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Its massive torso narrows to a lean waist, where the rest of its lower body is covered in dark brown fur and long legs with joints bending the wrong way. Its hooves make me think of a deer and hint at a gait that could cover ground much faster than mine without even trying.

“Holy shit,” I breathe when my gaze snaps to the skull on its face. I know immediately that it’s not a mask, the way you know the difference between a taxidermied head on a wall and an animal blinking at you in the underbrush.

It’s a weathered stag skull, the bone darkened and shaped with an elongated muzzle. Long, thick, dark hair spills from under the skull and over its chest, and faint blue lights, similar to the lantern’s, burn behind hollow sockets. When it breathes, air moves through its nasal cavity with a faint sound, more felt than heard.

I know I should feel afraid right now. I know I should be screaming, grabbing my knife, pissing my pants—something. I’m looking at the fucking town legend; the thing from every campfire story that made kids sleep with flashlights under their pillows.

But the fear isn’t what hits first—not even the mounting arousal, which I am not unpacking right now. Shock does. It knocks everything else sideways as I stare up at it, breath caught somewhere in my chest, and all I can think is the stories got it wrong.

The creature doesn’t move toward me; it just stands there with a stillness no living thing should be able to hold. But even that word—creature—starts feeling wrong the longer I look.

Him.

The thought hits so hard it almost makes me dizzy, because a second ago my brain was still screaming creature, thing, monster—every safe little word people use when they don’t want to admit something is looking back.

But he is looking back.

“You’re…” I trail off, words escaping me completely. “You’re real.”

He tilts his head to the side in a movement that should make him look more animal—it doesn’t. It makes him look as if he understands every word.

The smell rolling off him slams into that same place in my chest that the dream keeps poking at. Not death or rotting meat, but Labrador tea and smoke sunk so deep into skin and hair that it might as well be growing there. It makes every nerve in my body sit up and pay attention.

I’ve finally set my eyes on the thing that’s been chasing me in my dreams for months, and my instincts aren’t telling me to book it. It sighs and says, ‘There you are.’

But then a word hits my skull, and my body moves before I make a single decision.

I take one step back, my boot sliding through the damp leaves as I keep my eyes on the creature and shake my head.

Mate.

“No,” I say, except the word barely comes out because my throat has gone dry. “Nope. Absolutely fucking not.”

His chest rises slowly, and he still doesn’t lunge at me. He still doesn’t reach for me with those massive hands that look like they could pull a fucking redwood tree out of the earth.

That’s when I finally come to my senses and run.

The first few strides are ugly and uncoordinated. I almost go down because I don’t look where I’m putting my feet. Every ranger lecture I’ve ever given about not sprinting through unfamiliar terrain at night comes back to mock me in my own voice.

I catch myself on a sapling, shove away, and launch myself down a trail hard enough that my lungs seize on the first breath.

Mate.

That’s the word from my dream, the word I’ve spent all damn day trying not to think about. The word whispered into my neck while dream hands pinned me to a tree and my own body betrayed every neat little label I’ve ever put on myself.

Mate.

“Fuck,” I wheeze as I get close to the cabin. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I expect fear to take over at any time now—that would make sense. Running should unlock it fully now that I’m moving, dumping panic into my blood until I’m stupid with it. Goddamn it, I should feel hunted or minutes away from becoming another picture on Reyes’ wall.

But the awful, sick joke is that I’m not scared. My heart is pounding, sure. My mouth is dry, my skin is tight, and shock has lit up every nerve. But underneath all of that, underneath the disbelief punching holes through the rational part of my brain, there’s the same thrill from the dream. The same breathless awareness of something behind me that could close the distance if it wanted to but doesn’t.

The same horrifying certainty that I’m not being chased to be killed.

I can feel him close behind me, too. Not crashing after me, but following with that quiet, patient movement that makes the forest feel complicit. The kind of movement that shouldn’t belong to anything his size.

I can’t hear his feet or branches breaking, but I know it’s there. The smell of Labrador tea keeps threading through the cold spring night every time the wind turns—not overpowering me or dragging me in, just present.