A colossal creature moved through the trash canyon. It towered even with the garbage walls: giant, white, with fringes of coarse pale hair along the back of its enormous arms. Its pelvis sat low to the ground, its arms disproportionately long and armed with long, garden-shears-sized claws. Its bones pushed against its skin, its stomach so sunken in that if I had seen it in the wild, I’d think it was sick and starving. Its head was round and pale, sitting on a short neck. Its face might have had a distinct bone structure at some point, but all of its bones seemed to have melted into the skull to make room for its wide mouth. Its lips were missing and the rows of long sharp teeth in its mouth jutted, exposed. Its nose was little more than a bump with two holes, but its eyes, three inches wide and sunken into their orbits, looked completely human.

The moon broke through the clouds, its light illuminating the abomination. The creature’s white flesh glowed, translucent, and within it I saw its pale lungs and pink stomach, and, in the middle of this mess, cradled in the cage of its ribs, a darker, humanlike shape, as if the beast had swallowed a person whole and the corpse became its heart.

Goose pimples ran up my arms. I had seen one before in photographs but never in real life.

Ascanio shivered and shifted shape, so fast he was a blur.

“A wendigo,” Robert whispered next to me.

“Run!” I sprinted. “Ruuuun!”

We charged down the street. My cracked ribs set my side on fire. Speed was our best chance. There was no place to hide on Garbage Road. We didn’t have the numbers or the means to kill it, and every second we spent fighting would cost us time we didn’t have.

Legends said that wendigos haunted the winters on the Atlantic seaboard in the States and Canada, feeding on the Algonquian tribes. According to the Native American myths, those who reverted to cannibalism eventually transformed into a wendigo, doomed to a never-ending hunger for human flesh. I had never fought one, but I’d talked to a man who had. The wendigo couldn’t be reasoned with. Their hunger overrode all else. They would devour their prey even as they themselves were being cut apart, and the only way to kill one was to dismember it and burn the pieces. If you didn’t, it would regenerate in minutes, knitted together by magic.

A wendigo wouldn’t just show up in Atlanta on its own. We were too far south, and even if it had somehow arrived, once it turned, it would have gone on long eating sprees. We would’ve heard about it. This was Hugh’s import. A special present just for the Pack.

“Faster, faster!” Robert snarled.

I couldn’t go any faster. I glanced over my shoulder. The wendigo was closing the gap.