Mira Mossveil had killed a hundred deer without opening her eyes, but she could not calm the fox thrashing on her floor. It had crashed through the door of her cottage in the treetops, blood on its snow-white tail, a curl of cold steam rising from its fur. She had hunted the shadow beast for three months, ever since it stole her sight in one black instant. This fox had seen it too. She could smell the beast on its coat, and she needed the animal alive. She knelt slowly, palms open. The fox snapped at the air. Her white owl waited on the rafter above, silent, watching the way it always watched for her now that her eyes gave her nothing. Mira spoke low, the same tone she used to draw a bowstring. "Easy. I'm not the thing that hurt you." The fox lunged for the door. Mira caught only fur and frost. It bolted onto the branch platform outside, then stopped at the edge, too weak to jump. She followed on her hands and knees, feeling the boards, tasting the fox's fear-steam on the cold air. One wrong move and it would fall, and every clue about the beast would fall with it. She found the flowers by the rail, the glowing cluster she kept for the bees. She crushed a petal and let the sweet scent drift toward the fox. The snapping stopped. She heard it sniff, then step closer. She waited. She did not reach. She let the animal choose her. Wet nose touched her wrist. Mira exhaled and laid her hand along its trembling side. Her fingers found something hard tangled deep in the fur near its shoulder. Long. Curved. Cold as river stone, with a hooked tip that pricked her thumb. She worked it free. It was a claw. Black, smooth, arched like a scythe. She turned it in her hands and knew the shape at once. She had felt this exact edge at her own throat the night her world went dark. A piece of the beast had broken off inside this fox. The owl dropped from the rafter and landed beside her. Mira held the claw to her nose. Under the fox's frost she caught the beast's scent again, stronger now, pointing somewhere north and low, toward water. The fox had come from there. The claw had come from there. "You're going to show me," she whispered. The fox pressed into her side and did not run. Mira wrapped the animal in her sleeve and stood. For three months she had chased a thing she could not see, following only smell and sound. Now she held its claw in her fist and a living witness against her ribs. She was no longer waiting for the beast to find her. At first light, she would follow the trail north to the water, and she would not be hunting blind.