Prologue
I loved it up here. That was the thing I kept reminding myself as my boots crunched over the switchback and my lungs started to work a little harder. The Sandias were my favorite mountains in the state, which was saying something because New Mexico was not short on mountains.
So why did the back of my neck feel like someone had run a cold finger along it?
“Katie, you’re falling behind.” Mark was maybe thirty feet ahead of me, his trekking poles clicking a cheerful rhythm against the rock. He grinned back over his shoulder. Mark had the kind of grin that made you feel like everything was fundamentally fine with the world.
“I’m appreciating the view,” I called back.
Jen, who was somewhere between us and had the fitness level of a person who had done something incredible in a previous life to earn it, just laughed without looking back.
I picked up my pace and told myself the feeling was nothing. Altitude, maybe.
The trail broke from the tree line briefly and opened onto a ledge that looked west over the Rio Grande Valley, the city of Albuquerque far below. I stopped and put my hands on my hips and breathed. Three seconds of that, and then it came again.
That feeling.
Not anxiety, exactly. I was super used to that: tight chest, runaway thoughts, the general conviction that I had left something important behind. This was different. This was directional. It came from behind me, from somewhere back in the trees we’d just passed through, and it was not abstract. It was specific. It was pointed at me with the precision of something that knew exactly where I was and exactly what it wanted.
Something was watching me.
I turned around.
Just trees and the trail dropping back into shadow. A bird shrieked from a branch and then went silent.
“You good?” Mark was beside me now, following my gaze.
“Yeah.” I turned back to the valley. “Thought I heard something.”
He tilted his head, listening the way people do when they’re humoring you. “Wind, probably.”
“Probably.”
We kept walking.
It followed.
It?
So my primitive “don’t get eaten” instincts had decided there was an “it” now…
That couldn’t be good.
Was I ready to tell Mark about “it”?
No. I was not.
So I pressed on, definitely not scanning the ground for sharp rocks and pointy-ended sticks that I could use if “it” got hungry. But every time I looked back at the tree line it was just trees. Each time I scanned the granite outcrops above there was nothing.
Nothing but whatever invisible fucking sasquatch was taking a big dump on my weekend.
Stop it, I told myself. You vaped too much last night and had too much coffee this morning and you’re on a nice fucking hike with perfectly normal people in the most unscary mountains in the world.
By the time we hit the turnaround point and started back down, I had constructed a fairly convincing internal argument for the position that I was fine, everything was fine, and the hills definitely did not have eyes. The argument held up well enough that I was able to eat half a granola bar and take a photo of a particularly dramatic cloud formation and laugh at something Jen said.
But when we reached the section of trail that wound back through the densest part of the pine corridor, the part where the trees came close on both sides and the light dropped and you couldn’t see more than fifteen feet into the forest, I stopped dead in the middle of the path.
Every hair on my arms stood up. Something old spoke deep in my mind, something ancient and primitive that had nothing to do with my conscious thoughts and did not consult them.
My body wanted to run.
Not in the generalized, anxious, “I’m uncomfortable” way an introvert like me feels at a party. In the very different manner of a prey animal that has identified a predator animal and is now executing survival logic that long predates the capacity for rational thought.
I walked faster instead of bolting, because I was not prey, I was a law student who did bouldering on weekends, and I was not going to run for my life because of a spooky feeling.
By the time we were back to where we’d parked, the feeling had faded to something I could hold at arm’s length and analyze on the drive home. After a shower and a dinner of leftover green chili pasta eaten while standing over the sink, I put on a podcast about American Supreme Court oral arguments because while I enjoy bouldering, I get off on Supreme Court oral arguments.
By ten o’clock I had myself mostly talked down and by eleven I was in bed. The city was making its regular sounds through the cracked window, and if I lay very still I could convince myself that the mountains were just mountains and whatever I’d felt up there was just a mood. I was probably about to start my period.
I almost believed it.
[divider]Chapter One
Two nights later…
Katie
I was brushing my teeth when I heard it.
A thud. Muffled, like something heavy hitting drywall. Then a scraping sound that traveled the length of the shared wall between my apartment and Mark’s.
Pulling the toothbrush from my mouth, I stood motionless, minty foam gathering at the corners of my lips. The bathroom was small enough that the wall was within arm’s reach, and I pressed my palm flat against it. The plaster felt cool. Normal. But there it was again, a low, dragging rasp, as if someone were running their fingernails from floor to ceiling on the other side.
