Cold air hit his nose like a slap. Milt's eyes snapped open, and for a second he didn't know if he still had eyes—only the ache behind them and the wet smell of moss. He lay half in leaves, half on exposed roots, his limbs heavy and wrong, as if they belonged to an animal that had never walked upright.
A distant crack echoed. Not thunder. Wood.
He forced a breath through his teeth. The breath came out as a low growl he didn't mean to make. His ears twitched on their own, catching too much: insects, a stream somewhere, something bigger moving far off.
He couldn't stay here. Stillness meant being found.
He rolled to his side and pushed up. The motion nearly dumped him back into the dirt. His balance was a mess—his tail countered when it shouldn't, his feet planted with too much force, and his hands ended in thick fingers with short claws that snagged leaf litter.
"Slow," he told himself.
He tried again, spreading weight, testing joints. Knees bent. Spine aligned. He stood, shaky, then steadied by locking his core the way he used to in drills—except the core felt longer now, built for a different center of gravity.
The forest pressed in. The canopy turned daylight into green shade. He chose a direction by sound: running water. Water meant a reference point and a chance to wash his scent.
Step. Listen. Step.
His ears were a problem and an advantage. Every rustle sounded like danger. He forced a rule: only react to patterns—rhythm, weight, intent. Light skittering was insects. Heavy, intermittent was something with legs.
After a short stretch he caught a different smell. Iron. Old blood, faint. He froze and dropped into a crouch that came too easily. Ahead, a patch of trampled ferns and a dark smear on a stone. Something had fought here. Something had won.
He didn't need the details. He needed distance.
He circled wide, moving uphill to keep his tracks on rock where he could. The effort burned fast. His lungs felt too big for his chest, and his heart thudded like a drum under his ribs.
The stream came into view as a thin ribbon cutting between stones. Milt approached low, scanning both banks. No fresh prints. No snapped reeds. Still, he waited until his panic stopped steering his hands.
He drank, careful not to dunk his face. The water was cold and clean enough. When he finished, he dipped his forearms and rubbed mud along them, then along his neck. It wasn't perfect, but it dulled his scent.
He followed the stream, staying in the shadows. He needed a place to rest that wasn't a trap—something that gave him seconds to react.
A slope climbed into a cluster of boulders. Between two stones, a narrow gap formed a shallow pocket. Not a cave—too open—but it had a back wall and only one clean angle of entry.
He gathered deadfall in quick trips: thin branches for a frame, thicker ones to block line of sight, a mat of leaves for insulation. Each trip he forced the same routine: look, listen, move, stop. He wasn't building a home. He was buying one night.
When the pocket was half screened, he sat and tried to think like himself again. Breath control had always cut fear and sharpened movement. Here, the air felt heavier, like it carried something he could grip if he knew how.
He inhaled slowly, counted to four, held, then exhaled. On the second cycle, heat sparked under his skin. Not pain—pressure. His muscles tightened as if they'd been wrapped in a thin band.
His claws extended a fraction, clean and sharp. The pressure followed his focus.
He pushed it into his legs and stood. For three steps, his feet moved smoother, quieter. On the fourth, the pressure slipped, and his knee buckled. He caught himself on the rock, panting.
Useful. Not free.
He stopped before he broke something, pulled leaves into the gap, tucked his tail close, and listened to the stream until his heartbeat slowed.
Sleep didn't come cleanly. Every time his eyes closed, his ears kept working. A twig snap downstream. Wings beating too close. The slow drag of something heavy in the underbrush that might have been wind—until it stopped, then started again.
He tried the breathing trick again, hoping the pressure would make him calmer. It did the opposite. The moment he pulled it in, his senses sharpened hard. Smells layered on smells. The stream's wet stone. Rotting bark. And beneath it… musk. Predator.
His stomach tightened. He held the pressure in his legs and shifted deeper into the pocket, trying to become part of the rock. His tail brushed leaves. The sound was tiny, but in the silence it felt loud.
Something moved outside.
A dark shape crossed the gap between stones. Low to the ground. Not a wolf—too broad in the shoulders. It paused, head lifting as if tasting the air.
Milt didn't move. He kept the pressure coiled, ready to explode into a sprint if it lunged.
Seconds stretched. His muscles began to tremble. The pressure wasn't a steady flame; it was a clamp. It squeezed. It demanded focus. His breathing shortened without him meaning to.
The shape turned slightly, sniffed again, then backed away into the brush.
Relief hit him so fast it made him careless. He released the pressure all at once.
Pain flared behind his eyes. His nose bled, warm and sudden. He slapped a hand over it, but the copper smell spread anyway.
Not free, he reminded himself, teeth clenched. Worse—expensive. He'd hidden his scent with mud, then paid it back in blood.
And somewhere out there, a predator now had a clearer trail to follow.
Gray morning seeped through the leaves. Milt wiped dried blood from his muzzle with a fistful of wet moss and forced himself out of the pocket. Staying meant letting anything with a nose walk straight to him.
He moved along the stream again, but this time he kept to the far bank and stepped in the water whenever he could. Cold numbed his feet and slowed him, yet it erased tracks.
Then he heard it—voices.
Not animal calls. Words, clipped and human. They carried through the trees from downstream, followed by the faint scent of smoke.
He climbed a rock and peeked through branches.
Two men in leather and dull metal walked the bank, heads low, eyes sweeping the ground as if they were reading it.
"Fresh," one of them murmured, pointing at the mud. "Big… and not just a beast."
Milt felt his claws slide out as the man turned his head straight toward the rock.