Radonna crouched in the black water and counted the empty boats. Four hunters had launched for the Gator Brunch contest at dawn. Now four skiffs drifted empty, their motors cold. She wanted the apex predator title more than anything, but a title meant nothing to a corpse. Something out here was hunting the hunters, and it was clearing her competition one by one. She gripped her blade and listened. The swamp breathed around her. Frogs had gone silent, and silence in this place meant death nearby. She pushed through a curtain of hanging vines toward higher ground. Her boot struck stone. An old well rose from the muck, its throat glowing sick green, a rope draped across the rim. She pressed her back to the cold stone and waited for whatever had emptied those boats. It came through the trees low and fast. She rolled aside as jaws snapped where her shoulder had been. The thing was long and striped like a tiger, but its flesh hung in rags and its eyes burned yellow. A smaller shape clung to its back, a rotting boy with a hunter's missing rifle in his dead hands. Radonna had hunted every beast in this swamp. She had never seen prey that refused to stay dead. She slashed at the tiger's flank. Her blade bit, but no blood came. The creature wheeled and drove her against the well. The rope bit into her spine. Behind her the green light pulsed, and she understood. This thing had crawled up from that glowing shaft. It did not tire. It did not bleed. She could not win a fair fight, so she would not try one. Radonna dropped her blade and grabbed the rope. When the tiger lunged, she sidestepped and looped the line around its skull. She threw her weight backward over the rim. The beast's head wrenched down into the glowing water. The dead boy shrieked and clawed her arm, cold fingers tearing skin. She kicked him off and hauled with both hands until the whole writhing mass toppled over the edge. The splash swallowed the shriek. Green light flared, then dimmed. Radonna knelt by the well and listened to the frogs begin again. Her arm bled where the dead boy had raked it. The wound throbbed, and the green glow on her skin would not wash off. She stood and found the title now lay open to her. The other hunters were gone, drowned or fled, and nothing in the swamp could match her. But she pressed her torn arm and felt the cold spread under the skin, the same cold that had moved those dead things. Whatever lived in that well had marked her. She started back toward her boat, the contest ahead and something new growing inside her wound.