Read Chapter 34: The New Deputy

The call came at 7:42 on a Tuesday, three weeks after Declan had been discharged from the hospital. He was in Carter's cabin, cataloging the contents of the cellar, when his phone buzzed against the pine table. Sgt. Nolan's name lit the screen.

"Cross," Nolan said without preamble. "You're not going to like this."

Declan set down the hand-loaded cartridge he'd been examining. The copper tip was machined to an unusual frustum shape, like a miniature flechette. "I'm listening."

"Disappearance up near Fort Nelson. British Columbia, just shy of the Alberta line. A geologist doing permafrost surveys went missing eight days ago. RCMP's been over the ground twice, search dogs once. Nothing."

"So why are you calling me?"

A pause stretched down the line. Declan heard Nolan exhale, the familiar sound of a man deciding how much to say.

"Because the RCMP officer on scene used to work with me in Manitoba. He's a tracker, same as you — a good one. He says what he found on that ridge doesn't belong in the wildlife guide. He sent me photos."

Declan's hand tightened on the phone. The cellar smelled of old paper and cold dust, and suddenly it was the smell of the tunnel, of cordite and crushed rock, of Maya's blood steaming on ice.

"I'll send them to your secure line," Nolan said. "But I want you to know what you're walking into before you say yes. He called it a bear track with a human stride. I've been doing this twenty-three years and I've never heard that combination before."

Declan had. He'd seen it in Carter's photographs, dozens of them, black and white and fading color, spanning thirty years and four continents. He'd seen it in fresh powder on Grizzly Ridge, leading away from a camp where four people had died and one had walked out changed.

"Send them," Declan said.

The photos arrived six minutes later. Three images, taken at dusk with a phone flash. Snow churned by wind, a depression that could have been a kneeling position, and then the tracks. Four toes, broad pad, elongated heel—plantigrade, not digitigrade. The weight distribution was subtly forward, heel and ball nearly equal, a stride length that suggested an upright posture.

Human, walking on bear feet.

Declan stared at the images until the screen dimmed. Then he looked at Carter's wall map, the one marked with red pins and fading ink. He'd put a new pin on Grizzly Ridge last week, the way Carter used to do. Somewhere near Fort Nelson, according to the map's scale, there was a loose cluster of tiny circles in pencil that Declan had assumed were graphite marks from a compass.

He crossed to the map and looked closer. The pencil circles weren't random. They bracketed a chain of ridges running northwest from Fort Nelson toward the Yukon border. And beside the largest circle, in Carter's cramped hand, a single word:

*Echo.*

Declan packed the rifle.

---

The drive took eleven hours. Declan left Watson Lake before dawn, crossed the border into British Columbia on 97, and followed the Alaska Highway until it bent south at Fort Nelson. The town was small, a service hub for gas fields and logging roads, and the RCMP detachment was a two-story building with a weather-stained sign and a parking lot of snow-covered trucks.

The officer who met him in the lobby was short and wiry, with the wind-burned face of a man who worked outside. His nameplate read BRENNAN.

"Sergeant Nolan said you'd come," Brennan said, shaking Declan's hand. "Didn't think you'd make it same day."

"Long drive. Quiet roads." Declan shrugged off his pack. "You said the tracks were up a ridge. I'd like to see daylight while we're walking."

Brennan grabbed his coat. "Weather's holding. Might not tomorrow."

The ridge was forty minutes out of town on a plowed service road, then another twenty on snowmobile down a cut line that hadn't seen traffic since the freeze. Brennan drove; Declan sat behind him, rifle case strapped across his chest, watching the treeline slide past. The snow was deep, the light flat, and the cold had that particular bite that meant the temperature had dropped below minus thirty.

They parked the machines at a clearing and climbed on foot. Brennan moved well, reading terrain without being told to, and Declan noted the economy of his motion—he was a tracker too, the kind who kept his eyes out and his mouth shut.

The site was a rocky shoulder halfway up the ridge, where the treeline thinned and the ground fell away in a long bowl to the valley below. Yellow police tape snapped in the wind, and a small tent fly had been erected over a patch of churned snow.

Brennan stopped at the tape line. "Guy's name was Anders Voss. Geologist, forty-four, doing contract work for the provincial survey. He was out here on a two-week solo rotation checking permafrost instruments. Last contact was a satellite message at 1400 hours on the third. When he didn't check in on the fourth, the office called it in."

Declan ducked under the tape, careful to stay out of the marked area. The snow was hardened and wind-carved, days old, but the tracks were still visible in the lee of a boulder where the drift had protected them.

He crouched. The print was nearly identical to the ones in Brennan's photos. Four toes, broad pad, elongated heel. He placed his gloved hand over it—the width spanned his palm, the depth pressed six inches into the compacted snow.

"A bear," Brennan said from behind him. "That's what my first thought was. But bears are denned up, and the stride length is wrong."

Declan stood and followed the line of tracks. They led from the boulder toward a fringe of spruce, then looped back and crossed their own trail. He counted strides. At the turn, the tracks compressed, like the creature had paused, pivoted, taken a step sideways.

He'd seen that pattern before. On Grizzly Ridge, outside Dr. Lindqvist's tent, where the transformed man had hesitated at the threshold of what remained of his human life.

