CHAPTER FOUR — The Hunt-Song (1)

West ridge. One hour before dawn.

Kellen Blake had run from a great many things in his life. He had run from a very angry moose. He had run from a very angry cease-and-desist letter. He had run, once, for forty minutes through an airport parking lot because a man in a puffer vest had mistaken him for his own stunt double.

He had never, in all that time, run for his life while being towed by a woman who moved like the dark had drafted her personally.

"Left," Isola said.

"Left is a cliff."

"Left."

He went left. It was a cliff, technically — a shelf of granite that dropped into a trough of white mist — but she found handholds in the stone the way other people found a light switch, and Kellen, who had built a career on trusting rope and insurance, discovered he could trust a Umbra Guardian's judgment more than he trusted either.

Behind them, the mountain had stopped humming. It was calling.

"That," Kellen panted, scaling a wall of wet rock with the grace of a startled raccoon, "— that noise. That's not a good noise, is it? Be honest. I've built a brand on being honest with myself about bad noises."

"They're singing the hunt-song." Isola didn't look back. Her voice came flat, professional, the voice of a woman reading a weather report that happened to be about her own execution. "The Veil has woken all its children. Every eye on this mountain is now looking for us."

"Us being the two most wanted people on it. Great. Love that for us." He hauled himself over the ledge and collapsed onto his back, chest heaving, stars spinning overhead. "For the record, when you said 'west ridge,' I pictured more a scenic hike. Less a chase scene in a medieval nightmare."

She crouched at the ridge's edge, staring back the way they'd come. Kellen followed her gaze. Far below, in the valley they had just torn out of, points of light were moving along the switchbacks — not torches, because the Umbra didn't need torches, but the wrong kind of light. The kind that burned silver in pairs and didn't belong on a map.

Wraithwolves. And between them, smaller and steadier, walked shapes wrapped in white.

"Ah." Kellen sat up. "The white robes. Our friend Casimir mentioned those. 'Wear the white.' That's a funeral thing, right? Like, who wears the white."

"I do." Isola's jaw was a blade. "At the Trial of the Veil, the accused wears white. It's the color of confession. You're meant to put it on yourself, kneel in the circle of elders, and let them read your sins aloud before the whole tribe."

"Let me guess. You didn't RSVP."

"The trial convened an hour ago." She said it evenly, the way a doctor says a number. "In my absence. That's why the song's up. They've already pronounced it. I'm no longer Chief Guardian Vane. I'm a deserter. A breaker of the Veil. And deserters don't get a trial they can attend — they get the white robes delivered to them, by the people who are currently walking up this mountain."

"Delivered. Lovely." Kellen dusted himself off. "Like a very aggressive takeout delivery."

He had maybe thirty seconds to feel smug about the simile.

Because one of the pairs of silver lights stopped climbing the switchback and turned, slow and curious, straight toward their ledge.

"Kneel down," Isola said, in a voice like ice cracking. "No — lower. Press your chest to the rock. Do not breathe through your mouth."

"Chief, I've watched a lot of survival shows, and this is not — "

"Now."

He pressed himself flat. The granite was cold enough to bite through his jacket. Beside him, Isola did something he couldn't see — she reached, with that part of her that the mountain listened to — and the shadows of the pines crept forward without wind, pooling over the ledge like spilled ink, swallowing the two of them whole. Kellen held his breath and discovered that, for once, he had nothing funny to say at all.

The wraithwolf reached the base of the ledge. He could hear it. It wasn't breathing, exactly; it was hollowing, a low wet sound from the hole where its chest should be. It sniffed. It lifted its silver gaze to the rock above.

Kellen's heart hammered. Somewhere in his jacket, his dead phone chose that moment to remember it had a low-battery alarm — a faint electronic whine, barely there, the sound of a machine that had never once in its life been told it was on the menu.

Isola's hand clamped over his pocket. Over the phone. Still.

The wolf stood there for a long, terrible count. Then it whined — disappointed, almost petulant — and turned back down the switchback to rejoin the white robes.

They waited a full minute after the silver light was gone. Then Isola lifted her hand. The shadows withdrew like water down a drain.

"Your phone," she said.

"It was off."

"It was dying. There's a difference. The mountain can hear electricity, Kellen. It hears it the way a dog hears a doorbell." She sat back on her heels, pale and furious. "Next time, the power bank goes in the stream. The stream buries it. The mountain forgets."

"Noted." He let out a breath. "For the record? When I said I wanted to get closer to nature, I meant, like, a lodge. With room service."

* * *

He expected her to run again. Instead she sat down on the rock, cross-legged, and patted the ground beside her.

"Sit."

"Chief, there are ghost-dogs and fashion police approximately — "

"Sit. You need to learn the mountain before I take you across it. Otherwise you won't make an hour."

He sat. It was, he had learned, the safest possible response to whatever she said next.

"Listen," she said. "And stop narrating. I can hear you thinking in paragraphs."

"It's a professional hazard."

"The Veil isn't a wall. It's a listening device." She tipped her head back, eyes half-closed, and Kellen had the strange impression that she was not listening to the wolves or the horns but to something underneath all of it — a current, a pulse. "It hears footfalls. It hears the shape of a trail. Straight lines. Clean breaks. A human walking at human speed leaves a footprint the Veil can read for days. So you never walk straight. You walk the way the water walks. You double back. You step in your own prints. You let the wind cross them over."

"Okay. Trailcraft. I know trailcraft. I filmed a whole series on — "

"You don't know this trailcraft. Your kind's trailcraft is about other humans seeing you. Ours is about the mountain not seeing you." She opened her eyes. "The Veil remembers everything that crosses it. It only forgets things that look like they were always here. So we stop looking like we're running, and we start looking like we belong."