Read Chapter 2: The Snowmobile Wreck

The wind had teeth now, biting through the shell of his parka as he crested the ridge. Declan cut the snowmobile’s engine, letting the silence rush in—except it wasn’t silence. It was the low, constant groan of a mountain getting ready to bury itself. Above him, the sky had gone the color of a bad bruise.

He’d been riding for three hours, following the last GPS ping the team’s tracker had spat out before going dark. The coordinates put them in a shallow bowl valley between two granite shoulders, a place locals called the Devil’s Kettle because of how the wind funneled through it. A place where tracks didn’t last long, even on a good day.

Declan swung off the machine, planting his boots in the powder. He knelt, brushing the top layer of fresh snow aside with a gloved hand. Beneath it, packed ice held the impression of a ski track—wide, deliberate, not panicked. That was something. Panicked people made erratic cuts, their weight shifting, their skis stuttering. This track read like someone knew exactly where they were going.

He followed it forty yards on foot, the snow climbing past his knees in the drifts, until the shape ahead stopped him cold.

The snowmobile lay on its side against a boulder outcrop, one ski snapped clean off at the spindle, the other twisted skyward like a broken limb. A dark smear on the seat caught the flat gray light, and Declan’s gut tightened before his brain even confirmed it. Blood. Dried to a rust color at the edges, still dark and wet in the center. Recent. Maybe an hour. Maybe less.

He approached slow, the way you approach a wounded animal—not because he thought it would lash out, but because the scene was already telling him a story he didn’t like.

The machine was a Ski-Doo Expedition, a workhorse model outfitted with a rear rack and dual fuel cans. Both cans were gone. The seat was slashed, not from the crash—the cuts were too deliberate, too straight. Someone had taken a blade to the foam, maybe to check for something, maybe to scavenge. The handlebar grip on the right side was gone too, leaving bare metal that caught the light.

Declan pulled his radio from his chest harness and thumbed the transmit button.

“Nolan, this is Cross. Over.”

Static chewed the air for five seconds before the RCMP sergeant’s voice crackled back, thin and strained through the interference.

“Go ahead, Cross. You got something?”

“Found a Ski-Doo down in the Kettle. Overturned, damaged ski. Registration numbers match the outfitter’s fleet. Cole Wainwright’s likely ride.”

A pause. He could hear Nolan breathing, the scratch of a hand over a rough jaw. “Casualties?”

“Blood on the seat, but no body. Could be a head wound, could be something worse. The tracks leading away are still readable.”

“Readable for how long?”

Declan glanced at the sky. The bruise had darkened, the cloud base dropping so low it seemed to sit on the granite shoulders. “Maybe two hours before the front hits. If that.”

“Then read fast. You’re the only set of eyes in that valley until the helicopter can get airborne, and that won’t be before morning.”

Declan didn’t answer. He clicked the radio off, clipped it back to his harness, and turned his attention to the ground.

The tracks were there. Of course they were there. Two sets, leading away from the wreck in a staggered line, heading northeast toward a tree line of black spruce that marked the valley’s edge. But that wasn’t what made him stop.

He crouched low, pulling his headlamp from his pocket and flicking it on even though the light barely cut the gloom. He needed to see the details.

The first set was human. A man’s boot, size ten or eleven, lugged sole, deep heel strike. He was carrying something heavy—the track was compressed harder on the left side, suggesting a load slung over that shoulder. He walked with purpose, strides even, no stumbling. This was Cole Wainwright, or at least the man wearing Cole Wainwright’s boots, walking away from a crash he should have waited by.

The second set was the problem.

Declan had read tracks for twenty years. He’d followed moose through deep powder, wolves across frozen lakes, lynx through subalpine firs. He knew the difference between a padded foot and a clawed one, between the drag of a belly and the clean print of a running animal.

This track was neither.

At first glance, it looked human. Same gait pattern, same heel-to-toe roll of weight transfer. But the toe had splayed wide, and where the ball of the foot should have pressed into the snow, there was nothing but a void. Instead, five ragged impressions fanned out—long, thin grooves ending in needle-sharp points that had punched through the crust like hot wires through wax.

And it was bigger. A third longer than the human track, a third wider. Whatever made it had walked upright, but the stride was too long, too loping. It didn’t walk. It prowled.

Declan pulled his hand back from the snow as if it might burn him, but he made himself breathe. Made himself think.

“Not a bear,” he muttered. Bears didn’t track in a straight line, and they didn’t walk heel-to-toe. Bears swayed, their feet landing in parallel sets.

Not a wolf. Wolves ran on their toes, and their claws didn’t punch through crust that way.

The track paralleled the human’s, twenty feet off to the right, matching step for step. Like it was escorting him. Or herding him.

Declan stood, sweeping his gaze across the valley. The human track disappeared into the spruce line. The animal track—the thing track—did not follow. It veered south, cutting across the open slope toward a rock shelf that jutted from the mountain’s flank like a broken jaw.

He had two choices. Two sets of tracks, one storm, one radio that would go dead soon after the snow began to fall in earnest.

The human track was the mission. The human track was Cole Wainwright, a man with seven scientists under his care, and if Declan followed the thing with the clawed feet into the rocks, he might lose the only chance he had of finding the rest of the team alive.

But his gut was screaming.

He knelt one more time, running his gloved fingers along the edge of the claw impression. The snow had compacted beneath it, and there was something else—a faint discoloration, a pale yellow tint that had seeped into the ice. He leaned closer. The smell hit him, faint but unmistakable.

Copper. Old blood. And something else, something chemical and sharp that made his eyes water.

He gripped the radio, thumbed it on.

“Nolan.”

“Go.”

“I’ve got two tracks leaving the wreck. One human, one… I don’t know what. The second one’s not making sense to me.”

The static swelled, a growl of interference. Nolan’s voice came through mangled. “…repeat… didn’t copy… track…”

“The other track,” Declan said, slower, louder. “It’s not animal. It’s not human. But it’s walking like a man.”

The radio spat a storm of white noise. When Nolan’s voice finally cut through, it was thin, distant, like he was already under ten feet of snow.

“Cross… Eliza… Voss said… the prints… I didn’t believe her… but if you’re seeing the same thing, you need to get out of that valley. Now.”

Declan’s jaw tightened. “I’m not leaving until I find them.”

“You don’t understand—she’s not the only one who saw those tracks. We found a hunting party two weeks ago, off their grid. They had photos. Same shape. Same size. They said they saw it moving like a man but bigger, and when it got close, the snow around it didn’t work right.”

“What does that mean?”

The radio crackled, and the signal broke apart, Nolan’s words dissolving into a burst of static so harsh Declan had to pull the speaker away from his ear.

When the noise cleared, the radio was dead. He tapped it, clicked the channel dial, but nothing. The storm had finally arrived, not as flurries but as a wall of white dropping over the ridge, swallowing the peaks one by one.

Declan looked at the radio in his hand. Then at the human tracks heading into the spruce.

He took a breath that burned cold in his lungs, turned his back on the clawed prints, and started walking. He had maybe ninety minutes before the snow erased everything. He didn’t have time to be afraid.