr. Perrin passed.”

“Passed” was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Perrin had been found in this same surgery with his throat opened ear to ear, the wound so precise it looked like a surgical incision gone wrong. The gendarmes had called it an animal attack. A dog, maybe. A lynx. Something that had gotten in through the back window and panicked.

Étienne knew better. He’d seen the body. And now he’d seen what was inside the shepherd in Col de la Tourne.

“You’re the tracker,” Claire said. “The one they call when the wolves get bold.”

“Something like that.”

“Dr. Perrin mentioned you. He said you’d found things in wounds that didn’t belong.” She folded her arms. “Then he died. And I found things in his findings.”

Étienne kept his face still. “You have his records?”

“I have better than his records.” She moved to the desk, pulled open a drawer, and took out a glass vial. It was small, corked, filled with a pale liquid. Something floated inside—a sliver of tissue, off-white, no larger than his thumbnail. She set it on the desk between them. “This came from the shepherd’s body. Perrin extracted it during the autopsy. He logged it as ‘foreign material, inconclusive.’ Then he stopped logging anything at all.”

Étienne didn’t reach for the vial. “Mind if I look closer?”

“That’s why I showed you.”

He crossed to the desk and picked up the vial. The tissue inside was pale, almost translucent, with a strange fibrous texture. He held it to the light and turned it slowly. The edges were ragged on one side, smooth on the other. It looked like a splinter. Like a piece of something that had broken off and been left behind inside the flesh of a dead man.

His thumb pressed against the key in his pocket. The old brass one, warm from his body. The one that had belonged to his brother.

“Not human,” Claire said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’m not a doctor.”

“No, but you’ve seen what I’ve seen. You’ve been in those mountains. You know what animals leave behind.” She stepped closer, and her voice dropped. “This isn’t claw. Isn’t tooth. It’s not bone from anything I can identify. I sent a sample to a lab in Lausanne. They called me back—not with results, but to ask where I got it. When I pressed, they said it had ‘degraded beyond analysis.’ In three days.”

Étienne set the vial down carefully. “Tissue degrades.”

“Not like this. This looked like fresh cartilage when I extracted it. By the time it reached Lausanne it was dust.” She pointed at the fragment still floating in the vial. “This piece I kept back. Sealed it, refrigerated it, did everything short of praying over it. And it’s still here. Still intact.”

He looked at her properly now. She wasn’t frightened. She was angry. That was good. Anger kept people honest.

“What do you think it is?” he asked.

“I think it’s not from anything that belongs in these mountains.” She paused, and in that pause he saw her decide to trust him. “I think it’s older than that. Primordial. Like the rock up at the high pass. Like it’s been waiting there since before the glaciers receded.”

Étienne said nothing. He turned the vial again, watching the fragment shift in the liquid. Fifteen years ago he’d found something similar at the bottom of a crevasse, embedded in the ice where the surface had cracked. He’d reached for it, and the ice had groaned, and when they pulled him out his brother was gone.

“You’ve seen something like it,” Claire said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’ve seen a lot of things.”

“Don’t do that.” Her voice cut. “Don’t give me the closed-mouth tracker routine. Perrin is dead. That shepherd is dead. And I’m standing in the office of a man who was killed while examining remains of something I can’t identify, and I’m telling you that whatever did this is still out there. Still hunting.”

Étienne set the vial down. “You want me to tell you what you already know. That it’s not a wolf. That it’s not a lynx. That there’s nothing in the natural world that leaves wounds like surgical cuts and tracks like a ghost.”

“Yes.”

“Then you already have your answer. What you do with it is your business.”

He turned toward the door, and her voice stopped him at the threshold.

“Your brother.”

He went still.

“Dr. Perrin’s notes,” Claire said. “His personal files. He kept records on everyone who’d gone missing in this valley in the last twenty years. There was a file on your brother. Marc Marchand. Fell into a crevasse at Roc de Naye, fifteen years ago. Body never recovered.”

Étienne didn’t turn around. His hand rested on the doorframe, fingers pressing into the wood. “That’s what happened.”

“That’s what the report says.” She was closer now. He could hear the soft scrape of her shoes on the floorboards. “But Perrin had other notes. Things he’d written after talking to people who were there. Witnesses who said there was something in the ice that day. Something that moved.”

“People see things in avalanches. Snow, light, panic.”

“And this.” She touched his sleeve. He flinched before he could stop himself, and she let her hand fall. “I’m sorry. But I need you to look at this.”

He turned. She was holding out her phone. On the screen was a photograph of a wound—an old scar, pale and ropey, running in three parallel lines across the inside of a forearm. It was shaped like claw marks, but the pattern was too regular. Too precise. As if the claws had been arranged specifically to match.

Étienne’s mouth went dry.

“This is from one of Perrin’s old case files,” Claire said. “A hunter who claimed he survived an attack at the high pass, eleven years ago. He said he never reported it because no one would believe him. The wound never healed properly. It kept reopening, year after year, no matter what he did.”

Étienne felt the fabric of his sleeve against his own forearm. Felt the ridges beneath. The ones he kept covered, even in summer. The ones Marc had looked at in the hospital, pale and silent, before he’d walked back into the mountains to prove he wasn’t afraid.

“You said your brother died in a fall,” Claire said quietly. “But I’ve seen that scar before. I’ve seen it on you.”

The room was very quiet. The lamp hummed. Outside, a dog barked twice and went silent.

“It’s none of your business,” Étienne said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended.

“You’re right. It’s not.” She put the phone away. “But whatever left that mark on your arm is the same thing that killed two people in this valley, and I think you know it. I think you’ve known it for fifteen years. And I think that’s why you came here today.”

Étienne looked at her. She was standing between him and the door, arms loose at her sides. She wasn’t blocking him. She was waiting.

“You’re new here,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“The people in this valley don’t like outsiders poking into their shadows.”

“Then it’s lucky I’m not asking their permission.”

A beat. Then, almost against his will, he felt the corner of his mouth twitch. She saw it. Something eased in her expression, but not much.

“I’m going up to the high pass tomorrow,” he said. “Checking a poacher’s cabin that was hit two nights ago. No tracks leading in or out, but the door was clawed open from the inside.”

Claire nodded slowly. “You’re going alone.”

“That’s how I work.”

“That’s how you end up like the shepherd.” She crossed to her desk, pulled open a lower drawer, and took out a black canvas bag. She slung it over her shoulder. “I’m coming with you.”

“No.”

“I’m a doctor. If you get mauled, you’ll need one. And you won’t call for help, because you don’t trust anyone in this valley.” She walked past him toward the door. “You can argue in the truck.”

He didn’t move. She stopped in the doorway and looked back.

“Your brother,” she said. “What did you find in that crevasse?”

Étienne’s hand closed around the key in his pocket. The one his brother had worn around his neck. The one he’d found in the mud at the bottom of the ravine, two days after Marc vanished, when the search teams had given up and the snow was already falling.

“The same thing you found in that shepherd,” he said. “And I’ve been pretending I didn’t see it ever since.”

Claire held his gaze for a long moment. Then she stepped out into the cold, and the door sighed shut behind her.

Étienne stood alone in the dead doctor’s surgery. The vial sat on the desk. The lamp hummed. Outside, the mountains waited, patient as a held breath.

He picked up the vial and slipped it into his coat pocket.