The forest swallowed the night whole.
It was not a gentle absorption, but a voracious consumption. The darkness beneath the ancient pines and gnarled oaks was absolute, a dense, velvety black that seemed to press against the skin. Only at the distant fringes, where the tree line broke against the sky, could one see the feeble amber glow of the city—a sickly halo bleeding over the treetops, a reminder of a world that felt continents away. Here, in the deep woods, there was only the wet, breathing dark.
A cold, persistent drizzle needled its way through the canopy, a thousand tiny punctures in the night's fabric. It pattered on a carpet of fallen leaves—oak, maple, beech—that lay in a soggy, decaying mosaic of russet and gold and bone-white. The air hung thick with the loamy perfume of wet earth and rotting vegetation, underscored by the crisp, clean scent of pine sap. But threading through it all was something sharper, alien to this place: the acrid tang of cordite and a metallic hint of human anxiety, carried on the damp breeze from the military base that lurked somewhere deeper in the woods' heart.
The crunch of tires on the leaf-strewn access road was a profound intrusion. A black Mitsubishi SUV, its paint a non-reflective matte that drank the scarce light, moved like a silent predator along the narrow track. Its high-beam headlights carved two desperate tunnels through the gloom, illuminating the frantic scuttle of a squirrel as it darted across the path in a blur of grey fur before vanishing into the impenetrable bracken. The vehicle slowed, its suspension dipping as it reached a narrow wooden bridge. The planks groaned a protest under its weight, a sound swallowed by the whispering trees.
Just beyond the bridge, the forest opened into a small clearing. And there, illuminated by the stark, unforgiving white light of generator-powered halogen lamps, was a macabre tableau.
The crime scene was an island of grim, electric daylight adrift in the dark sea of the wilderness. Yellow 'DO NOT CROSS' tape, strung between skeletal birch trees and iron stakes, fluttered and snapped in the damp breeze like demented party streamers. Inside this vibrating perimeter, a group of ten soldiers stood in a rigid, silent cluster. Their camouflage uniforms were darkened by the rain, plastered to their bodies. Their faces were set in stoic, professional masks, but the masks were thin. In the set of a jaw, the too-wide stare, the white-knuckled grip on a rifle strap, the raw shock bled through. Their collective gaze was nailed to the clearing's center, to the reason their world had tipped off its axis.
Around the ravaged remains of a man in olive-drab fatigues, forensic technicians in hooded white suits moved with a slow, deliberate grace, their movements ritualistic against the backdrop of atrocity. The scene was not merely one of violence; it was a composition. The body lay not where it had fallen, but had been arranged. The limbs were positioned with an awful, unnatural precision—one arm outstretched as if pointing, the legs bent at identical angles. It spoke of cold calculation, not hot frenzy. The wounds themselves were brutally simple: deep, raking gouges and tearing punctures that spoke of immense power and claws the length of a man's hand. They suggested a large predator—a bear, perhaps, or a wolf of impossible size. But the context transformed them into something else entirely. This was no animal's larder.
Kneeling beside the grotesque centerpiece, a figure stood out against the anonymous white suits. Dr. Eleanor Thompson wore a long, tailored coat of charcoal wool over her forensic gear, the collar turned up against the insidious drizzle. Her focus was absolute, a laser beam of concentration that seemed to generate its own heat in the chill air. She directed the careful placement of the body onto a stretcher with quiet commands, her voice cutting through the murmur of the generators and the hiss of rain on nylon.
"Careful with the left arm. Support the clavicle," she instructed, her tone cool, clear, devoid of anything but professional imperative. "I need all soil from beneath the torso bagged separately. Mark the grid. And photograph the placement of these stones—exactly as they are—before anyone moves a single one."
Her gloved hand indicated a small ring of fist-sized, moss-covered rocks that encircled the victim's head, a detail that made the watching soldiers shift uneasily.
The black SUV's headlights swept across the scene one last time, throwing long, monstrous shadows that leaped and twisted among the trees. Then they were cut. The sudden plunge back into relative darkness was disorienting, leaving the clearing dependent on the artificial, surgical glare of the work lights.
The SUV's doors opened with solid thunks. Three men emerged, their polished shoes sinking into the soft, leaf-mulch ground with unpleasant squelches. The one who took the lead was James Wilson. His trench coat was already damp at the shoulders, and his expression was a carefully maintained blank slate, the default setting of a detective walking into someone else's nightmare. But his eyes, a flinty grey under a strong brow, were instantly, restlessly active. They scanned the perimeter, catalogued the soldiers, assessed the techs, and finally, inevitably, came to rest on the kneeling figure in the dark coat.
A flicker—fast as a camera shutter, but unmistakable—passed through his gaze. Recognition. And a tension that had nothing to do with the corpse in the clearing. It was a personal ghost, summoned here to this place of professional horror. He shuttered it away, his face hardening back into impassivity.
A young Captain, his face pale under his helmet's rim, broke from the statue-like group of soldiers and approached. He saluted, the motion sharp.
"Detective Wilson? Captain Miller. We've secured the area as best we can, sir." He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "It's… we don't know what to make of this."
