When she opens them again, she blinks. Back in the trees, there’s something moving. For a second, her heart skips—as though it could be Iain himself.

She peers out, thinking first that the others must have returned after all. But it’s more defined than that. A shadow.

Perhaps not all of them. Perhaps just one.

Maeve shoves her feet into her boots and steps outside, holding the door safely open with one hand. But the shadow doesn’t move. The darkness of the forest grows, lying in wait. No one shouts to her.

She does hear something, though. A huff. Is it? A low grunt?

Maeve pulls in, holds her breath—

But the clouds shift: the shadow disappears, swallowed up by the night. She scans the snow from her doorway out to the trees. Whatever it was—real or imagined—she can’t see it now. The woods are silent. To each side, only the mountains loom in the dark.

She retreats back inside and locks the door.

The fire cracks and spits sparks, and Maeve shivers at the noise. She pads softly to her makeshift bed and lies down. Karo sleeping, and no one else in the whole place. She tries not to think of Anna lying on her shelf.

The building like an endless cavern around her. Maeve alone, exhausted and wired, all at once.

Sleep. She needs to sleep, that’s all.

Her eyes finally close but even as she drifts off, she’s unable to shake the sense that something is waiting, outside in the dark. Feeling it there.

The moonlight shifts again, then disappears. Dreaming now, Maeve slides her boots back on and steps outside into a storm. The snow is so thick she can’t see—is that the building behind her? Or is that the forest, and the center is ahead? The ridge to one side and safety to the other, but which is which? Maeve gropes blindly for the door, the new snow stinging her face—but the door shuts, and now she’s spinning in circles, desperate.

She realizes she is not alone. Something is out here with her. It grows darker, closer, pressing in. A new cold cuts through her wrists, the back of her neck. She knows it’s there.

She cannot see it. She can’t see her hand in front of her face.

In the lobby, Maeve opens her eyes with a start. Awake.

She turns over on her cushions, her breath coming short and broken. There’s a creak back in the kitchen and she freezes—then again, somewhere else, lower down. She waits, counting the seconds between sounds the way you count in a storm between the flash and the crack of thunder. She can remember lying this same way, in the heat of that night, with Iain pacing on the sidewalk below. Willing herself to stay alert.

There’s nothing out there now. Just a dream. She saw that for herself.