Read Chapter 11: Turn: The Transformation

The scream ripped through the tent walls like tearing canvas.

Declan was on his feet before his eyes fully opened, the cold hitting him like a slap. Maya thrashed against her sleeping bag beside him, eyes wild. Jules was already upright, his bandaged arm pressed against his chest, staring at the tent flap.

"Ansel," Jules said. "That was Ansel."

The wind howled, and through it came a second sound—wet, rhythmic, punctuated by a cracking that Declan's mind refused to name. He grabbed the flashlight, unzipped the flap, and stepped into the white chaos.

The blizzard had swallowed the world whole. Visibility was three feet, maybe less. The other tent stood fifteen yards away, a dark smear in the swirling snow. Declan pushed toward it, the beam of his flashlight cutting a weak, useless path.

He found Ansel ten feet from the tent opening.

The body lay on its back. Arms thrown wide. Eyes open and fixed on the falling snow. The sleeping bag was still half-wrapped around his legs, as if he'd been dragged out of it. His chest was open—not torn, not mauled, but opened, like a parcel unwrapped with deliberate care. The snow around him was black in the flashlight beam, still steaming in the bitter cold.

Declan's gorge rose. He forced it down.

"Ansel." Maya's voice came from behind him, small and broken. She'd followed him out. He grabbed her shoulder before she could get closer, turning her away from the body.

"Don't."

"He was just—" her voice cracked. "He was just sleeping. He was right there."

Jules emerged from the tent, his face gray. He didn't ask. He looked past Declan's shoulder and saw Ansel's body, and something in his eyes went dead and flat. "Where is it?"

Declan swept the flashlight in a slow arc. Snow. Wind. The tracks were there—fresh, deep, leading away from Ansel's body toward the treeline. He'd seen those tracks before, at the ridge, at the lake. The three-toed impressions that could have been a bear's, except for the heel that elongated too far back, like a foot halfway between shapes.

But beside them, parallel and fresh, was a second set of tracks. Human boot prints, size ten, standard tread. Walking calmly alongside the beast's path.

"Stay with the body," Declan said. "Get him inside the tent. Both of you."

"You're not going alone." Jules stepped forward.

"I'm not asking." Declan clicked the flashlight off, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. "You're wounded and you're slow. I'll be back in ten minutes."

He didn't wait for an argument. He turned and followed the tracks into the storm.

The wind cut through his jacket like it wasn't there. Every step was a fight against the snow piling up around his boots. But the tracks were fresh—minutes old—and they led northeast, along the edge of the frozen lake, back toward the tree line and the ridge beyond.

He moved fast, tracking by feel as much as sight. The beast track and the boot prints ran parallel. Not chasing. Not fleeing. Walking. Like two things sharing the same path.

The scream came again.

Not a human scream this time. Something else. Low, almost subsonic, vibrating through the snow-packed ground and into Declan's bones. He dropped to a crouch, years of instinct taking over. The sound was close. Fifty yards, maybe less, just beyond a stand of black spruce.

He crept forward, keeping low, letting the tree line shield his approach. The sound resolved into wet, crunching noises. Feeding. Something was feeding.

He found the kill at the base of a fallen log. A deer—or what was left of one. Ribs splayed open, haunches stripped to the bone. But the blood was fresh, still steaming, still pink.

And standing over it, crouched in the snow, was a figure.

Human-shaped. Naked flesh, pale as bone. The figure's back was to him, head bowed to the carcass. It pulled something free with a wet, tearing sound and brought it to its mouth.

Declan's flashlight was off. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his temples. He should have retreated. He should have backed away and returned to the group and told them the thing was gone, they needed to move, now.

But the figure straightened.

It turned.

For one impossible moment, Declan saw a face—a human face, streaked with blood, features blurred by cold and shadows. Familiar. Almost familiar, like something pulled from the dark corner of a dream.

Ansel. The thought arrived unbidden, wrong in every way. But the face had Ansel's jaw. Ansel's dead eyes.

Then the face *twisted*.

There was no other word for it. The skull elongated, the jaw splitting at the hinge, the cheeks rippling like fur shoved up from beneath the skin. The shoulders hunched and broadened, spine arching forward, fingers thickening and darkening into claws. A sound came from the thing's throat—not a growl, not a scream, but a wet, grinding *shift* as bone slid over bone and muscle re-knit itself.

Declan stood frozen. The flashlight in his hand felt like a toy.

The creature—fully formed now, dark-furred, massive, its eyes burning with something that was almost recognition—stared at him across forty feet of open snow. It lifted its head. Drew in a long, slow breath, tasting him on the wind.

The pendant beneath his jacket grew cold against his chest.

It held his gaze for five seconds. Ten. Long enough for Declan to understand that he was being seen, measured, placed. Then it turned and loped into the storm, moving with a fluid power that no animal should possess, fading into the falling snow until it was nothing but a dark shape, then nothing at all.

Declan stayed crouched in the whipping wind, his breath coming in ragged clouds. The deer carcass steamed before him. The tracks—the human tracks that had walked alongside the beast's—continued past him, up the ridge, heading northeast.

Toward the Nest.

He looked down at his own hands. They were shaking. He couldn't make them stop.

The monster was not a monster. The monster was a man. And the man had worn Ansel's face when he rose from the kill.

Declan turned and walked back toward the tents, the wind at his back, the pendant heavy and cold against his chest.