“What does that even mean?” Raina asked, exasperated.
“I understand,” Camille said quietly. She gave us a sad little smile when Raina and I both looked at her. “When I was younger, before I knew who I really was, I told my best friend that I thought I’d been born in the wrong body. Instead of keeping it secret, he told all our friends. The entire school knew by the next morning.”
“I know none of you would tell a soul, but they trusted me not to tell anyone,” Alex whispered, pleading, and I watched the foundations of Raina’s stubborn defiance crumble.
“Will you tell us what you can?” she asked.
Alex nodded, but it still took him a moment to speak. “They’re different,” he said carefully. “Jean and Landon and the others. I can’t say how, just that they have a way of protecting themselves and each other. That’s how Landon was able to stay alive and mostly safe, even stuck out here. I don’t know why they couldn’t find him without me, but please believe me when I say that none of them will hurt him. It wasn’t them that chased him. He wouldn’t have run from them.”
“You don’t think a bear chased him,” Camille said, reading between the lines. His explanation really didn’t give much to go on, but it was simple enough to deduce that the other group was like him, in a way.
“No, I don’t,” he agreed. “I don’t know who or what it was, but he was absolutely terrified, like it was something he’d never seen before.”
“Well, that’s fantastic,” Raina grumbled. “You swear that Landon is safe and his family can get him home?”
“To the best of my knowledge, yes. They’ll be able to take care of him better than any of us can.”
“Great. Then I vote we get out of here as quick as we can, because after that fun little talk, my skin is crawling and I keep feeling like something is watching me.”
“Agreed,” Camille nodded, glancing around the trees. Visibility had gotten worse and we’d made almost no progress, slowing to a crawl while we talked. Knowing that there were things out in the trees that we knew nothing about made me uneasy, and I understood what they were talking about. It felt like there were eyes on me, raking over me, a hunter stalking prey.
We picked up our pace, almost running through the dense underbrush, trying to follow our trail before the snow buried it. The feeling only got worse the further we got from the ledge and I heard a tiny whimper from Alex, whipped away by the snow, but leaving his panic. He felt it, too.
Where the quiet of the woods had been soothing before, now the utter stillness grated on my senses, rubbing me raw with each step. It was an unnatural silence, not a hint of birdsong on the wind or a whisper of a wandering squirrel. Even with the oncoming snow, it wasn’t normal for the woods to be so completely silent, our increasingly frantic footsteps the only sound to be heard.
Getting to the ledge hadn’t taken too long, compared to the sheer vastness of the woods. The land beyond Lowery’s Crossing was mostly untamed and unsettled, a wilderness stretching to the very heart of the mountains. Going slow, looking for tracks and signs, it’d taken over an hour. We’d only left Jean and the others about ten minutes ago, but with the speed we were moving now, we’d make it back to the cars in half the time it’d taken to find the ledge.
To the left, where the trees were thickest and the snow drew up a white curtain, the snap of a branch echoed in the utter silence. We froze and the girls immediately readied their rifles, mittens ripped off and shoved deep into pockets.
“It could have been nothing,” Alex breathed, his voice shaking. “A limb snapping from the cold.”
It came again, closer this time, and I saw movement, something dark slinking through the underbrush, pausing a second before disappearing again. Something about it felt deliberate. Like itwantedme to see it. Like it wanted me scared.
“Call Ori. Warn them,” I whispered to Alex. “Keep moving toward the cars. Don’t run. Whatever it is, we don’t need to give it a reason to chase us.” I did as Raina and Camille had done, stripping off my gloves and slowly drawing my service weapon. I hadn’t expected to need it, but habit had me grabbing it before we left this morning, something I was grateful for now.
I kept myself between Alex and the spot where I’d seen the movement, with Raina and Camille slightly in front of him and on either side, protecting him by unspoken agreement.
“Ori, there’s something out here following us.” Alex didn’t bother with a greeting when Ori picked up. “I think it’s what was hunting Landon. Be careful and get him out of here while you can.” Ori must have agreed, because Alex ended the call but didn’t put the phone away. “Should I call for help?”
“No one would get here in time and they’d be in just as much danger as us.” Will would drop everything and come if we called, but until I knew what we faced, I wasn’t putting anyone else’s life on the line.
The underbrush rustled, off to the other side this time, and closer. Somehow, it had slipped around us without us seeing a thing.
“How close are we to the car?” Raina asked, real fear in her voice.
Not close enough and we all knew it, but I wasn’t going to be the one to say it. “We’re going to get there.” Another branch snapped, this one even closer, and when I looked back, I saw eyes peering at us through the underbrush, an eerie, unnatural pale orange color that sent a shiver of primordial fear crawling up my spine. It blinked and disappeared and I knew it was toying with us now, savoring our fear.
“Donovan?”
I reached out and gripped Alex’s hand as tight as I could, not daring to take my eyes off the trees. We weren’t close enough to safety. Whatever hunted us had waited, biding its time until we were too far from the others to go back and too far from the cars to make it. We had to try, though.
“Run,” I ordered, giving his hand another squeeze before dropping it and clicking the safety off my gun.
“Donovan, what—”
“Run!”
***
