“What are you doing?” I asked him. “What is this?”

Very slowly, he straightened his body. He dropped his arms to his side. “Behind you.”

As I turned, I became acutely aware of the world around us. The smell of dirt. The sound of Free and Jude and the dogs on the ledge.

The feeling of being watched.

I scanned our surroundings, pushed back against the sound of my own heartbeat, my breath, and listened. I heard nothing, but my head swiveled to the left of its own accord. There, in a tree less than ten feet away, I made out two eyes glowing an unearthly yellow.

Reflecting the sun, I thought, but the words were distant, like someone else had thought them and I’d only overheard. My own thoughts—the ones I lived and breathed and felt rushing like blood through my veins—were entirely focused on the shape of the animal watching us from that tree.

Bigger than Girl. Faster.

“Mountain lion,” Gabriel said. “They rarely attack humans.”

That was what he thought.

That was what the statistics said.

That wasn’t the message I received from the liquid grace with which the predator leapt down from the tree.

Food. Hungry. I remembered being hungry. I remembered hunting.

I remembered being prey.

The mountain lion stood between us and the others. Saskia was the first one to notice. I knew her. I knew what she looked like when she was on the verge of a lunge.

“Stay.” The word burst out of me. Saskia growled, and the mountain lion’s head swiveled from me to her.

No.

I took a step forward. Gabriel caught my arm, but I shook him off. Another step, and the animal’s gaze was right back on me. I knew better than to corner a predator. I also knew that Saskia’s control was even more tenuous than mine.

“Don’t turn around,” I told Gabriel, fighting the instinct to lower my voice. “Raise your hands. Make noise.”

The way to fight a predator was to convince it you were the bigger threat.

“Don’t look away,” I continued, my eyes on the cat’s as I felt a scream bubbling up in my own throat. Not terror. Not fear. Rage was a human word. The yell I let out when the cat took a languid step toward us was anything but.

Beside me Gabriel added his own voice to the chaos, stomping, taking up space, staring the mountain lion straight in the eye. The animal eyed us for a moment, then made a chuffing sound, deep in its throat.

But it didn’t come any closer.

As quickly as it had begun, it was over, the mountain lion melting back into the wilderness—all 130 pounds of it.

Sharp teeth. Strong jaw. Claws. Lethal. The drumbeat of warnings thrumming in my brain persisted long after the threat was gone.

“You okay?” Gabriel asked me.

“I’m fine.”