Isla Vance had been walking into Pineland Forest for two hours when she realized something was walking with her. She was twenty-five, alone, and carrying a kitchen knife, a flashlight, and a creased photo of her younger sister. Six hours ago, two strangers had pulled the girl off the trailhead so fast that all Isla managed was a scream of her name. The police were still filling out forms when Isla left the parking lot. She did not know the men who took her sister. She knew only the direction they had run. The sound came from her right. A slow crunch of needles, matched to her own pace. When she stopped, it stopped. When she moved, it moved. Her flashlight caught nothing between the trunks but more trunks. She tightened her grip on the knife and felt how small it was in her hand. She stepped off the path to put a thick pine between her and the sound. Her boot came down on something soft. A small fox lay curled against a root, one ear split clean down the middle, its front paws so dark they looked dipped in ink. It was breathing. It watched her without moving. Whatever was pacing her had not scared it into running. That meant whatever was pacing her was something the fox already knew to freeze for. Isla crouched and swept the flashlight low. Twenty feet ahead, a fallen log lay across the slope. The bark was torn open in four deep gouges, the wood underneath pale and fresh. Something with claws longer than her fingers had dragged itself over that log within the day. She tracked the beam past it and found prints pressed into the wet dirt. Not a bear's. Wider. A wolf's, but wrong-sized, the pads as broad as her palm. She heard breathing then, close, off her left shoulder. She turned the light. Amber eyes caught it and held. The wolf was the size of a pony, silver-gray, pine needles snarled through its coat. It did not run. It lowered its head and stepped forward into the beam. Isla scrambled backward over the gouged log and her hand closed on something hard in the leaf litter — a length of wood, heavy, crowned with a bundle of shed antlers lashed tight with cord. Someone had made it. Someone had left it here. She swung it up two-handed as the wolf came. The antlers caught the wolf across the jaw. It twisted, snapped, tore her sleeve, and bolted into the dark. Isla stayed on her knees, shaking, the club across her thighs. The forest was quiet again. She looked at the weapon in her hands and understood two things at once. Someone was out here making weapons for what lived in these woods. And the men who took her sister had walked in this direction hours ago.

Isla stood up from the gouged log with the antler club in one hand and the kitchen knife in the other. Her sleeve was torn where the wolf's teeth had caught her. The wolf's blood was on the fabric too, smeared dark across her cuff and down the front of her jacket. She had not noticed it during the fight. She noticed it now because the forest had gone wrong around her. The small fox by the root was gone. Nothing chirped. Nothing moved. Something else had come. She heard it before she saw it. A heavy step in the brush to her left. Then a second step, behind her. Whatever circled her was big enough to break twigs without trying. She turned a slow circle with the flashlight. The beam caught a pale shape low between the trunks, then lost it. She smelled wet fur and something sour under it, like meat left out. She ran. She picked the downhill slope because it was faster, and she kept the club up across her chest. The ground dropped into a clearing she had not seen from the path. In the middle stood a hump of gray rock taller than she was, streaked with old blood that had dried black in the cracks. Bones lay scattered around its base. Ribs. A jaw. Something with a long skull she did not want to name. She had run straight into the place the predator brought its kills. Isla understood then. The blood on her jacket was the invitation. As long as she carried it, she was meat walking. She dropped the flashlight in the dirt and stripped the jacket off over the club. Her fingers shook on the zipper. Inside the pocket, against her hip, sat a dagger she had picked up off the log without remembering — a short blade shaped like a fang, the leather grip dark and tacky. It had been lying in the wolf's blood too. She pulled it out and set it on the rock. The brush behind her cracked open. A bear pushed through, black coat marked with pale spots, head low, nose working the air. It was not looking at her. It was looking at the jacket in her hands. She threw the jacket hard across the clearing, toward the far treeline. The bear's head swung after it. The bear ran past her, four feet from her boots, and crashed into the brush on the other side. Isla stayed on her knees by the bloodied rock until her breathing slowed. She picked up the flashlight. She picked up the fang-shaped dagger and wiped the grip on her jeans until it was dry. The jacket was gone. So was the smell that had drawn the bear. But she was deeper in the forest now than she had meant to go, and she had no idea which direction the trail was anymore.