There was no warning. One moment it was just Mark and I on the trail, the next it was Mark and I and a huge fucking wolf, two hundred and fifty pounds of gray-black fur and muscle that slammed into Mark’s chest with enough force to send both of them cartwheeling off the trail and over the edge of a rocky drop-off I hadn’t even registered was there.
White-hot aggression surged through my body, raw and primal, like adrenaline’s feral cousin. My vision sharpened. The scents of the forest hit me with staggering intensity, each one distinct and layered and identifiable in ways that shouldn’t have been possible for a human sense of smell. My lips peeled back from my teeth, and the sound that rose in my chest wasn’t a scream.
I snarled like I was going to tear out a motherfucker’s throat with my teeth.
What the fuck is happening to me?
The question dissolved before I could process it, overridden by the imperative to move. I ran to the edge of the drop-off and looked down.
The wolf was gone. So was Mark.
Unless the enormous, bare-ass-naked man down there now was somehow Mark…
Because this new specimen wasn’t tall and lean like Mark. He was thick, powerfully built, his body a landscape of hard muscle and old scars. His hair was dark, hanging past his jaw, and his skin was weathered brown and slick with sweat despite the cold. He stood in the ravine with his bare feet planted wide on the rocks, his back to me.
Mark was gone. Justgone, as though the forest had swallowed him.
And at the far end of the ravine, half-hidden in the shadow of an overhang was… something.
My brain tried to process it as some kind of Chernobyl coyote because that was the closest shape it could match, but the comparison collapsed almost immediately. It was too angular, as though someone had rendered it with a drafting compass and a box of broken glass. Its too-long limbs were jointed in places things in the waking world didn’t have joints, and its gaunt body was pale to the point of translucence, the skin stretched over a cage of ribs and vertebrae that looked like they’d been carved from dark, polished stone. As its head swiveled toward me, I caught the glint of dark pits that might have been eyes.
The acrid stench hit me so hard my stomach lurched, and then I knew. This was “it”. This was the thing that had been watching me in the Sandias. It must have been following me.
The naked man looked up at me, snapping my mind back to the moment.
His eyes were amber, the color of pine resin held up to sunlight, and in the half-second our gazes locked I felt something ignite inside. It wasn’t fear or lust—or at least notpurelylust—but something deeper and more destabilizing, something that made me want to both flee and press myself against him. My pulse tripled and my skin flushed hot.
“Run,” he commanded.
His voice carried up the ravine with unnatural clarity, deep and rough and stripped of everything except that single imperative.
I couldn’t make my feet move. I stood on the lip of the drop-off with my teeth bared and my fists clenched and watched as the man turned back to the creature. It moved first, lunging with a speed that defied the awkwardness of its angles, those jagged limbs somehow covering ground in a blur.
The man faced it without flinching, and then suddenly he… changed.
So quickly my mind could barely process what was happening, the man was gone and the massive beast that had attacked Mark was back, casually defying everything I understood about the world as it tore into the angular thing with a savagery that was neither human nor animal but something more primal than either.
I stood transfixed by the scene before me.
RUN.
This time the command came from my body rather than my mind, a physical compulsion that seized my legs and spun me away from the edge before the conscious part of me had agreed to comply. I ran, crashing through the scrub and the deadfall,branches whipping my arms and face, hiking boots slipping on the loose volcanic rock.
Just as the sounds of life or death combat were finally fading into the distance, leaving only my own ragged breathing and the pounding of my heart, a root caught my foot at the exact wrong angle.
My ankle twisted and the ground rushed up to meet my face. I threw my hands out but they found only loose scree, and the side of my head struck a flat slab of rock with a sound like a mallet hitting a cantaloupe.
There was a white flash, and a taste of copper. The forest tilted, went sideways, and began to fade at the edges. The last thing I registered before the darkness swallowed me was another smell, like pine sap and wood smoke and the musk of something wild, and somewhere beneath the ringing in my skull, I had a single thought that didn’t feel entirely like my own.
I found you.
Then nothing.
CHAPTER 2
Silas
The hospital smelled like bleach and recycled air.
