The camp hadn’t changed much.
Trampled snow, a tent folded flat under its own collapse, the fire pit a black smear where the previous night’s flames had died.
Vesper found the boulder they had hidden behind and dug through the frost beside it until his fingers hit leather.
He crouched there a moment, not moving.
The wrapping was worn smooth in spots his hands hadn’t made — his mother’s grip, years of it, before the knife was ever his.
Near the hilt was a scratch he remembered putting there himself, eleven years old, showing off with a whittling blade and nearly taking his own thumb off.
She’d laughed at that.
She hadn’t laughed later, when she put this same knife in his hand and told him a man should carry something that remembers where he came from.
He closed his hand around the knife and slid it into his belt.
That was it.
No tears.
He didn’t have room for that tonight.
The grief could wait; it always found a way to collect later, in smaller pieces, for as long as he lasted.
He stood up.
Something in the woods had gone quiet.
Not a sound so much as the lack of one.
The small noise the forest usually kept up — insects, a branch settling, something moving through brush — had gone still, all at once, like the whole wood had noticed him.
The wind turned and brought a smell with it.
Not fox.
Not wolf.
Not man.
Something under those, harder to place.
He dropped low the way he’d once drilled into Cael, weight forward, breathing shallow.
It came easier now than it ever had as a human, like his body had been waiting all this time to be built right for it.
A branch in the black pine at the camp’s edge didn’t move with the wind the way its neighbors did.
Then he felt it plainly: the weight of being watched, pressing somewhere behind his eyes.
He turned.
Two eyes were already on him, yellow, catching what little light made it through the trees.
His hand found the knife at his belt without him telling it to.
Neither of them moved first.
The cat watched him the way you’d watch someone who owed you money — no hurry, no doubt it would collect.
It hadn’t come to hunt tonight.
Even in the dark he could make out the wound along its ribs, black and half-scabbed, where Cael’s spear had gone in.
Lower down, hidden in the fur, his own knife had left the twin of it.
Same animal.
No question.
It had a reason to remember him.
He had one too — last night, terrified, barely getting out alive.
Tonight felt different, and some cold, unfamiliar part of him was almost glad for the chance to prove it.
The cat came off the branch without a sound and landed in a crouch that didn’t so much as stir the snow.
It didn’t wait.
Eight feet of black muscle crossed the distance before Vesper had even finished thinking here it comes.
He threw himself sideways, felt claws pass close enough to catch his hair, and hit the collapsed tent canvas hard.
He struck back without thinking, knife first, and cut nothing but air.
The cat was already somewhere else, circling, faster than he’d planned for.
It had learned something last night too.
It came low next, faked toward his legs, then snapped up at the last second.
Claws opened four lines across his forearm before he could pull clear.
He hissed through his teeth.
Still dangerous.
Don’t get comfortable.
But he was catching up to it now.
The world had a half-step of slowness to it that hadn’t been there last night, enough that he could see the muscle shift under black fur before it committed.
He used the speed on purpose this time, not blind panic, and took the next lunge on his shoulder instead of his throat.
They went down together into the dead campfire, ash kicking up around them in a gray cloud.
The knife slipped out of his hand somewhere in the fall, lost against a stone, and after that there was nothing left but the two of them, rolling through snow and burnt wood, each hunting for the angle that would end it.
The cat’s weight came down on his chest.
Its jaws snapped an inch short of his face, and he held it off with both arms shaking, understanding for the first time how easily this could still go wrong.
Then he got the leverage.
A twist of his hips, a shift of weight, and he was on top of it, one hand locked around the base of its skull, the other pinning a foreleg into the snow.
It thrashed once, twice, and then held still, and for a breath neither of them moved.
He never decided to bite it.
He’d go over that later and never find the moment where he chose it — his knife was gone, his arms were shaking, the cat was still fighting under him, and there just wasn’t anything left to decide with.
His fangs found its throat on their own.
The blood came thin.
Warm, but nowhere near what human blood had given him — that had been a flood, effortless, gone straight to the bone. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
This fought him a little going down, rougher, the way it should when it isn’t what your body actually wants.
The cat’s struggling eased as he fed, and some of his strength came back with it, enough to steady his hands and chase the cold out of his fingers.
Not enough to call it full.
It should have disgusted him.
Instead it felt good — not satisfied, exactly, more like a hunger finally getting an answer, even a wrong one.
A small, human part of him said this was monstrous, and it barely registered over how much quieter his body had gotten, how much steadier.
The real hunger hadn’t left.
It had just gone quiet for now.
The cat went still.
He held the position a few seconds longer than he needed to.
Vesper sat back into the snow, breathing out of habit rather than need — he was starting to suspect that much, at least.
Below him lay something that looked smaller now than it had alive.
Dull fur.
Eyes open, fixed on nothing.
His hands were dark to the wrist.
He looked at them without moving for a while.
The knife had landed a few feet off, half-buried in ash.
He picked it up, wiped it clean on his thigh out of some habit that no longer meant anything, and put it back in his belt.
The letter was still where he’d tucked it.
He pressed it flat against his chest once before letting it go.
He’d come out here to get back a piece of who he used to be.
