Page 46 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

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ROWAN

SO MUCH FOR THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE

Rain doesn’t fall in the high Cascades when a front like this moves in. It attacks. The water comes down in sheets of gray iron, turning the dust of the North Ridge into a slurry that pulls at my boots with every step. I stand between the trees, perfectly still, perfectly concealed, and watch the two men. They’ve stopped walking, and they’re panting now. Their lungs are soft, unused to the thin, wet air at six thousand feet, and their gear is far too heavy for the terrain they were trying to conquer.

Jax, the one with the shaved head and the stabilization rig strapped to his chest, slips for the third time in ten minutes. The camera stays steady—a marvel of modern engineering—but his knees hit the shale with a wet thud. He doesn’t curse. These people are professionals, I’d give them that. They’re also persistent in the way of a biting fly, impossible to swat away and always returning for another taste.

“We need to keep moving,” Jax says as he gets up.

“Give me... a second,” the second one, a man named Miller, gasps. He’s holding a thermal tablet, a plastic hood shielding the screen. “The signature... we’re losing it. The rain is cooling the rocks too fast.”

I look toward the tree line. My concealment was a steady presence in the back of my mind, a mental muscle I’ve kept flexed since they first stepped off the lodge porch three days ago. It’s a constant redirection of their attention. I make myself a shadow in their periphery.

The geography is working against them. Wren assigned them to follow me, a clever move that should have kept them contained. She thought she could use me as a leash. But the mountain had other plans. We’re three miles from the lodge, deep in the throat of a drainage that turned into a waterfall during a deluge like this.

My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I slink back deeper into trees, far away enough that they won’t hear me.

“Rowan?” Wren’s voice is distorted by the electrical interference of the storm. There is a sharp edge to it that has nothing to do with the signal.

“Wren.”

“We have a situation,” she says, and I can hear her pacing. I can picture the lobby, the way she’d be twisting her father’s old pen between her fingers. “A solo hiker. He’s on the Eagle Crest cutoff. He called the hotline. He’s trapped between the washouts, and he’s hypothermic. SAR is six hours out, minimum. A mudslide at mile marker twelve is blocking the roads.”

I close my eyes, letting the mountain speak to me. I felt the vibration of the peaks, the frantic rush of water, and the specific, hollow ache of a life flickering out in the cold. He’s close. Less than a mile from our current position, but on the other side of the ridge. In this weather, for a human, that mile is a death sentence.

“I know where he is,” I say.

“Rowan, the crew is with you,” she whispers, her voice dropping. “If you go, they’ll see.”

I look back at Jax, who’s adjusting a lens, his eyes fixed on the red light of his recording deck. There is no way around them. The ridge is up ahead, and I’ll have to pass them to get there. I could hold the concealment, keep them blind to me and my nature, and watch a man die. Or I could let the curtain fall.

“The hiker doesn’t have six hours,” I say.

“I know.” A beat of silence follows, filled only by the scream of the wind. “Rowan, if you do this, there’s no taking it back. Aethelgard... they’ll have it. It won’t be a myth anymore. It’ll be a file on a server.”

I don’t answer. I end the call and put my phone in my pocket. The choice isn’t a choice at all. I’m a Guardian. I don’t protect secrets. I protect the mountain and those who are lost or stranded on it. And right now, the mountain is trying to swallow a man.

The concealment is a membrane, a thin skin of lies. I let go of it. The mental drain vanishes, replaced by a surge of heat that makes the raindrops sizzle against my skin. The two cameramen whip around, the shift in the air alerting them to my presence.

“What the hell?” Jax breathes, his hands shaking as he grips the camera. “Miller, look at the thermal. The levels... they’re off the charts. He’s glowing.”

I start running. I don’t run like a man, but I move like the wind through the trees. My stride triples. The shale that trips Jax is nothing more than grip for my boots. I vault over a fallen cedar, a fifteen-foot leap that felt like stepping over a puddle. Behind me, I hear the frantic clicking of a zoom lens and the heavy breathing of two men realizing they had just found exactly what they were looking for. This was the cost, and I paid it gladly. The secret is a heavy coat I’ve been wearing for centuries, and throwing it off feels like the first real breath I’ve taken since Wren Cassidy started the hotline.

I reach the crest in under a minute. Below me, the Eagle Crest cutoff is a graveyard of broken tree limbs and rushing silt. I spot the hiker, a small, blue speck huddled under a granite overhang. The water is rising, a brown tongue of debris licking at his boots. He’s shivering, his movements slow and purposeless. The early stages of the end.

I descend the slope in a controlled slide, kicking off boulders and catching myself on saplings that groan under the force. I land ten feet from him. He looks up at me with glassy, unfocused eyes. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t have the energy left for fear.

“I have you,” I say, scooping him up and tucking him against my chest. He is as light as a bird, a fragile collection of wet clothes and failing heat.

On the ridge above, the two silhouettes are clear against the gray sky. Jax has his camera level, the red light a steady, mocking eye. He’s capturing it all—the speed, the strength, the impossible scale of a man who could navigate a landslide like it was a groomed lawn. It is undeniable. It is high-definition. It is the end of the quiet.

I begin the climb back up, the hiker cradled in one arm. I don’t hide or blend into the shadows. I move with a brutal, efficient grace, making sure the camera could see every second of it. If I’m going to lose my world, I’ll do it while saving his.

When I reach the top, Jax is white-faced, his mouth hanging open. He doesn’t lower the camera. He’s a creature of his own instincts, and his instinct is to record the impossible.

“You’re... you’re him,” Miller whispers, his eyes wide with a terror that was slowly being replaced by a frantic, commercial greed. “The Mountain Wraith. You’re actually real.”