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was assaulted by a fetid stink. There was something lying in the snow. An animal. Don’s ax handle jutted out from its skull like a crooked flagpole.
    Jenny crept toward the carcass, her grip tightening around the barrel of the gun as she pressed it against her chest, her heart thudding in her ears. It wasn’t an animal as much as it was a monster, a thin and hairless monster so bony its arms looked like twigs in proportion to its wide, skeletal chest. She couldn’t make out its face, Don’s ax having cut it in two. But she was glad she couldn’t tell exactly what it looked like. Wide at the temples, its head looked almost alien, like a creature that had fallen out of the sky or had crawled out of hell itself. Its stomach was deflated, little more than a hollow cavity covered by thin gray skin. Her breath puffed out from her lungs in short, staggered bursts as she slowly approached, terrified but unable to help herself. It was like nothing she’d ever seen, its long, angular body spread out on the snow. It was its teeth that snapped her out of her daze, reminding her that Don was missing, that there were far too many tracks to belong to this one creature alone. Its teeth were thick and jagged, like the fangs of a massive dog.
    She twisted away, breaking into as fast a run as her sixty-year-old legs would allow.
    That thing was dead, which meant Don was out there somewhere, alive. Alive. He had to be alive.
    But those long, thin, alien tracks followed Don’s footsteps away from the kill. He had fought one of them off, but there hadbeen far more than one. She readied the gun as she ran, determined to blast every last one of those freaks off the face of God’s green earth.
    Skidding to a stop, she sucked in a breath and yelled as loud as she could. “Don, where are you?!”
    This time there was a response.
    This time a communal moan rose in the distance.
    A jolt of terror shot through her torso, radiating out to her arms and legs, because it didn’t sound like any animal she’d ever heard. It sounded almost human, like a battlefield of dying soldiers wailing as they waited for death. Her breath hitched in her throat as she staggered backward. That haunting cry surrounded her on all sides, at first distant, but slowly growing louder until it transformed completely. The last thing she heard was a rattling growl. The last thing she saw was a shadow sprint across the snow.

    Ryan stood on the deck overlooking the pines, his coffee cup on the railing, steam wafting out of it like a witch’s brew. The silence of the outdoors was staggering—not a sound save for the whisper of wind through the conifers, those green giants swaying gently in the mounting wind, ebbing and flowing like a waterless tide. The occasional gust made it colder than it already was, carrying the distant groan of what must have been a gang of elk upon the wind. The chill bit at his cheeks and fingertips, at the back of his neck where the air slithered beneath his coat. Jane and Lauren were inside. He could hear them laughing over Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days.”
    Ryan didn’t need music out here. He liked the silence, the soft creak of tree trunks bending in the wind. He snowboardedwithout headphones, loving the sound of his board carving into the snow as he zigzagged down a steep grade. But if Jane needed Duran Duran to be one with nature, he wasn’t about to deny her. With the possibility of this being their final visit, it was all the more important to make this trip count.
    Plucking his coffee mug off the deck’s railing, he lifted it to his lips and let the steam drift across his face. The fur lining of his trooper hat shivered in the breeze, the pelage snagging on the bristles of his day-old beard. Fresh laughter spilled from inside the house. He smiled against the edge of his mug, watching his sister through the window as she twirled in the kitchen, a spatula covered in frosting held above her head. She looked just like their mother: fair