Read Chapter 15: Voices in the Trees

The microscope hummed under the fluorescent light, its low drone the only sound in the clinic's back room. Iona leaned closer, adjusting the focus with a thumb she'd bitten raw that morning. The slide held a smear from the cow's infected tissue, stained violet and swimming with the same rod-shaped bacteria she'd pulled from the dog weeks ago. But now, nestled among the colonies like seeds in soil, she saw something she'd missed before—tiny, crystalline structures, almost plant-like, with spiked hulls.

She sat back. The chair creaked. Her breath fogged the lens, and she wiped it with her sleeve, hands steady even as her pulse picked up.

Spores. Not bacterial spores, either. Something else. Something that didn't belong in animal tissue.

She grabbed her field guide from the shelf—the one with the water-stained cover and dog-eared pages on Highland flora—and flipped to the section on moorland plants. The spores under her lens had a distinctive lattice pattern, like a honeycomb pressed into glass. She'd seen that pattern somewhere before. Not in a book. In the field.

Bog asphodel. It grew in the wet, peaty hollows of the upper moor, past the treeline, where the land opened up to sky and wind and not much else.

Iona pulled her phone from her pocket and texted Lachlan before she could think better of it: *Found something. The spores in the wounds—they're from bog asphodel. Grows on the moor. Need to search the source.*

The reply came in under a minute. *I'll pick you up. Ten minutes.*

She changed out of her clinic whites into jeans and a waxed jacket, grabbed her sampling kit, and slipped out the back door before Gareth could ask where she was going. He'd been hovering all morning, watching her with that worried, knowing look he had, like he could sense the weight she was carrying and wanted to help but didn't dare ask.

The Land Rover growled up the lane, exhaust curling white in the cold air. Lachlan leaned across and pushed the passenger door open. His face was tight, jaw set, but his eyes softened when they met hers.

"Bog asphodel," he said as she climbed in. "That's specific."

"It's not supposed to be in blood or tissue. It's not even toxic to livestock. But there it is, hitchhiking on a bacteria that's tearing animals apart from the inside." She buckled in. "Whatever infected that cow and that dog came from somewhere the asphodel grows."

"The upper moor." He put the truck in gear. "Past Ben Gorm's shoulder. There's a hollow up there—call it the Witches' Kettle. Wet ground, peat, asphodel everywhere." He paused. "I haven't gone up there since I was a boy."

"Why not?"

He didn't answer. He just drove, knuckles white on the wheel, and the village fell away behind them, replaced by drystone walls and then open heather, purple and brown bleeding into grey sky. The road narrowed, turned to gravel, then to mud. Lachlan downshifted and coaxed the truck up a steep incline, wheels spinning once before catching.

They parked at the edge of a stone shepherd's hut, roof half-collapsed, and walked the rest of the way. Wind whipped across the moor, flattening the grass and carrying the smell of peat and cold water. Iona pulled her collar up and followed Lachlan's long stride past clumps of cotton grass and deep, black-green pools of standing water.

The hollow opened ahead of them like a wound in the earth—a shallow bowl of boggy ground, dark peat exposed in jagged cracks, and there, scattered in clumps, the pale yellow-green spikes of bog asphodel. The wind shifted.

Iona smelled it before she saw it: the sweet, cloying stench of decay.

A deer lay at the hollow's center, legs splayed, belly torn open. The wounds were not clean. They were ragged, ripped, as if something had clawed through hide and muscle with brute force. Iona approached slowly, crouching low, and saw the marks—four parallel slashes running from shoulder to flank, deep enough to expose bone. The flesh around the wounds had a grey, sickly tinge, and the same faint crystalline sheen caught the light along the torn edges.

"Same bacteria," she breathed. "Same spores. This is where it started."

Behind her, Lachlan went very still.

She turned. He was facing the treeline at the moor's edge, head cocked, listening. His body was a drawn bowstring, shoulders rigid, hands loose at his sides.

"Lachlan?"

"Get back to the truck."

The howl came from the trees—low, long, and wrong. It rose and fell, and even from this distance, Iona felt it in her chest, a vibration that wasn't quite sound, like something reaching into the space between her ribs and pulling. A second howl answered from further east. Then a third, closer.

The dog in her pack started barking, high and frantic.

"Iona." Lachlan's voice was barely a whisper. "Now."

"I need a sample." She was already moving, unzipping her kit, pulling out a sterile vial. She knelt beside the deer, heart hammering, and pressed the swab to the wound's edge, collecting the grey fluid. "Just give me ten seconds."

"Five."

She worked fast, sealing the vial, tucking it into her jacket. When she looked up, the trees at the moor's edge had gone silent. The howls had stopped.

The silence was worse.

Then the treeline exploded.

A shape burst through the birch—massive, low to the ground, moving faster than anything that size had a right to. Dark fur, matted with mud, eyes catching the grey light like banked coals. It was not the wolf from the cave. This one was larger, shoulders ridged with muscle, and it moved with a terrible, focused purpose, straight at them.

Lachlan stepped in front of her, blocking her line of sight. "Run. Now."

She ran. Her boots slipped on the wet peat, and she stumbled, nearly going down, but his hand caught her arm and hauled her upright. They crashed through the heather, the truck a dark shape ahead, and behind them came the sound of heavy paws on wet ground.

Lachlan shoved her into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and was around the hood in a blur. The engine roared to life before he was fully in the seat, and he wrenched the wheel, tires spinning, throwing mud. The truck fishtailed, then caught, and they hurtled back down the track.

Iona twisted in her seat. The shape had stopped at the hollow's edge, watching them go. It didn't chase. It just stood there, head raised, and let out one more howl—long, sorrowful, almost human.

Then it dissolved back into the trees.

They drove in silence for five minutes before Lachlan pulled over, killed the engine, and gripped the wheel with both hands. His shoulders were shaking. Not from cold—the truck's heater was blasting—but from something else. Iona watched his knuckles turn white, then bone, and when he finally let go and turned to her, his face was pale beneath the stubble, and his hands trembled where they rested on his thighs.

"I've never seen one like that," he said, voice rough. "Not even Duncan at his worst."

Iona reached out without thinking and took his hand. It was cold, but it steadied. "That wasn't your brother."

"No." He swallowed. "That thing is something else. Something older, maybe. Or something that's been out here alone too long." He met her eyes, and for the first time since she'd met him, she saw fear—real, unguarded fear—in the grey depths of his gaze. "It's not hunting deer, Iona. It's hunting anything it can find. And it knows this territory."

She squeezed his hand. "Then we find it first."

He didn't answer. He just stared at the hills, where the last light was fading, and his grip tightened around hers like she was the only thing holding him to the ground.