"Did Voss have a history of night hiking? Any reason he'd be out here after dark?"

Brennan shook his head. "We checked his journal. He was logging measurements until sundown, then heading back to the hut. Hut's three klicks down the valley. His snowmobile was still there, battery dead, so he walked."

"Walked where?"

"That's what we can't figure." Brennan pointed past the spruces, toward the ridgeline. "The tracks head up, not down. Away from shelter, into the worst ground on this whole section of plateau."

Declan followed the line with his eyes. The tracks rose into the treeline and disappeared over the shoulder of the ridge. Beyond that, according to the map, the ground dropped into a series of ravines that complicated tracking.

"I need to see the hut," Declan said.

---

The hut was a prefab container on skids, the kind the survey used for remote camps—one room, a propane heater, a bunk, a desk. The RCMP had already dusted for prints and photographed the interior, and a thin layer of sealant powder covered the surfaces like frost.

Declan moved through it slowly. The desk held a laptop, unplugged, and a stack of field notebooks. The bed was unmade, the sleeping bag shoved to one side. A mug sat by the stove with residue of dried coffee.

"You notice anything off?" Brennan asked.

Declan picked up the notebooks and flipped through the most recent one. Voss's handwriting was precise, almost mechanical, each entry dated and time-stamped. The last entry was the day of his disappearance.

*Field station 14-7. Instruments re-zeroed. Local anomaly in deep ground temperature. Consistent with logged pattern at 14-3 and 14-5. Will investigate in AM.*

"Anomaly," Declan said. "Did he investigate 14-3 or 14-5?"

Brennan frowned. "I don't have the instrument logs. Those go back to the survey office in Victoria."

"He found a pattern," Declan said slowly. "Three stations with the same anomaly. He was planning to investigate. That same night, he walked up a ridge into the worst weather ground in the area." He looked at Brennan. "What kind of geologist walks into a blizzard without his GPS?"

It wasn't Voss who did the walking. Declan was sure of it now, the way he'd been sure on Grizzly Ridge. Something had come to the hut, and the man had gone out to meet it.

Or had been taken.

He was about to say as much when a voice came from the doorway.

"Excuse me—are you the tracker they called in?"

Declan turned. A woman stood in the open doorway, stamping snow off her boots. She was in her late twenties, bundled in a heavy down coat with a university patch on the shoulder—University of Alberta, Department of Geology. Her dark hair was escaping from a knit hat, and her eyes were sharp, assessing, more than a little wary.

Brennan straightened. "Dr. Mercer. I didn't expect you back."

"I heard someone new was coming." She looked at Declan, not at Brennan. "Anders was my colleague. We were working the same survey grid. I found the anomaly logs the morning after he disappeared—three stations showing the same deep-ground heat signature. I came out to recheck them."

"Recheck them for what?" Declan asked.

She hesitated, then pulled a folded map from her coat and spread it on the desk. The map was covered in contour lines and survey markers, but someone—her, Declan guessed—had drawn circles around three points. They formed a rough triangle on the plateau north of the ridge.

"These aren't permafrost anomalies," she said. "They're too deep for that, and the signal shape is wrong. I've seen readings like this before, in the literature. The closest analog is a buried metallic mass with unusual thermal conductivity."

"Like a meteorite," Declan said.

Dr. Mercer's eyes widened a fraction. She looked at him for a long moment, reassessing.

"That's exactly like a meteorite," she said quietly. "But we've done extensive survey work in this region. There's no record of a fall in this area in the last fifty years." She paused. "And if there were a meteorite out here, it wouldn't explain Anders. Unless—"

She looked at the open door, at the darkness gathering beyond the hut, and didn't finish the sentence.

Declan reached into his jacket and pulled out the map from Carter's cabin. He unrolled it on the desk, the worn paper crackling, and placed his finger on the pencil circle near Fort Nelson. The word Carter had written beside it caught the lamplight.

*Echo.*

"This is why I came," Declan said. "Not because the RCMP called. Because I've seen what made those tracks, and I know what happens to people who go looking for what's at the center of them."

Dr. Mercer studied the map, then looked at the rifle case strapped across Declan's back. Her jaw tightened.

"You're not really RCMP, are you?"

"No," Declan said. "But I've seen those tracks before. And I've seen what they mean."

He let the silence hang. Then he rolled up both maps, Carter's and hers, and slid them into his jacket.

"First light," he said. "We instrument-check those three stations and figure out what Dr. Voss found. Then we find out where his tracks were leading him—and stop it from happening to anyone else."

Dr. Mercer nodded, once, the gesture firm. "I'll bring the ground-penetrating gear."

Declan waited until her footsteps crunched away through the snow, then looked at Brennan.

"You said you saw those tracks up on the ridge. Did you follow them?"

Brennan shook his head. "Went as far as the treeline, then lost them in the blowdown. No way to track over that crust without a dog team."

"Tomorrow," Declan said, "we'll follow them on foot."

He stood in the doorway of the hut and watched the last of the light drain from the horizon. In the east, clouds were building, the kind that carried heavy snow. In his pocket, Carter's map pressed against his hip, weighted with a lifetime of answers he was still learning to ask.

For the first time since the tunnel collapsed around Maya's body, he felt something like purpose settle into his chest.

He wasn't hunting ghosts anymore. He was hunting what made them.