Page 73 of The Emerald Oath

James stops then—long enough to look back at us both. “And if something spooks it deeper into the trees? Or I take a wrong step in the bog? Or I’m unlucky enough to cross paths with something that doesnae care whose land it’s on?”

Alex raises a brow. “Like what?”

James shrugs. “A wolf, for instance. Ye think about that before givin’ me such strife?”

Alex and I look at each other.

I roll my eyes. “Well, that’d be hard, considering they’ve been extinct from this part of Scotland for over a hundred years. Habitat loss. You know. History.”

Alex grins. “Reckon you’re safe, then.”

James opens his mouth to reply⁠—

Then something changes.

Not all at once. Not enough to name. Only a faint unease prickling at the back of my neck.

The insects stop first. The soft lap of water beside the path dulls, as if the sound is being pressed deeper into the earth rather than carried away. Even the crunch of earth under our boots comes muffled now, flatter, like the ground is absorbing more than it should.

Alex slows. “Do you… feel that?”

James’s gaze drifts to the trees lining the road, his brow creasing as if he’s trying to make sense of something beyond his sight.

“I don’t like this,” Alex mutters.

Neither do I, though I don’t say it. The mist has thickened in mere seconds, curling lower around our legs, clinging to the bog road ominously. It doesn’t roll or drift. It’s lingering.

The air is damp, but there’s a faint metallic tang in it, sharp enough to settle at the back of my tongue.

James shifts his grip on his drawn blade. “We’ll have a look up ahead,” he says, tone steady in the way men get when they’re trying not to unsettle anyone else. “Then we turn back.”

Alex nods, but his eyes flick left, then right, tracking the treeline. “I’ve the strangest feeling,” he says slowly, “like we’ve crossed a threshold we weren’t meant to.”

That’s when the silence finally drops whole.

No wind. No water. No echo of our own movement. The quiet is so complete my ears ring with it, and my next breath feels intrusive.

Something moves in the mist ahead of us.

It doesn’t rush out. It unthreads itself from the fog as if shedding a second skin, revealing something my mind refuses to settle into sense. Moss-coloured, with a thick, matted coat and too broad for any hound I’d ever seen, and still hound is the nearest thing I can call it.

Low. Smooth. Wrong in a way that makes my skin prickle.

Alex goes still. “This might be the drink talking, but that’s no hound.”

“No wolf either,” James says. “So what in the name of the Gods is it?”

I’m searching my mind for something ordinary, something survivable, some animal that has wandered where it shouldn’t. The illusion shatters the moment the deep-red eyes catch the light, set too high and too wide for anything I can name. A cold hollows through my chest as certainty settles in.

This is no earthly being.

The thing slides sideways across the road, a measured drift that places its body between us and the way back. Peat sighs under its weight. I hear that, and the slow pull of its breath, but nothing else. No panting. No growl. No warning sound any living animal ought to make as it corners prey.

“James,” I say quietly, though I’m not sure why I bother lowering my voice. The suffocating silence carries my words to him farther than is natural. “It’s not⁠—”

The creature lowers itself closer to the ground, shoulders bunching, its weight settling in the way a great hound might before it springs.

Alex shifts beside me, blade half-drawn now. “Why isn’t it charging?”