She knows when he hits the woods behind her by the sheer sound of it: the sharp crack of falling ice, frozen branches splintering, his voice coming throaty and harsh. She can’t make out the words anymore. It all sounds like heavy breath, something forcing its way through. But it’s not an animal; the sweep of his flashlight is still there. She can tell he’s moving fast, the beam surging and flickering ahead. He must have guessed where she’s going.

She moves from marker to marker, searching for her own trail, whatever path between the center and the cabin she tramped down herself over the past days. The solar lights are buried now: the new storm has coated everything in ice, and she slides when she hits the clearing around the studio, has to kick and dig in with her heels to break through the heavy crust.

At the studio door, she slams her good hand against the lock.

The lock, the handle, the door itself—all immovable. All frozen, iced over, buried. The ice is clear and solid and an inch thick. She looks over her shoulder, frantically presses the warmth of her body against the door, thinking maybe she can melt it. The flicker of his light from the woods—she knows she has to move again.

But there is nowhere else to run now.

She could try to make it to the village herself. Or burrow into the snow and hope, at least, to last till morning. The only real possibility is to somehow backtrack and lock him out of the main building, but Maeve knows immediately it won’t work; he’d smash a window in before he froze to death. The thing that made the studio cabin so secure—no windows at all.

Wind whips at her ears, her fingers. She realizes she’s shaking. Back in the woods, he calls her name again. He’s never going to give up. She starts going over contingencies the way she used to with Iain. Ways to talk him down, ways to protect herself. Keep space between the two of you, look around for anything that can be used as—not a weapon, per se, but in self-defense. She wishes the shovel were still hanging over the studio’s front door.

The binding around her hand gapes, and Maeve looks down to see a dark stain spreading in the snow at her feet. Her palm slick with it. She knows what the scent of warm blood can attract out here: in the woods, there’s the man, but there’s also the bear. The thought makes her gag a little bit, but she holds it in her mind.

All this time, she’s let others build her fear of the bear. Anna with the violence of her rougarou dreamscape, Karo with her dismissals. Dan more than anyone with his locked doors and bear spray and rules. But Maeve is the only one who dreamed of the bear, night after night. She’s the only one who now knows where it lives. And the dark terror she’d felt for days, the feeling of something there, watching, waiting at her door—it wasn’t an animal at all. She thinks of Sim’s spiny hand looming from the gallery ceiling, the way it seemed to pin her to the floor. Paralyzed. Unable to protect herself.