Page 47 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“I’m a man who wants to get this hiker to the doctor,” I say, stepping past them. “You can follow, or you can stay here and wait for the SAR team. But if you get in my way, I will leave you behind.”

They follow. I’m the only thing in this storm that makes sense, even though I’m the thing that defied all their logic. I lead them down the back side of the ridge toward the lower trail, moving at a pace they can barely maintain. I don’t look back at the camera, but the lens’s gaze is like a brand on my back.

We meet the SAR team a mile from the lodge. They are a group of three, led by a man named Henderson who has been pulling people out of these woods for twenty years. He sees me first, coming through the mist with the hiker in my arms. He doesn’t reach for a weapon, and there’s not even a trace of surprise on his face.

“Rowan.” He nods as he walks over with a thermal blanket. “Should have known you’d beat us to him. He okay?”

“Cold,” I say, handing the hiker over. “But breathing. His pulse is thready.”

“We’ve got him,” Henderson says. He glances at Jax and Miller, who are hovering ten feet back, their cameras still rolling. Something like pity flashes in his eyes. “You know they’re filming this, right?”

“I know.”

“All right then. Get yourself inside, Rowan. You look like hell.”

The adrenaline is beginning to ebb, a hollow clarity taking its place. Jax and Miller are huddled together, looking at the playback on the camera’s small screen, at the gold mine they had just unearthed.

The lights of the lobby are a glowing beacon in the rain. Through the window, I see Wren standing next to the desk, her head in her hands. She knows. Even without seeing the footage, she knows what I’ve done.

I stop at the edge of the gravel lot. I look at my hands—the broad palms and blunt fingers that have just ended centuries of silence. I protected the mountain. I saved the man.

And I lost everything else. I walk toward the doors, the sound of the rain drowning out the world I used to know.

I don’t enter through the front. I couldn’t face Sarah Vance yet, not with her professional hunger and her linen shirts. I go through the mudroom and silently slip into the small washroom. I strip off my soaked shirt, leaving it in a heavy, sodden heap on the floor. My skin is still humming, the residual heat of my true form refusing to dissipate entirely. In the mirror of the small washroom, I see the man I pretend to be. Beard. Amber eyes filled with exhaustion. But underneath that, bark-like patterns still flicker like embers under ash.

Wren finds me there. She doesn’t say a word at first, just leans against the doorframe, her face pale, eyes tracking the steam rising off my shoulders. She searches my face for the irritation or the ancient, dry distance I usually maintain. She’ll find neither. I’m just a man who made a choice.

“Jax is in the lobby,” she says, her voice barely a whisper over the drum of the rain on the roof. “He’s already uploading the proxies to their cloud server. He didn’t even take his coat off. He’s shaking, Rowan. From the adrenaline. He knows he just filmed the most valuable three minutes of footage in the history of his industry.”

“I know,” I say, grabbing a towel off the hook. “He was very thorough with his framing. Professional to the last.”

Wren steps into the small room, closing the distance until she can put a hand on my chest. Her skin is warm, a sharp contrast to the damp chill of the air. “Rowan, I’m so sorry. I tried to build a fence around you. I tried to turn them into a joke so they wouldn’t look for the truth. I thought I could outsmart the world.”

“You’re a human, Wren. You believe the world can be managed with contracts and cleverness. But the mountain has no fine print. A man was dying. I am the Guardian. There was no other sum to that equation.”

“But the cost,” she chokes out, her fingers curling into the skin of my shoulder. “They have it. It’s not a blurry photo or a shaky infrared blob. It’s you, leaping fifteen feet and glowing like a furnace on that thermal scanner. It’s undeniable. By tomorrow morning, every news outlet on the planet will have a copy. Aethelgard will own the right to hunt you with every lens they have.”

I cover her hand with mine. “Let them come. They will find that the mountain is larger than their servers. But you were right, Wren. The quiet is over. The secret your family kept for a hundred years... I broke it to save a man who won’t even remember my name.”

“He’ll remember,” she says, looking up at me with a fierce, tragic kind of pride. “Henderson and the SAR team? They’re already calling it a miracle. But Jax? He’s calling it a series. He’s in there right now, Rowan, staring at the screen like he’s found the Holy Grail. And I’m the one who gave him the map.”

I pull her closer, resting my forehead against hers. We stood there in the quiet of the mudroom, two people tethered together by a disaster of our own making. The footage is racing through the wires, leaping across the sky, turning a myth into a commodity. It was out of our hands, out of the forest, and into a world that would never stop looking for me again.

26

WREN

THE INTERNET NEVER FORGETS, UNFORTUNATELY

The blue light of the laptop screen is the only thing standing between me and the total darkness of the lodge office. Outside, the storm has settled into a rhythmic, punishing pour, but inside, the air is humming with a different kind of electricity. On the monitor, a progress bar hits one hundred percent. The file name is a string of gibberish—MOV_0942_RAW—but I know exactly what it contains. It’s the end of the world, rendered in 4K resolution.

I don’t need to click play. I saw the thumbnails before Jax slammed his laptop shut to go find a signal booster. I saw the frame where Rowan’s skin looks less like flesh and more like ancient hemlock. I saw the way he moved—a blur of impossible speed that no human frame could sustain. It wasn’t a grainy photo taken from a hundred yards away. It was a portrait of a secret being torn open.

My phone vibrates on the desk, a jagged skitter against the wood. The Bigfoot Hotline is no longer a trickle of bored millennials and Croc-theft reports. It’s a physical weight. The notification light is a frantic, rhythmic red pulse. Every news aggregate, every cryptid forum, every bored person with an internet connection is currently watching a man turn into a mountain.

I touch the screen, my fingertip resting over the digital ghost of Rowan’s face. He’s probably already gone. I felt the shift in him when we stood together in the dark—a pulling away that had nothing to do with physical distance. He saved a life, and in return, I handed him over to the vultures. I didn’t mean to. I meant to save the lodge. I meant to pay the electric bill. I meant to keep the lights on so I could see him clearly, but the lights I’ve turned on are too bright. They’re blinding.

A soft knock at the door makes me jump. My chair screeches against the floorboards, the sound echoing in the hollowed-out silence of the building. I expect Sarah Vance with a contract or Jax with his camera. I expect the world to come crashing through the heavy oak doors to demand their piece of the miracle.