I spat into the sink, wiped my mouth, and padded barefoot to my front door. The hallway of our apartment building was the kind of place that tried hard to look charming and mostly succeeded during daylight hours. It had clay-colored walls, wrought iron sconces, and saltillo tile, but at eleven p.m. with half the bulbs burned out it just looked like a tunnel.
I knocked on Mark’s door.
Silence.
I knocked again, harder. “Mark? You okay in there?”
Footsteps approached, slow and measured, nothing like Mark’s usual loping shuffle. The deadbolt turned, and the door opened.
Mark stood in the gap, one hand on the frame. He was dressed, which was unusual for this hour. Jeans and a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the collar.
I’d never seen him button a shirt past the third button in the four years I’d known him.
His Lobos cap was gone and his sandy hair lay flat against his skull as though it had been smoothed down with water. Or with a hand that wasn’t his.
“Hey.” His mouth formed the word correctly, but his eyes didn’t participate.
“Hey. I heard a noise through the wall. Sounded like something fell?”
“Nothing fell.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. He just stood there in his buttoned-to-the-throat flannel, looking like some sort of store-brand Mark that came in a bag instead of a box. Everything was where it should be, the crooked nose from a bouldering fall in Cochiti, the faint sunburn across his cheekbones, the scar bisecting his left eyebrow, but the overall product felt off.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“I’m fine, Katie.”
He never called me Katie. It was always K, or dude, or bro.
“Okay.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Well. If you need anything…”
“I don’t need anything. Good night.”
The door closed. Not slammed, just pressed shut with a soft, definitive click. I heard the deadbolt turn.
I stood in the hallway for a while, staring at the closed door. The sconces buzzed, and a cockroach traced a confident path along the baseboard before vanishing beneath the stairwell door. There was a faint smell I couldn’t place. It was acrid, like charred sage mixed with something chemical and sour, and for a disorienting moment my upper lip pulled back from my teeth in a way that felt involuntary.
That was super strange.
But this was Albuquerque, so it was probably some hippie-but-for-bros-who-go-rock-climbing-and-shop-at-REI incense shit Mark was trying out. I did my best to shake it off and went back to my place.
In bed at last, I lay on my back and listened to the wall and heard nothing, which was somehow worse than the earlier scraping. Mark’s TV was off. There were no footsteps, no sounds of running water, nothing. The apartment next door had gone silent in a way that felt less like a person sleeping and more like an empty room pretending to be occupied.
He’s fine. He said he’s fine. People have weird nights.
I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my face into the pillow and breathed until my heartbeat slowed. Sometime well after midnight I fell asleep.
[divider]
The knock came at six forty-five.
I was already half-awake, hovering in that gray zone between sleep and alarm clock where my brain rehearses every anxiety it couldn’t get to during the previous day. My Property Law exam, for example. And the way Mark had looked last night.
Like a stringless puppet. Or a newly sentient chatbot figuring out how humans are operated.
I wrapped myself in my robe and shuffled to the front door, checking the peephole out of habit. Mark was standing in the hallway with his hands in his jacket pockets, staring straight at the peephole as though he could see me through it.
I opened the door. “Hey. Little early for a Saturday.”
“Let’s go hiking.”
No morning, K or dude, you won’t believe what happened or any of the other verbal runway Mark usually required before making a point. Just three words, delivered with the cadence of someone reading from a card.
“We just went hiking. Like three days ago.”
“Different trail. Jemez area. West of town. There’s a route I want to try.”
I leaned against the doorframe and studied him. He was wearing the same flannel, still buttoned to the throat. He had the same flattened hair. His eyes tracked my face without blinking, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Mark go this long without blinking.
“The Jemez? That’s like an hour and a half drive.”
“An hour forty. I already looked it up.”
“Mark, are you—”
“I’d really like you to come.”
Something in the way he said it stopped me. He sounded like a man reciting a line he’d been given, and yet beneath the recitation there was an urgency that felt almost desperate.
He’s going through something. Maybe a bad breakup? He hasn’t mentioned that Stacy girl in a while. Or maybe his parents called again.
Mark’s relationship with his family was a subject he deflected with humor and beer, and I’d always respected that boundary because I had my own version of it. Orphans and the emotionally neglected recognized each other, even when neither felt like talking about it.
“Yeah, okay.” I ran a hand through my tangled hair. “Give me twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
I blinked.
