Read Chapter 6: First Night

The tent wall shuddered, and Declan’s hand went to the knife at his belt before his mind caught up. The fabric bowed inward, a deep crease mold to something broad and heavy pressing against it from the outside. Snow grated against the nylon, a sound like claws dragging across a drum.

Maya’s breath caught. She scrambled backward, knocking the map from his hands.

“Don’t move,” Declan whispered, though the words were as much for himself as for her. He held his knife low and watched the crease in the fabric hold, then shift, moving along the side of the tent like a shark circling beneath ice.

Whatever it was, it was big.

The crease paused at the tent’s corner, where the fly met the snow. Declan heard a wet, sucking breath—the unmistakable sound of something sniffing, pulling air through its nostrils, testing the wind. His own breath fogged in front of him, thin and fast.

Then the weight lifted. The fabric snapped back into place, and the silence returned, broken only by the howl of the blizzard outside.

Declan waited. Counted to sixty in his head. Then counted again.

“Is it gone?” Maya’s voice was barely audible, hoarse with fear.

“I don’t know.” Declan eased himself forward, unzipped the inner flap an inch, and pressed his face to the gap. The storm had swallowed the world—white on white on white, the tree line ghosted into nothing. No tracks would survive this wind. No sign of anything that moved. He zipped the flap shut.

Maya had drawn her knees to her chest, arms locked around them. In the lantern light, her face was pale as the snow outside, and her eyes were fixed on the tent wall where the thing had pressed against them.

“It doesn’t attack tents,” Declan said, sitting back down. “Not usually. Most things don’t want to be inside four walls. It was just testing.”

“Testing what?”

“Whether we were worth the trouble.” He studied her. She was shaking, but not from the cold—she wore her insulation well, layers peeled down to a thermal shirt in the tent’s trapped warmth. Her eyes flicked to his, then away.

“Maya. You’ve been holding something back since I found you.”

She didn’t answer immediately. Her thumb traced the seam of her sleeve, back and forth, a small repetitive motion that made Declan’s tracker’s instincts itch. People lied with their hands when they couldn’t lie with their mouths.

“It’s not…” She trailed off, then started again. “There was something I should have told you. Something I should have told Elias.”

“About the night of the attack?”

“About before.” She looked up, and her fear had a weight to it now, a shape. “There were eight of us.”

Declan felt the words land in his chest like stones. “The manifest said seven.”

“I know.” She swallowed. “That’s because she wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“She?”

“Her name was Petra. Petra Hollis.” Maya’s voice had the hollow quality of a confession. “She was Elias’s friend. He brought her along without telling anyone—not the park office, not the team, not even his university contact. She joined us at the trailhead three days out, after we’d already passed the last checkpoint.”

Declan’s mind ran the numbers, mapping the terrain against the timeline. “Three days out. That’s not easy country to reach without a marked route.”

“She came in by skis. Fast ones. Like she’d done it before.” Maya’s thumb stopped tracing her sleeve. “The night before the attack, I couldn’t sleep. The wind kept talking—you know how it does up here, like it’s saying things that aren’t words but make you wish they were. I stepped out of my tent to relieve myself, and I saw her.”

“Saw Petra?”

“She was walking into the woods. Alone.” Maya’s eyes met his then, and held. “It was late. One in the morning, maybe two. And she was walking with no light, no pack, no snowshoes. Just walking, like she knew exactly where she was going and didn’t need to see the way.”

Declan’s pulse had settled into a low, steady rhythm—the rhythm he knew from tracking wounded game when it stopped running and started circling. “And you didn’t follow her?”

“I thought about it. But it was cold, and dark, and she was already gone by the time I’d pulled on my boots. I told myself she knew what she was doing. That she was just going to relieve herself too, or stretch her legs. I went back to bed.”

“And then the attack came the next night.”

“Yes.” Maya’s voice cracked on the word. “When the thing hit camp, I ran. I didn’t look back. I didn’t count heads. I just ran. And when I finally stopped running, I realized I hadn’t seen Petra since that night. Not during the attack. Not after.”

Declan let the silence stretch. Outside, the storm had reached a resonant pitch, the tent’s walls humming with the pressure of moving air. He turned Ethan’s words over in his mind—the boot tracks walking beside the clawed impressions, deliberate, parallel. Walking. Not fleeing.

“Her tracks,” he said slowly. “When you saw her that night. Did you notice her footprints?”

Maya blinked. “I didn’t look.”

“Think.” Declan leaned forward. “Was there snow on the ground?”

“Yes. Light—barely an inch. It had stopped falling an hour before.”

“And she was walking through it?”

Maya’s brow furrowed. “Yes. I remember that. I remember thinking she’d be cold in here for long hike—she wasn’t wearing a jacket, or at least not a heavy one.”

“And there were animal tracks around the camp?”

“I don’t know. It was night. Dark. I wasn’t looking at the ground.” But her voice had lost its certainty, its steadiness. Something was forming in her mind, a shape she didn’t like.

Declan pulled the map from where it had fallen, smoothing it flat between them. The mark Thomas Blackwood had left—the circled “Nest” in the northern ice fields—sat patient as a promise. His finger traced the line of a ridge that ran north from their position, then stopped at a small, unmarked valley.

“You said Elias brought her without documentation. That she had her own skis, her own gear, her own way in.”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone on your team know her? From before?”

Maya hesitated, and Declan watched the calculation flicker in her eyes—old habit, the brain deciding how much to give and how much to keep. But she was too tired, too scared for subtlety now.

“Elias said he knew her from a research conference last year. But that night, when we—” she stopped. “The second night, before the attack. He called her by a different name.”

“What name?”

“I don’t remember it exactly. It was long, and it wasn’t English. He was talking to her by the fire, and he said something like, ‘I didn’t know you still came up here, Lena.’” Maya’s eyes met his, wide and lost. “She told him he was imagining things. She said, ‘You’re mixing me up with someone else.’”

Declan’s blood went cold. “Lena?”

“You know the name?”

He didn’t answer. His hand had gone to his coat pocket, where the deerhide pouch sat heavy against his ribs. Thomas Blackwood had spoken of a woman once, years ago, in the months before his death. A trapper he’d met in his youth, out past the northern boundary. Thomas had never called her by name—not in Declan’s hearing. But he’d described her fingers, nimble and scarred from years of fileting game. He’d described her eyes as yellow as the sun through a pine grove.

Declan had always assumed Thomas was spinning stories. Old man’s tales to keep his apprentice’s mind off the snow-bright emptiness of the long winter months.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

“We’re not looking for a creature,” he said slowly, the words forming even as he resisted their shape. “We’re looking for a woman. One who might have been out here for a very long time. And Elias brought her to your camp, knowing what she was.”

Maya’s face went pale. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying—” Declan stopped. The sound came again. Not the wind. Not the creak of the tent. Something low and vocal, riding the storm’s current. A howl, rising through the white noise and curving into a shape that might have been a word.

Maya heard it too. She gripped his arm, nails biting through the fabric of his coat.

Declan listened. The howl died, swallowed by the wind.

But the word it had almost formed—that shape on the air—stayed with him, cold and familiar.

*Come*, it had seemed to say. *Come home.*