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A shape moves between the trees.

Large.

Then larger.

It comes on four legs, but no ordinary animal was meant to look so wrong. Grey-black fur hangs in ragged lengths over a frame too broad through the shoulders and too deliberate in its movement. There’s power in it, a horrible rolling heaviness under the skin, and yet nothing about it is merely animal. The proportions are wrong. Worst of all is the face, which holds far too much recognition, far too much intention, to belong to any natural creature.

Its eyes catch what little light filters through the trees and throw it back wrong.

Gold, but not like an animal’s should be. Not glassy. Not vacant. They are bright with a dreadful attention that lands on us one by one and appears to weigh us. Its jaws part, and barring teeth far too white against the dark wet of its mouth.

A sick part of my mind wonders whether it has fed already this morning.

“Conriocht,” I say, almost under my breath.

“In fucking English, Robert!” Alex hisses.

My temper sparks at once, hot and stupid and absurdly welcome. Anything is easier to bear than terror. “It’s a bloody werewolf!”

“Faoladh,” Mannie corrects. “A shapeshifter,” he adds.

I turn toward him. “Are they not the same thing?”

“No,” he says. His voice is steady enough to make me want to shake him. “And the difference matters.”

Alex gives a hard, humourless laugh as the grip on his daggers tightens. “It doesn’t seem especially important while it’s standing there looking ready to tear out my throat.”

“It should,” Mannie says. “A werewolf is a mindless beast. A shapeshifter still has a mind of its own.”

“How in the hell can ye tell what it is from this distance?” James demands.

It pads fully from the trees and onto the path with the calm of something that has never once doubted itself as the worst thing in the woods.

“Hold,” Mannie says, forestalling James’s question entirely. “Let’s try to keep our heads.”

That would be easier if the creature were less plainly built for ending us.

It keeps coming. Not fast. Almost strutting, as if we’re meant to wait upon it.

Our horses grow more anxious with every step it takes.

Mannie’s not moving. Why isn’t he moving? Questions pound through me almost as loudly as my heart. Every muscle in my body screams for action, for steel, for shouting, for anything but this terrible stillness.

But some battered remnant of sense keeps me from breaking first, if only because Mannie is not afraid, so perhaps fear is not yet the wisest thing in the world.

The creature stops.

Its head turns slowly, almost curiously, and then those terrible gold eyes settle on Alex.

The change in him is instant. He knows—as surely as I know my own name—that he’s being singled out. He’s suddenly too far away to reach.

“Alex—” It hits me then, cruelly, that Róisín’s not here to see this. For one sick instant, I can all but hear her calling his name, can picture the exact look on her face were she made to watch him die on this road.

What if she doesn’t get to see him again? What if this is the last sight of him because I brought him here?

All of it narrows to this one impossible point.

The creature lowers its head.