Read Chapter 17: The Second Assault

The plain stretched before them like a frozen ocean, white and featureless except for drifts that curled like waves arrested mid-break. Declan kept his eyes moving—tree line to the east, ridgeline to the west, the undifferentiated snow between—but the wind had scoured the surface clean, and there were no tracks to read. No sign of anything living.

That was what bothered him.

He glanced back at Jules, who was leaning heavily on Maya's shoulder, his face pale beneath the grime and frost. The wound in his side had stopped bleeding through the bandage, but the limp had grown worse with every mile. Jules caught his look and managed a crooked grin.

"Still here, Cross. Don't look so worried."

"Save your breath," Declan said.

Maya shot him a look—the kind that said she'd heard the tension in his voice and was filing it away. She'd been doing that a lot since the cave. Asking quiet questions about the pack he carried, about the route north, about what exactly he'd seen when Ansel died. He'd given her nothing but half-truths, and she knew it.

They were maybe two hundred yards from the treeline when it happened.

The snow erupted.

Not in front of them, not behind—but off to the left, where a drift had looked solid enough to walk on. A shape exploded upward, all teeth and muscle and fur that shifted and rippled like a heat mirage given mass. It came at them low and fast, moving with a predator's economy, and Declan's hand was already going to his hip before his brain caught up.

Flare gun. Not the rifle. He'd given the rifle to Maya, and she was scrambling to bring it up, but Jules was between her and the beast, his body slow and off-balance.

Time stretched. Declan saw it the way he saw tracks—component parts, each one a clue. The beast was huge, bigger than the thing that had worn Ansel's face. Its shoulders hunched high, and its forelegs ended in hands—human hands, pale and thin, grafted onto a wolf's frame. The wrongness of it hit him in the gut.

He fired.

The flare screamed out of the barrel and burst against the beast's shoulder, a fountain of red-white sparks that bloomed and spat. The creature recoiled, shrieking—a sound like nothing alive should make, part howl and part scream, human vocal cords straining beyond their range. It twisted away from the light, claws gouging furrows in the snow as it scrambled backward.

But not before its arm swept out in a blind, panicked arc.

The claws caught Jules across the thigh.

He went down without a sound, his leg folding beneath him like a cut marionette. Blood sprayed an arc of crimson across the white—shockingly bright, impossibly red—and Maya was screaming something Declan couldn't hear over the ringing in his ears. The beast hesitated at the edge of the flare's dying light, its eyes—too intelligent, too aware—locked on Jules's prone body.

Declan fired again.

The second flare hit the snow at the beast's feet, and it lunged away, crashing into the treeline with a sound of breaking branches and something that might have been a whimper. Then silence, except for the wind and Jules's ragged breathing and the wet, awful sound of blood hitting snow.

"Move," Declan said. His voice came out flat and calm—the voice he used when everything inside him was screaming. "Now. Get him to the rocks."

The rocky alcove was a shallow notch in a limestone outcrop a hundred yards west, a pocket carved out of the plain by some ancient glacier. Declan had spotted it earlier as potential cover but hadn't wanted to stop. Now it was the only thing between Jules and the cold.

They dragged him inside. Maya worked fast, cutting away the leg of Jules's pants with a knife she produced from somewhere, exposing the wound. Declan's stomach turned. The flesh was torn in three parallel tracks, deep enough to show the pale gleam of muscle beneath. It was bleeding too freely, too dark.

"Compression," he said, pressing his own bandages into Maya's hands. "I'll hold him."

Jules was shaking, but his eyes were open, and that alone was something. He stared at the low rock ceiling as Declan braced his shoulders, his breaths coming in short, sharp gasps.

"Hurts," he got out. "Hurts worse than before."

"Shock," Declan said. "Stay with me."

Maya worked without looking up. Her hands were steady, her movements practiced—more practiced than her cover story of a university researcher should have allowed. Declan filed that away along with everything else. She bound the wound tight, then tighter, and gradually the flow slowed to a dark seeping around the bandage edges.

"Bad," she said quietly. "I can't tell if it nicked the artery. If it did—"

"Then we have hours, not days," Declan finished.

Maya nodded, not meeting his eyes.

Jules's hand shot out, gripping Declan's arm with surprising strength. His eyes were feverish, too bright, darting to Declan's face with an intensity that made the hair on the back of Declan's neck stand up.

"Cross. Declan."

"I'm here."

"The meteorite—" Jules's voice cracked. "In your pack. You have to destroy it."

Declan went still. "What are you talking about?"

"Lindqvist—no, not Lindqvist, the others, the ones who sent us—" Jules shook his head, a small, desperate motion. "The corporation. They knew. They knew about the transformation, about the Nest, about what happens when the fragment gets close to the petroglyphs. They sent us to retrieve it. I never wanted—"

His words dissolved into a coughing fit. Blood speckled his lips.

Maya looked up, her face unreadable. "What meteorite?"

"I don't have—" Declan started.

"You do," Jules insisted, his grip tightening. "Elias carried it. When I ran, I took his pack. I put it in yours—before the cave, during the storm, I don't remember—but it's there. Wrapped in cloth. You have to destroy it. If Lindqvist gets his hands on it, if they bring it to the Nest, whatever's waiting there—"

He stopped, his eyes rolling back for a terrifying moment. Maya slapped his cheek lightly, once, twice, until he blinked back.

"Whatever's waiting there," Jules wheezed, "will finish what it started. Everyone who was Taken. Everyone who will be Taken. The meteorite is the key. Destroy it. Promise me."

Declan stared at him. The words were coming too fast, too feverish, but there was a thread of coherence beneath the delirium. Elias's journal. The satellite team. The first Taken, waiting at the Nest. A corporation that sent them.

"You were never lost hikers," Declan said. It wasn't a question.

Jules's laugh was a wet, broken sound. "We were never anything else. That was the cover. We were supposed to retrieve the fragment and get out. But Elias—Elias touched it. And then he wasn't Elias anymore. He was... wondering what he was. What it made him. And he wanted to go back."

Maya's voice was very quiet. "My brother."

Declan's throat tightened. He watched her face and saw the question she was too afraid to ask. His silence went on a beat too long.

"Your brother," Declan said slowly, "was on my team last winter."

Maya's face went blank. "What?"

"The team you knew about. The one that didn't come back. Your brother was among them." Each word felt like it cost him something. "I never found him. I never found any of them."

The silence in the alcove was absolute, broken only by Jules's rattling breath.

"Except Lindqvist," Maya said. "Lindqvist wasn't on that team."

Declan shook his head. "Lindqvist was never part of the official record. But I saw his name—after. In the files. He wasn't on the missing list. He was on the list of people who went looking for them."

"And now he's at the Nest." Maya's voice was flat. "Waiting."

"I don't know what he's waiting for."

Jules's hand tightened on Declan's arm. "Not what. Who. He's waiting for the fragment. It calls to the Nest. It calls to everything—" His eyes fluttered closed. "—already Taken. You need to destroy it before the blizzard clears. Before Nolan's helicopter finds us. Before they find us."

His hand went slack. In the sudden quiet, Declan heard it—the low, distant howl that echoed off the ridgeline. Not one. Two. Answered by a third.

He reached for his pack, fingers finding the shape wrapped in cloth at the very bottom. Heavy. Cold even through the canvas.

Outside, the snow began to fall again.