Read Chapter 10: The Claw Mark

The wind had finally died, leaving the world in a hush that felt worse than the scream of the storm. Declan knelt in the snow beside Jules, his breath fogging the air as he peeled back the blood-soaked layers of the man’s jacket. Jules’s face was pale, almost blue at the edges, but his eyes were sharp—watching Declan with the desperate attention of a man who knew his life depended on what happened next.

“This is going to hurt,” Declan said, not looking up.

“Everything hurts already,” Jules replied, his voice thin but steady. “Get on with it.”

Maya stood a few feet away, her back to them, scanning the treeline. Ansel paced near the tent, stomping his boots to keep his blood moving, his rifle cradled loose in his arms. The lake behind them was a white expanse, featureless and silent, and the tracks that had led them here—the beast’s clawed impressions, the strange walking boot print beside them—were already beginning to fill with the last whispers of drifting snow.

Declan worked quickly. He cut away the makeshift bandage Jules had tied around his forearm, revealing a wound that should have been a mess of torn flesh and shredded muscle. Instead, what he saw made his hands stop.

The wounds were gouges—deep, parallel furrows running from wrist to elbow. But they weren’t ragged, not like an animal’s claws tearing through flesh. They were clean. Precise. Five distinct lines, evenly spaced, curving slightly as they descended.

Declan’s thumb traced the edge of one furrow. The skin had been pushed aside in a smooth, deliberate cut, like a blade drawn slowly through butter. And the spacing—the spacing was wrong. A wolf’s paw left four claw marks, sometimes five, but they were clustered, uneven, the outer marks shorter than the inner ones.

These five marks were the same length. And the outer ones were slightly wider apart than the middle three.

Like fingers.

Declan’s blood went cold. He stared at the wound, his mind rejecting what his eyes were telling him. He’d seen claw marks before—bear, wolf, cougar, even wolverine. He’d seen knife wounds, too, and the aftermath of more violence than he cared to remember. This was neither.

This was a human hand. An outstretched hand, fingers extended, nails driven into flesh with enough force to tear through muscle to the bone.

“Jules,” Declan said, his voice low enough that only the two of them could hear. “What did this to you?”

Jules’s eyes flicked to Maya, then to Ansel, then back to Declan. He swallowed, a dry click in his throat. “Wolf,” he said. “It was a wolf.”

“Bullshit.”

The word came out harsher than Declan intended. Jules flinched, and for a moment, the mask of steadiness he’d been wearing cracked. His jaw trembled, and his eyes went wet.

“It wasn’t an animal,” Declan pressed, his voice barely a whisper now. “Tell me what you saw.”

Jules’s gaze dropped to his own arm, to the wound Declan was still holding open. He stared at it for a long moment, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts.

“I saw Evers die,” he said finally. “She was running. We were running. The thing came out of the trees—I thought it was a wolf, big, too big, but it moved wrong. It moved like… like a man, crouched low, using its arms and legs together. Evers slipped on the ice. She went down, and it was on her before she could get back up.”

He stopped. His face twisted, something between grief and horror. “I heard her scream. But it wasn’t a scream of pain. It was—God, it was a scream of recognition. Like she knew. Like she’d seen its face.”

Declan’s hands were steady, but his heart was hammering against his ribs. “What did you see? When it was on her. What did its face look like?”

Jules shook his head. “I didn’t see. I ran. I grabbed my arm—” he gestured at the wound— “and I ran. But I heard it. After she stopped screaming. It made a sound. A sound like nothing I’ve ever heard from an animal.”

“What kind of sound?”

Jules met his eyes. “Like a man crying.”

The words hung in the air between them, heavy and wrong. Declan’s mind raced, pulling together fragments—the boot prints, the petroglyphs, Maya’s whispered confession about the eighth member who wasn’t on the manifest. Elias’s father’s boots, walking beside beast tracks. His own father’s warning about wrong tracks.

He thought of the bare human footprint at the shore of the lake, where the beast tracks had ended.

“It’s one of them,” Jules said, his voice barely audible. “One of the team. It changed, Declan. I don’t know how, but it changed. And it’s still out there.”

Declan’s eyes snapped to the wound again. The five parallel furrows seemed to pulse in the dim light—deliberate, knowing, familiar. He made a decision, quick and instinctive. He pulled a fresh bandage from his pack and began wrapping Jules’s arm, his movements brisk and efficient.

“We’re going to the Nest,” he said, his voice carrying just enough for the others to hear. “We’re not stopping until we get there.”

“What about the cabin?” Ansel called from his position near the tent. “You said there was a cabin on the map. Shelter. Supplies.”

“The map’s wrong,” Declan lied. “The cabin’s too far east. The Nest is closer. We cut across the ice field before the next front moves in.”

Ansel muttered something under his breath but didn’t argue. Maya turned, her expression unreadable, and for a moment, Declan thought she might speak. But she just held his gaze, then nodded once, slow and deliberate.

Jules grabbed Declan’s wrist as he finished the bandage. His grip was surprisingly strong. “There’s something else,” he said, his lips barely moving. “The night before the attack. I heard Elias talking to Lindqvist. He said the gate was opening. He said—he said his father’s tracks were leading them right to it.”

Declan’s blood turned to ice. “His father’s tracks? On the way to the Nest?”

Jules nodded. “Elias said his father had been there before. That he’d walked the same line, tried to close it. But he couldn’t. He said—” Jules’s voice broke, and he coughed, spitting blood into the snow. “He said his father went in alone. And only the beast came out.”

The pieces clicked into place with a sound Declan felt in his bones. Thomas Blackwood had walked the Nest. Thomas Blackwood had tried to close the gate. And whatever had come out of that mountain had worn his boots when it walked beside its own tracks.

Declan stood, his legs stiff and cold. He looked out across the frozen lake, toward the distant line of white that marked the beginning of the ice fields. Somewhere out there, in the heart of the storm, was the Nest. And Elias was walking toward it, following his father’s ghost.

“Maya,” he said. She turned to face him. “Is there anything else you didn’t tell me?”

She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled out a small, tarnished pendant—a silver circle, etched with the same symbol he’d seen carved into the petroglyphs. She pressed it into his palm.

“Elias gave it to me,” she said. “The morning before the attack. He said if he didn’t come back, I was to give it to you. He said you’d know what it meant.”

Declan stared at the pendant. The symbol was old, worn smooth by years of handling. But he recognized it. He’d seen it once before, carved into the bark of a tree near the site of his failed rescue last winter.

The tree where his lost hiker had been found—torn open, clawed from throat to groin, in five clean parallel lines.

He closed his fist around the pendant. The metal was cold, but it felt like it was burning his palm.

“We move now,” he said. “Pack everything. We don’t stop until we find them.”

He didn’t look back at Jules. He didn’t want to see the fear in the man’s eyes.

Because Declan knew, with a certainty that sat like a stone in his chest, that the creature on the ice wasn’t hunting the survivors.

It was waiting for him.