ROXBURGH HAD KNOWN something was wrong as soon as he entered the paddock. It wasn’t the absence of deer. It was the absence of everything.
After decades in the woods, the little chirps and cracks of the world’s shifting skin were as familiar as his own voice. But today all had been silent: unturned soil and still trees, cold air empty of birdsong. So he’d sat unmoving as night came, watching the sun leach from the sky—waiting.
Now his eyes flashed in the darkness. There was something in the clearing. The feeling was bright on his skin, as though he’d been caught in a flashlight’s beam. He dragged some thick, tobacco-flecked spit from the gaps in his teeth, and tasted his own fear.
When he was young, he’d fought a war he hadn’t understood. As a scout, he’d crawled through the insects and the spiders of the Malayan jungle while the canopy dripped on his helmet and the Liberation Army slithered like cats in his cracked binoculars. One day he’d hunkered down to watch, cool and invisible in the green shade. Then a bullet had split the heel of his boot and he’d scrambled into a shell hole before he’d drawn breath, a body moving independently of thought.
The sniper had toyed with him for the rest of the day, cracking the bark above his head or bursting the stream at his feet, and he had lain like an ant under a magnifying glass, guts baking in the sun, lips splitting as he burned. He’d waited until the sun set massive and orange through the trees, then crawled away on his belly, hiding from the moonlight in mud pits that spun with venomous snakes.
Back at his barracks the CO had given him new boots, a fresh canteen of water, and sent him straight back—along the same path, into the same ditch. And as he’d marched there, Roxburgh had understood what fear meant—not the jolt of a sudden noise, but real, primal fear—the chewing of reason between instinct’s yellow teeth.
Even forty years on, there were nights when he lunged from bed having walked that path in his dreams, moments in his waking life where he felt those young bones quake in his old skin.
Now that primal terror was upon him once again. Something was watching him with the sniper’s measured threat, the same patience—and the same deadly intent. And Roxburgh recognized something he’d not felt in decades, something from before even the jungle—something from his childhood. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like—the charge there’d been in the air that summer.
The old gamekeeper whistled for his dogs, but the silence took his brisk, efficient note and made it desperate and small, like a cry from a well.
Lundy and Biscay came reluctantly from the brush, close to his heels. They were whimpering deep in their bellies, and Roxburgh saw a gash in Lundy’s side—pink and thin, like wet, pursed lips. He crouched and parted the fur. The little dog flinched.
“What’s you done to yourself, girl?” he said quietly.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a string of soft red meat, pressed it gently into the dog’s mouth. She mashed it quickly, then licked the dirt from his hand, covering his wrist in glistening spit as he examined the wound. It wasn’t from a tooth or a claw—it was deeper, longer. It could only have been made by Lundy dragging herself against something, like a wire snagged in her skin.
She had done this to herself. Even with her prey drive, she’d never have pushed through so much pain to chase something down.
So she’d been running from something. Running for her life.
Roxburgh lifted a feather from her lip, held it in the moonlight.
Black. A crow’s feather.
He checked the little brass eyes of the shotgun shells, then snapped the gun shut and tucked it into the crook of his arm. He took a step toward the clearing, stopped—then, to his horror, inched back to the path, swallowing away the pebble that blocked his throat.
“These is my lands,” he called, fighting to control the tightness in his voice. “An’ you’s best leavin’ ’em now if you doesn’t want your backside studded wi’ shot.”
There was no answer. He’d known there wouldn’t be. The sea-salt wind blew hard at his back, but the trees around him were silent and still.
The dogs drew closer to him.
And, in that moment, Roxburgh knew with the ancient certainty of the hunted that there was no friend near him, nobody within the reach of even his loudest screams. He was alone in the woods with his little dogs, surrounded by an anger that he felt with his blood but could not see.
He took a step back, felt bones crunch under his boot, and turned, heart thudding, to find a pile of black feathers and the blue-black gleam of a razor beak.
The dogs growled, licking their lips with nervous whines.
Roxburgh nudged the feathers apart with the barrel of his gun, exposing the soft tangle of ribs. He bent to lift the thing into the bushes.
But the mess of feather and bone fluttered at his touch, torn wings flapping as it vanished into the darkness.
Roxburgh stood bolt upright.
The bird’s chest had been ripped open—and the little pouches of the lungs had been completely still. The bird was dead.
And yet it had flown.
The gamekeeper turned and ran back to his little shack on the edge of the woods, thinking only of getting to Aileen.
The wind roared behind him, and the trees shook in the clearing.
Someone had broken the rules again.