Chapter 2: The Cost of Arrogance

She found the perfect spot a half-mile in. An outcropping of granite, slick with rain, jutting out over a small, churning cove. From here, she could see the whole violent theater of the storm. She braced herself against a stunted pine and pulled the sketchbook from her pocket. The paper was already damp. Good. It would make the charcoal bleed, soften the lines into something honest.

She barely got a single stroke down.

A crack like a gunshot split the air as a huge limb tore from an oak somewhere behind her. Before she could even flinch, the wind hit her. Not a gust, a solid blow, like being shoved by an invisible hand. It ripped the book from her grasp.

She watched, helpless, as it spun once, a frantic whirl of white against gray, and vanished over the cliff.

Her sketchbook. Gone. The loss was an emotional blow. The exhilaration curdled into cold anger. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She turned to go back, to admit defeat.

The path was gone.

Where she’d stepped over a small, polite creek, there was now a churning brown rage of water, six feet wide and rising fast. It had eaten the trail whole. And the world, once a clear gray, was now thick white. The fog hadn’t been a gradual thing. Instead, it had just arrived, a solid, suffocating wall that erased everything ten feet from her face.

Panic, cold and sharp, sank its teeth in.

She scrambled away from the roaring creek, deeper into the woods. Every tree looked the same. Every shadow was a pit. The sound of the sea was everywhere and nowhere at once, a disorienting roar that offered no direction. She wasn’t an artist anymore. She was just another lost thing.

She ran. She pushed blindly through the undergrowth, branches clawing at her face. That city confidence, what a joke. It had been scoured off her in minutes. The mud sucked at her boots with a greedy, grabbing sound, making her fight for every step. Her expensive jacket was a lie; the cold had already found its way deep into her bones.

She stumbled on a hidden root and went down hard. The fall knocked the air from her lungs in a pathetic grunt. She lay there, face pressed into the wet, dark earth, the smell of rot and rain filling her nose. All the bravado was gone. There was only the frantic hammer of her own heart and the certain, terrifying knowledge that she was lost. Utterly.

One choked sob escaped her, a small, hopeless sound the woods swallowed without a trace.

She forced herself up, every muscle screaming. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a hollow exhaustion behind. She took a few clumsy steps and stopped.

Something was wrong.

The world had gone quiet. The roar of the wind was suddenly muffled, distant. Even the rain seemed to hang in the air, a thousand separate, distinct drips.

She turned.

He was just there.

No sound, no rustle of leaves. One moment, an empty wall of fog. The next, a wolf. Big. His fur was so dark with rain it looked almost black. He stood twenty feet away, utterly still, just watching her.

Clara’s breath caught. Her brain scrambled for a logical file. Coyote. Big dog. But this was no dog. This was a creature from a different, older world, and he was looking at her with an unnerving stillness that had nothing to do with simple animal hunger.

Her body screamed conflicting commands. Run. Her legs were lead. Scream. Her lungs were frozen. Don’t move.

His head was low, his shoulders a powerful line of coiled muscle. But he wasn’t growling, wasn’t snarling. He was just… watching. And his eyes. The eyes were what broke her. They weren’t the flat, reflective beads of a wild animal. They held their own light, a pale, cold fire. It was a look of profound, unnerving intelligence.

She felt stripped bare, her wet clothes, her city softness, her rising panic all cataloged and dismissed in an instant.

The silence stretched, a taut wire between them. The only sound she heard was the frantic drum of her own heart.

He took a deliberate step forward. The motion was fluid, impossibly silent. A paw the size of her hand sank into the soft earth without a sound. Then another.

A scent reached her, cutting through the smell of rain and rot. Wet earth, crushed pine, and something else, something clean and musky that was entirely him.

He stopped a few feet away, so close she could see the raindrops clinging to the fur of his muzzle. He lowered his head and nudged her leg.

The touch was a shock. Not a bite, not an attack. A push. Firm. Insistent. A command that bypassed her terror and went straight to some primal part of her that understood power. He held the pressure for a beat, then pulled back, turned, and took a few steps into the fog. He looked back at her over his shoulder, those pale eyes glowing in the gloom, and waited.

Follow. Or die here.