The rain had transitioned from a weep to a heavy, rhythmic drumming by the time Sarah reached Miller's Creek. The logging trail was a mess of deep ruts and grey slush. Yellow police tape flickered like a dying flame against the dark, sodden green of the towering hemlocks.
Sheriff Miller Brody was leaning against his cruiser. His broad shoulders were hunched under a heavy raincoat. He was a man of few words, and today his face looked like it had been carved from the very granite of the Cascade Mountains.
"Abernathy doesn't know when to quit, does he?" Brody grunted as Sarah approached. Her boots squelched in the mud.
"He knows a story when he sees one, Sheriff," Sarah replied as she pulled out her recorder. "The Seattle papers are already calling it a mutilation. That is a heavy word for a cougar attack."
Brody spat a stream of tobacco juice into the mud. "Seattle papers like to sell fear. It was a bear, Sarah. It was likely disturbed while scavenging. It has been a lean winter for them."
"A bear?" Sarah looked past him toward the creek. "A bear doesn't usually drag a man three hundred yards uphill just to do whatever happened over there."
Brody's eyes shifted. A flicker of something, perhaps hesitation or fear, passed through them before his professional mask snapped back into place. "The scene is closed, Jensen. Go back to the office and write about the bake sale."
Sarah was not looking at Brody anymore. She was looking at the ground near the rear tire of his cruiser. Amidst the churned up mud was a footprint. It was not the flat, heavy palm of a bear, and it was not the clean tread of a hiking boot. It was large, easily fourteen inches long, with deep and elongated toe marks that ended in sharp triangular punctures in the silt.
"Sheriff," she whispered while pointing.
Brody moved with surprising speed for a man his size. He stepped over the print and ground it into the muck with his heel. "I said the scene is closed."
"You just destroyed evidence," Sarah snapped. Her journalist instincts were flaring. "What are you hiding, Miller? People are scared. They are talking about the Moon Beast again."
Brody gripped her upper arm. It was not enough to hurt, but it was enough to make his point. "Old men in bars talk. My job is to keep this town from burning itself down with panic. It was a bear. That is the official statement. If I see you past this tape, I am hauling you in for obstruction. Am I clear?"
Sarah held his gaze until he let go. "Crystal."
She turned and walked back toward her car, but she did not leave. Instead, she circled back through the thick brush a few hundred yards downstream. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. The woods felt different today. They felt heavier, as if the trees were leaning in to listen.
When she reached the creek bank where the attack had occurred, the smell hit her first. It was not just the metallic tang of blood. It was a thick and cloying musk that smelled like wet fur and rotted meat.
The crimson stain was not just a metaphor. The white stones of the creek bed were painted in a spray so violent it reached the lower branches of the nearby cedars. There was no body because the coroner had already taken Albright away, but the sheer volume of blood suggested a struggle of impossible strength.
Sarah knelt down as her breath came in shallow gasps. Near a jagged rock, something caught the light. She reached out with trembling fingers and picked up a tuft of coarse, silver-grey hair. It was too thick for a wolf and too wiry for a bear.
Suddenly, the forest went silent. There were no birds, no rustle of wind, and not even the sound of the rain.
Crack.
A branch snapped in the darkness of the treeline. Sarah froze. A pair of eyes, amber and glowing with an unnatural luminescence, flickered briefly in the shadows of a hollowed out stump. They were too high off the ground to belong to a wolf, yet they were too wide-set for a man.
The eyes vanished as quickly as they had appeared. A low and guttural growl vibrated through the ground. It was more a feeling than a sound.
Sarah did not wait. She scrambled back toward the trail with her lungs burning and the silver hair clutched tightly in her fist. She did not stop running until she reached the safety of her car. The engine roared to life as she tore away from the creek.
As she glanced in the rearview mirror, she saw a dark shape step out from the trees onto the road. It stood on two legs for a fraction of a second, appearing as a towering silhouette against the grey mist, before it dropped to four and vanished into the brush.
The full moon was still hours away from rising, but the hunter was already awake.