Read Chapter 5: The Second Set

They moved north through the ragged teeth of the spruce line, Declan breaking trail with the rifle slung across his chest, Maya a half-step behind him. The snowfall had thinned to a bitter drifting powder, but the wind was already sharpening, chewing at the exposed skin of his jaw. He’d been in enough mountain squalls to know the difference between a flurry and the real thing. This was the real thing, coiling itself out over the peaks like a predator getting ready to spring.

They found the second set of tracks at the edge of a frozen creek bed, where the snow had drifted hard enough to hold a cast. Declan stopped, breath fogging around his face, and saw them carved deep into the crust: three-toed impressions the length of his forearm, sunk four inches into the packed powder. The claws had raked the surface at the end of each stride, leaving long furrows that pointed north.

He crouched, running his gloved fingers along the edge of one print. The cast was clean. No melting, no blurring. Whatever had made this walked on two legs.

“This isn’t possible,” Maya said from behind him, her voice thin. He glanced back. She stood with her arms wrapped tight around herself, staring at the tracks with wide, unblinking eyes. “I’ve seen wolf tracks. Bear tracks. Mountain lion. None of them look like that.”

Declan rose, brushing snow off his knees. “That’s because no animal makes tracks like that.”

He followed the line of prints as they cut across the creek bed and angled up the far bank. They were heavy, deliberate. Whatever had made them wasn’t fleeing. It was walking. Tracking.

“I saw nothing,” Maya said, and there was an edge of pleading in her voice. “That night, before everyone disappeared—I was asleep. I woke up and they were gone. I heard a noise, and I ran. I never saw that thing.” She gestured at the tracks, her hand shaking. “I never saw it.”

Declan didn’t answer. He’d spent fifteen years reading snow, and the story it was telling now stood the hair up on the back of his neck. The tracks were too organized. Too purposeful. And they weren’t random. They ran parallel to a smeared drag mark that could only have been made by a body being hauled.

He stopped, looking closer. There, beside the drag mark, was another impression. Half-buried, but unmistakable. A boot print, nearly scuffed out, but positioned directly between the beast’s stride marks.

Not chasing. Not fleeing.

Walking beside it.

Maya came up beside him, hesitating, then froze as she saw the same thing. The color drained from her face. She took a step back, then another, until her shoulders hit a spruce trunk.

“Maya,” Declan said slowly, not taking his eyes off the boot print. “You said no one else walked out of camp.”

“They didn’t,” she whispered. “I told you. I was the only one who ran.”

“Then someone walked out with that thing.”

The wind gusted, whipping snow off the trees and swallowing the tracks around them in a swirl of white. Declan blinked, and when the air cleared, half the prints were gone, erased by the storm.

Maya’s hands were trembling now, visibly, and not just from the cold. She pressed them between her arms, but the shaking didn’t stop.

“You need to tell me what you actually saw,” Declan said, turning to face her, his voice hardening. “Not what you think I want to hear. I’ve been walking this mountain long enough to know when someone’s holding back.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her gaze flicked past him, into the white void beyond the track line, and her whole body tensed.

Then the howl came.

It rolled out of the timber to the north, muffled by the falling snow but unmistakable. Long. Rising. It didn’t have the natural cadence of an animal call—no wolf lifted its voice in that smooth, deliberate climb. It was pitched too low, sustained too long.

And it ended on a breath that almost sounded like a word.

Declan’s hand went to the rifle before he consciously chose to. Maya made a small sound, something between a gasp and a whimper, and took a step closer to him without seeming to notice she’d done it.

The howl faded, swallowed by the wind. For ten long seconds, the only sound was the creak of branches and the dry scrape of snow.

“That’s not an animal,” Maya said, her voice barely audible over the wind.

Declan didn’t disagree.

They didn’t speak again until they found shelter. Declan spotted the overhang near a granite outcropping, a low shelf of rock with enough clearance to pitch a small tent. The storm was already building, the sky behind the ridge darkening with the bruised gray of heavy snowfall. Getting back to the snowmobile was gone—he knew that. They’d be spending the night out here, if the storm let them.

Maya helped him set up the tent without being asked. Her movements were quick, jerky, the motions of someone running on adrenaline and fear. She didn’t look back at the track line they’d left behind, but she flinched every time the wind shifted.

They ate in silence. Freeze-dried stew, boiled over a pocket stove inside the vestibule, the flame hissing against the cold. Outside, the storm was reaching its full voice, a low continuous howl that pressed against the fabric of the tent like a hand testing a locked door.

Declan pulled off his gloves, flexed his fingers over the stove’s warmth, and reached into his jacket. The leather journal was still there, tucked against his chest. He hadn’t opened it yet. He didn’t like the idea of reading Thomas Blackwood’s words out here in the dark, with that sound answering the snow.

But the pouch weighed heavier.

He drew it out, the deerhide soft from years of use, and laid it on his knee. Maya watched him, her eyes dark and unreadable in the stove’s glow.

“This belonged to a man I knew,” Declan said. “Thomas Blackwood. He taught me to track in terrain like this. Taught me to read snow and wind and silence better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Elias’s father,” Maya said.

Declan nodded. “Your guide. And he disappeared from your camp without a trace.”

Maya’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t look away. “Elias knew about—about the wrong tracks. He told me once, around the fire. Two days before everything happened. He said his father used to tell him stories about prints in the snow that couldn’t belong to any animal alive. Prints that changed shape the longer you followed them.”

“He said they changed shape?”

“He said it with a laugh. Like he was making a joke. But his hands were shaking when he said it.” Maya paused, and her voice dropped. “He told me his father had seen them once. Up near the ice fields. And that they’d seen them together, years later, when Elias was sixteen.”

The stove guttered, casting long shadows up the tent walls. Declan turned the pouch over in his hands. The leather was worn smooth in places, cracked and dark along the fold, the stitching crude.

Something inside the pouch shifted.

It was slight—the barest scrape of material against leather—but in the quiet of the tent, it was deafening. Declan’s hand paused. He flipped the pouch open, tilting it toward the stove light.

Inside, folded into a tight square, was a piece of paper. Old, yellowed at the edges, creased from being pressed flat for years. He unfolded it carefully.

It was a hand-drawn map. Crude, but careful, the work of someone who knew the terrain. The lines traced a route from the Selkirk trailhead, past the creek bed where they’d found the beast tracks, and up into the northern ice fields.

At the terminus of the route, marked in faded pencil, was a single word.

*Nest.*

Underneath it, in a smaller hand, barely legible: *He comes back when the snow falls.*

Maya leaned in, reading over his shoulder. Her breath caught, and she pulled back, ducking her head into the collar of her jacket.

Declan refolded the map slowly and put it back in the pouch. He didn’t look at her when he spoke.

“Your guide’s father gave me this pouch five years before he died,” he said. “And whoever walked out of your camp with that thing tied this map inside a Blackwood knot. There’s only three people alive who know that knot.”

Maya was very still. The wind screamed against the tent.

“Elias was one of them,” he said. “And I’m beginning to think you’re not telling me something that would explain how the other two got tied up in this.”

Maya’s eyes glistened in the low light, but she didn’t speak.

Then, behind them, something touched the tent wall.

Not a branch. Not a gust.

A deliberate, heavy pressure, dragging slowly down the nylon.