He sat there a while longer and understood, without much surprise left to spend on it, that he’d traded away another piece of that person to do it — and picked up, in exchange, a little more of whatever he was turning into.
Vesper had gone to retrieve his knife, and the white walker was still coming.
Cael and the others had packed and started to move.
There was a problem Cael hadn’t considered before.
He was a vampire, but Nessa and the rest were not.
They were human, and needed rest to keep their pace.
Since becoming a vampire, Cael had stopped feeling fatigue.
But his companions weren’t so lucky, and they couldn’t afford to stop — the dead didn’t rest.
He could pick them up one by one, he thought, and with his speed get them to the Fist of the First Men before morning.
But that would mean revealing what he was.
As Cael turned the problem over, he noticed Rolf falling behind, his steps unsteady.
Cael slowed until Rolf caught up to him.
“You’ve entered your raven before,” Cael said.
“Have you ever tried it with anything else?
A wolf, a rabbit?”
“No.” Rolf kept his eyes on the ground.
“The first time I did it, it was with Viss.”
“Viss?”
“My raven’s father.
He died of old age.
This one’s his son.”
Cael said nothing, waiting.
“After I told my friends, they told their parents.
None of them came to play with me again.
When I tried to find them, their parents stopped me at the door.” Rolf’s voice had gone flat, the way old wounds sometimes did.
“It took me a while to understand it was because I could get inside Viss’s mind.
After that I stopped trying it with anything else.
Viss still came to me for treats, though.
Everyone just…
kept their distance.
I didn’t really talk to anyone again.
Not until you.”
Cael glanced at the others walking ahead — Nessa, Stigg, Hew — close enough to hear, their pace slowing slightly as they listened.
“Last night, before the Others came,” Rolf went on, “my raven warned me.
I hid in a barrel.
It rolled out during the fighting and I don’t know what happened after that.
I was out cold.”
“You should have told someone,” Cael said, then caught himself.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Would they have believed me?”
Cael thought about that a moment, and found he already knew the answer.
“No. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
Probably not.”
Ahead, Nessa lowered her head.
Stigg’s jaw tightened, and he looked away.
Nobody said anything.
It wasn’t forgiveness — Cael doubted a few sentences could undo a lifetime of flinching from ravens and rumors — but it was something.
A silence that wasn’t quite as cold as before.
“Try again,” Cael said.
“Not the raven.
Something bigger.
See what’s out there.”
Rolf shook his head.
“I’m tired.
I don’t think I can.”
“Then I’ll carry you.
But try, if you find something.”
“What good will that do?”
“Trust me.”
Rolf exhaled, long and slow, and nodded.
Cael lifted him onto his back and tied him there with a length of rope.
Earlier he’d caught a heartbeat far larger than any ordinary wolf had a right to be, moving alone somewhere ahead of them.
He didn’t know what it was.
Whatever it was, it was worth trying — if Rolf could reach it, he and Wick could ride, and Cael would only need to carry the rest if the walker closed the distance.
Rolf’s eyes rolled back.
Nothing happened for a long moment.
His breathing turned ragged, his hands trembling against Cael’s shoulders, and then he made a small, pained sound, like something pushing back against him.
“Rolf—”
“It’s not like Viss,” Rolf gasped.
“It’s stronger.
Its mind — it doesn’t want me here.” His whole body went taut, straining against something Cael couldn’t see, and then the tension broke all at once.
He sagged against the rope, breathing hard.
“I lost it.”
“Try again.”
“I told you, it doesn’t want—”
“Maybe don’t fight it, then.”
Rolf didn’t answer.
His eyes rolled back a second time, slower now, more careful.
Cael felt him go rigid again, but different this time — not straining, just still, like a man holding perfectly quiet so as not to spook something.
Long seconds passed.
Cael counted three of Rolf’s heartbeats, four, five, each one slower than the last.
Then, somewhere in the dark ahead, brush cracked and snapped, and a shape came through the trees — huge, gray, moving low and fast.
The size of a horse.
Direwolf.
Everyone froze.
Stigg actually stumbled back a step, and then looked immediately ashamed of it.
“That’s — that’s a good one,” Cael said, keeping his voice even.
“Big enough for Nessa too, maybe, if we’re careful with the weight.”
He was already rethinking the plan.
“Hew — tie the luggage onto its back.
Nessa, Wick, you two ride.
Without the weight, the rest of us move faster.”
Hew hesitated only a heartbeat before stepping forward to do it, throwing the wolf a wary glance the whole time.
When he reached for Cael’s pack, Cael shook his head.
“Leave mine.
I can manage.”
Hew didn’t argue.
Nobody argued much with Cael, these days.
The wolf lowered itself onto its haunches at some silent urging from Rolf, patient as a lamed workhorse, and Nessa and Wick climbed up warily, small and strange-looking against its size.
“Keep it slow,” Cael said, as the wolf started forward.
“It gets tired too, same as anything else.
We rest when we need to, and walk the rest of the way.”
Behind them, the white walker reached the abandoned camp and found nothing waiting for it.
It did not need footprints.
The presence it had come for — the thing it had really been sent to find — pulled at it from the west, toward Cael, and it began to walk.