Mark grinned. Or at least his mouth did. The expression arrived on his face a beat too late and departed a beat too soon, like someone who’d studied how grins work in a textbook.
“Fifteen, then. Bossy.” I closed the door, dressed quickly in leggings, trail runners, and a long-sleeve base layer, then grabbed a Nalgene and a granola bar. I almost left my phone charging on the nightstand but shoved both it and my wallet into my pocket at the last second, driven by some impulse I didn’t examine too closely.
Mark was waiting in the hallway, standing in the exact spot I’d left him as though he hadn’t shifted his weight once in the intervening fourteen minutes. He led the way down the stairs without a word. His truck was already running in the lot, exhaust curling white in the early morning cold.
We drove west, then cut through La Bajada and picked up Highway 4 toward the Jemez. Mark, who normally drove with one knee with music blaring while gesticulating about whatever climber drama was consuming the local gym that week, kept both hands on the wheel at ten and two and the radio off.
Then it hit me.
That same acrid, charred-sage scent I’d caught in the hallway the night before.
My nose had always been sharp. Sharper than anyone else’s I’d ever met, actually, to the point where I’d learned not to mention it because people looked at me funny when I told them I could smell rain coming from forty miles out or identify which of my friends had been in a room based on the scent they’d left behind. But the odor clinging to the inside of Mark’s truck wasn’t anything I’d smelled before. It was organic and mineral at the same time, like something earthy mixed with rotten eggs…
Or sulfur.
“So which trail are we doing?” I asked, more to break the silence than anything.
“There’s a spur off the East Fork. Not on the trail maps.”
“How do you know about it then? A hiking forum or something?”
“I found it last week.”
I hadn’t known Mark to hike alone. He was a social creature, the friend who organized group trips and complained about how boring solo outings were. The idea of him out here alone, finding unmapped trails in the Jemez backcountry, sat wrong.
Everything about this morning sat wrong.
We left the highway and bounced along a forest road for twenty minutes before Mark pulled over at a wide spot where the shoulder met a wall of mixed conifer. There was no trailhead marker. No sign, no other cars, just a gap in the trees that might have been a game trail or might have been nothing at all.
I climbed out of the truck and stretched, the cold mountain air filling my lungs. We were high here, eight, maybe eight and a half thousand feet. Ponderosa and Douglas fir gave way to spruce further up the slope, and beyond the spruce the mountains climbed toward rocky ridges still holding patches of early snow. I could hear a creek running somewhere nearby.
“Mark, where exactly are we going?”
He was already walking toward the gap in the trees. “It’s about four miles in. Maybe five. There’s a canyon.”
“You didn’t mention a five-mile approach.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No.”
He stopped and turned, looking at me with those unblinking eyes. “You’ll like it. Trust me.”
Trust me. Two words Mark had never once said to me, because he’d never needed to. Trust between us had always been ambient, built over four years of belaying each other on sketchy trad routes and sharing hangovers and borrowing each other’s laundry detergent. The fact that he had to ask for it now was maybe the most unsettling thing that had happened all morning.
But I followed him. Because he was Mark, and something was clearly wrong with Mark, and I was constitutionally incapable of abandoning someone who needed help even when the help in question was dragging me into a trailless section of the Jemez Mountains on a cold Saturday morning for reasons that made no sense.
The terrain rose steadily through the conifers, the ground soft with decades of accumulated needles. We walked in single file, me three paces behind, Mark apparently navigating by some internal compass that he checked by tilting his head at regular intervals, as though listening for a signal I couldn’t hear.
He didn’t talk. Not about climbing or beer or the weather or any of the hundred things that normally poured out of him in an unbroken stream of cheerful chatter. He walked like a marionette whose operator had studied human locomotion but couldn’t quite replicate it.
Forty minutes in, my skin was crawling. The forest had gone quiet, the same suffocating silence I’d felt in the Sandias. Even the creek sound seemed to have gone away. I could only hear the crunch of our boots and the rasp of my own breathing.
Turn back.
The thought was so clear it might as well have been spoken, issued by some part of myself I couldn’t identify.
“Mark.” I stopped walking. He didn’t turn around immediately, just stood there facing uphill with his hands at his sides. “Mark, I want to go back.”
He turned slowly. His face was blank. Not angry, not confused, just vacant, like a screen that had been switched off. “We’re almost there.”
“I don’t care. Something doesn’t feel right and I want to—”
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. Just gone, 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 not purely lust—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.
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