Read Chapter 4: Morning after the Hunt

The scratches started at the base of the door and climbed toward the handle, five deep gouges in the oak that had splintered the wood like matchsticks. Iona knelt in the cold morning air and ran her finger along the deepest one. It was wider than her hand. Whatever had made these marks had claws like carving knives and the weight to drive them home.

She straightened and looked at the ground. The gravel outside the surgery was undisturbed. No paw prints, no blood, no sign of a struggle. Just five parallel wounds in a solid oak door that had been painted green and looked a hundred years old, as if the beast had simply *reached* through the night and dragged its hand down the wood.

“Jesus,” she breathed. Her breath fogged in the dawn light.

The village of Lochraven was silent the way a held breath was silent. No tractors yet, no dogs barking. The hills lay grey and bruised under a low sky, and the Blackwood estate crouched on the far slope like something waiting to be noticed.

Iona touched the locket beneath her jumper—a habit she’d already developed after one day of wearing it—and went inside to start the kettle.

---

She was suturing a tear in a ewe’s ear when Gareth arrived, banging through the surgery door with his usual disregard for the animals recovering in the pens. He was seventeen, all elbows and acne, with a shock of red hair that defied any hat.

“Door’s scratched,” he said, shrugging off his coat.

“I noticed.”

“Looks like the big one.”

Iona tied the final knot and snipped the thread. “The big one?”

“From the MacKinnon farm. The creature that got the collie.” He said it with the casual certainty of someone discussing the weather. “They reckon it comes down off the moor when the moon’s full.”

“Gareth, there’s no animal in the Highlands that could leave marks like that and not leave tracks. I checked.”

He shrugged again. “It don’t leave tracks. That’s the point.”

The ewe bleated and tried to get up. Iona soothed her with a hand on her woolly neck and turned to wash her hands in the steel sink. “There’s a lamb in the back pen with a broken leg. I need a splint and bandages.”

“Old Callum brought her in.”

“Old Callum?”

“Farmer. Got that wee place past the loch.” Gareth disappeared into the back and returned with the splint. “He was talking in the yard. Says the Blackwoods came back this morning, all of them, looking like they’d been dragged through a war.”

Iona’s hands stilled on the tap. “Came back from where?”

“Nobody knows. They go off every full moon. Everybody knows that. But Callum says he saw them this time—came down the mountain road at first light, the old man driving, the missus in the back with the kids, all covered in mud and blood.”

“Blood?”

“That’s what he said.” Gareth handed her the splint. “I wouldn’t have believed it, but he wasn’t drinking. Anyway, he says you’re to have a look at his lamb when you’re ready.”

Iona took the splint, her mind churning. The Blackwood family loading into a van at midnight, disappearing into the mountains. Returning at dawn bloodied and exhausted. Lachlan, who had walked through her front door while his family was supposed to be gone, pale as a ghost and fleeing at the sight of her mother’s locket.

And now scratches on her door.

“Gareth,” she said, “have you ever heard of the Blackwoods being connected to a name? Maeve?”

His face went blank in the way of a teenager who smelled trouble. “Don’t know any Maeve.”

“Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No.” He was already backing toward the waiting room, eager to escape the conversation. “You want me to sweep the floor when you’re done?”

“Fine.”

He vanished. Iona stood in the quiet surgery, the locket a warm weight against her collarbone, and realised she hadn’t told Gareth the scratches were on the *inside* of the treatment room door too.

---

The lamb was a month-old female with a clean fracture of the left foreleg. Old Callum watched from the pen’s edge, his face a map of moor wind and whiskey, stroking his grey beard while Iona worked.

“Clean break,” she said, setting the bone. “She’ll be limping for a couple weeks, but she’ll mend. You need to keep her quiet.”

“Aye, they always say that.”

“I mean it. If she runs on this before it’s healed, she’ll be lame for life.”

The old man grunted. He watched her splint the leg with rheumy eyes, and when she finished, he didn’t reach for his wallet. He studied her instead, like a man reading a fence post for weather signs.

“You’re the new one,” he said. “From Glasgow.”

“That’s right.”

“MacRae.”

Iona nodded, her hands busy packing her equipment. Callum’s gaze dropped to her collar, where the silver chain had slipped out from under her jumper. The locket swung gently as she moved.

“That’s a bonny thing,” he said, but there was no warmth in it. “Where’d you get it?”

“It was my mother’s.”

The old man’s eyes met hers, and for a moment something flickered there—recognition, or wariness, or both. “Your mother’s,” he repeated. “And when did she die, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Two years ago. Cancer.”

“Cancer,” Callum said, as if tasting the word. He nodded slowly, pulling at his beard. “They say the Blackwoods are not to be trusted, you know. *They* say it. The old families. But I’ll tell you something different—they’re not to be *understood*, and that’s worse. You understand a thing, you can trust it or fight it. You don’t understand it, you’re just waiting for the teeth.”

He left before Iona could answer, his boots crunching on the gravel path, leaving her alone in the pen with the lamb and the cold echo of his words.

---

The day passed in the rhythm of a village that had no intention of hurrying for anyone. Iona vaccinated a spaniel, treated a case of mites in a Highland pony, and advised a young mother on worming tablets while trying not to think about claw marks on wood.

She was locking up at sunset when she saw him.

Lachlan Blackwood was walking along the edge of the moor, a dark figure against the dying gold of the sky. He moved like a man who’d been awake for days, his shoulders heavy, his stride slow. No coat. Just a shirt that was untucked and stained, his dark hair a mess in the wind.

Iona’s hand went to the locket out of habit. He was a hundred yards away, too far to see her face, but he stopped. Turned. Looked directly at her across the field that separated them, as if he had felt her attention like a hand on his shoulder.

Even at that distance, she could see his eyes. Amber. Catching the last of the light like a beast’s reflection in a car headlight.

He stood there a long moment, perfectly still, and Iona felt the strangest sensation—that he was not surprised to see her, had known she was there before he looked, had been walking toward her all along.

Then he turned and continued on, disappearing into the dip of the moor, swallowed by the gathering dusk.

Iona stood on the surgery step, the wind cold on her face, and thought about what Callum had said. *Not to be understood. You’re just waiting for the teeth.*

She felt the locket burn against her chest, as if it had warmed to her skin, and she reached beneath her jumper and lifted it out, holding the silver disc to the failing light.

The tree and the crescent moon. Her mother’s locket.

Her mother, Maeve, who had died with secrets in her throat, who had never mentioned the Blackwoods, never mentioned this village, never mentioned a reason to wear a silver tree-and-crescent-moon on a chain.

But Maeve MacRae had been born Maeve Blackwood. Iona had seen it on the birth certificate at the bottom of the box, in her grandmother’s handwriting, buried beneath the locket and the letters she hadn’t yet been brave enough to read.

The letters, she thought now. She still hadn’t opened the letters.

The valley was growing dark. The Blackwood estate flickered with lights in its windows, and somewhere up on the moor, a dog began to howl—not a dog, she corrected herself. Not a dog. She’d heard enough dogs in her life to know.

She went inside, locked the door, and reached for the box.