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A paw lifts from the black water with a wet, sucking pull. When it settles again, it spreads strangely in the mud, broad enough to turn my stomach.

My pulse hammers, loud in my ears. Every sensible thought I’ve ever had about animals, about fear, about how predators behave, scrambles uselessly. My stomach drops as I realise what it’s doing.

The creature’s eyes fix on me.

“James,” I say, ignoring Alex, and this time my voice shakes. “It’s herding us.”

Alex lets out a short, breathless laugh, sharp as a bark. “No fucking shit. Let’s not disappoint the bastard by staying put.”

He looks between us like he’s lining pieces on a board. “Our first hunt,” he says. “That boar that near broke James’s ribs.”

Then, Alex’s gaze snaps to the monstrous hound-like thing. “I’ll bait it. James’ll cut in. And Robert, break its footing.”

James has his blade ready, like a man built for impact.

Alex moves first.

It isn’t panic driving him, not exactly, but the old instinct to move before anything else can decide the outcome for him. Steel clears leather with a sharp, familiar rasp, and for a fleeting instant the world feels like something I understand again.

The blade connects, but the sound isn’t the wet give of flesh or the hard stop of bone, but something dull and resistant, as though Alex has struck soaked timber hidden beneath its skin. The blade glances off, dragged sideways before he can turn it into a real cut, and the shock jolts up his arm hard enough to jar his shoulder. For a single, breath-held beat, the thing only looks at him. Then it moves.

It surges forward with ground-eating speed, crossing the space between them with an ease that makes my stomach twist. Alex goes down under the force of it, driven sideways and back, boots skidding as he hits the softer edge of the bog. Water splashes up around him, dark and eager, and for one horrifying second I’m sure it’s going to drag him under and finish what the creature began.

“Alex!” I shout, the sound ripping out of me too loud in the dead air.

The creature turns on the sound of my voice.

Alex scrambles out of the water, cursing. By the time he hauls himself clear, blood is already slicking his forearm, dark against his sleeve where the claws must have caught him on the way down.

The beast’s gaze locks onto me, and I have barely enough time to register the intelligence there—cold, focused, utterly uninterested in mercy—before it moves again.

I throw my arm up more out of reflex than strategy, and claws rake across my arm, shredding cloth and scoring skin beneath it. Pain flares sharp and hot along my forearm, shallow but vicious, the restraint somehow more terrifying than if it had gutted me outright.

It could have easily maimed me, but chose not to.

James barrels into it then, blade flashing as he drives himself between the creature and where Alex is struggling to his feet. Steel finally bites somewhere that matters, and the creature hisses—a sound like steam tearing free from the earth—as it wheels on James with a force that knocks him back a step despite his footing.

The three of us are moving now, not cleanly, but together in a way we hadn’t been a moment before, the instinct to protect overriding every other thought. I stay close to James’s side, guarding his flank with no need to think it through, prepared to strike only when the opening is there. Hoping with everything in me that my arm doesn’t hesitate when it comes.

James drives into it again, but this time the beast meets him head-on. The impact thuds up through the mud-slicked ground, and into my boots. James staggers, jaw clenched, barely keeping his footing as the creature’s bulk presses him back. His paws are biting deep enough to carve gouges that fill instantly with dark water.

Then it surges through him with brutal force and hurls him backward. He stumbles hard, boots skidding on the slick ground, barely catching himself before the edge of the bog takes him.

It doesn’t follow.

Its head turns instead, first to Alex, then to me.

My heart pounds so hard it feels as though it’s trying to outrun my body, and for a sickening moment I understand exactly how little the space is between standing and dying.

It feints.

Not a full strike, only enough movement to make me flinch—to test whether I’ll hold or break—and I hate myself for the instinctive step backward that follows. The ground gives beneath my heel, and the bog reminds me how little room we have left. The creature presses the advantage immediately, driving us closer to the soft earth with measured force.

James swears somewhere to my left, still fighting for his footing. Alex’s eyes are wild now, scanning for an opening that isn’t there. None of us say it aloud, but the truth hangs between us, heavy and unavoidable.

If one of us goes down here, the others won’t be far behind.

The beast lowers itself closer to the ground, muscles coiling, the air around it tight with the promise of movement. I realise with a jolt of cold clarity that this is the moment it has been waiting for—the point where fear finally outweighs reason and something breaks.