James gave a curt, acknowledging nod, but his attention remained split, his eyes drawn back to Eleanor. "Who's in charge of the scene?"
"Dr. Thompson, the forensic pathologist. She just arrived from the regional institute." The Captain followed his gaze, a hint of relief in his own at being able to hand off the inexplicable. "She's been… very specific."
As if she could feel the weight of his stare across the twenty yards of mud and fluttering tape, Eleanor looked up.
The movement was slow, almost reluctant. Her head turned, and her eyes—a cool, intelligent hazel that could seem green or grey depending on the light—found his. The world seemed to narrow, the bustling scene fading into a blurred periphery. The space between them became a tunnel: five years of silence, a history of childhood friendship crystallized into a single, shattering night of drunken passion and bitter rejection, and the professional chill of a morgue where they had last spoken, now replaced by the visceral, mud-and-blood reality of the forest floor. The fine, cold drizzle fell between them like a beaded curtain, each drop a tiny separator of then and now.
James approached the tape, the yellow plastic yielding with a rustle as he ducked under it. Eleanor stood in one fluid motion, brushing soil from her gloves with a sharp, precise flick of her wrists. She did not move to meet him halfway.
"Dr. Thompson," he said. His voice was low, pitched to carry only to her, a mix of professional necessity and profound, awkward history.
She offered a single, shallow nod. Her face was a masterpiece of neutral composure, but he saw it—the slight, almost imperceptible tightening at the corners of her eyes, a tiny betrayal of the calm.
"Detective Wilson," she replied, the title formal on her tongue. "I was informed a specialist was being brought in. I didn't realize it would be you."
"The circumstances are… unusual," he said, the understatement hanging heavily in the wet air. "The military requested someone with my… particular experience." He glanced past her shoulder at the covered stretcher being loaded into the waiting ambulance, a dark shape against the white interior light. "What are we looking at?"
Eleanor followed his glance, then turned her piercing gaze back to him. When she spoke, her tone was clinical, a deliberate wall of data. "Superficially, injuries consistent with a large canine or ursine attack. Massive tissue damage, disembowelment, severing of the major cervical artery."
She paused, letting the sterile, horrific words hang between them. The drizzle sizzled on the hot housing of a nearby lamp. When she continued, her voice dropped a fraction, losing none of its precision but gaining a graver, more intimate weight.
"But the lacerations have a uniformity of depth and spacing that suggests a single, manufactured weapon, not multiple teeth. The lividity is wrong. The body has been moved post-mortem. It was placed here." She took a half-step closer, and he caught a faint scent of her—not perfume, but the clean, antiseptic smell of soap and, underneath, a hint of jasmine from her shampoo. It was devastatingly familiar. "And there are trace elements under the victim's nails and packed into the wound margins. Minerals, synthetic compounds. They don't belong in this forest. This wasn't an animal, Detective. And it wasn't random."
James absorbed this, his jaw tightening. The convenient 'animal attack' narrative was always a fragile construct, a blanket thrown over the inexplicable. Her confirmation sent a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the rain. "Ritualistic?" he ventured, the word tasting of ash.
"Methodical," she corrected him instantly, her gaze unwavering. "There is intent, but not necessarily worship. This feels like… a demonstration. Or a message. Written in blood and viscera for an audience that knows how to read it."
One of the forensic techs approached then, holding an evidence bag with a gloved hand. Inside was a small, mud-caked stone. "Doctor? You wanted this one specifically."
Eleanor took the bag. She held it up so the stark scene lights caught its surface. With her thumb, she rubbed a patch of dirt clear through the plastic. Beneath was not plain rock, but a strange, iridescent streak, a shimmer of unnatural colour like oil on water—violet, green, and a deep, bloody copper.
"This mineral," she said, her voice flat. "I've only seen it referenced in one obscure geological survey. From a protected, privately-held region about fifty miles north of here. Inaccessible. Highly guarded."
She looked directly at him then, and the unspoken knowledge passed between them like a live current. Pack territory. The sacred caves of the Silvervein Pack. His home.
James stared at the stone, then back at her face, which was all sharp angles and resolve in the harsh light. The professional divide was crumbling under the weight of this shared, terrible secret. "I'll need a full copy of your preliminary report," he said, his own voice gruff. "And access to all evidence. Everything."
"Of course," she said, handing the bag back to the tech without breaking eye contact. "It will be on your desk by morning. Along with my preliminary analysis of the synthetic compounds I detected." She bent to pick up her heavy field kit, the movement final. "The body is my domain now, Detective. Yours is the 'who' and the 'why'. I suggest you start with the question no one here is asking."
"And what's that?" James asked, the words pulled from him.
Eleanor stopped, looking back over her shoulder. The lamp light caught her profile—the straight line of her nose, the determined set of her chin, the way the damp tendrils of hair clung to her neck. The rain glittered in her dark hair like scattered diamonds.
"Not what kind of animal," she said, her voice barely more than a whisper that carried perfectly through the clearing. "But what kind of person could do this. And what they're trying to build."
With that, she turned and walked towards a waiting khaki-coloured Land Rover, her figure soon swallowed by the shadows beyond the pool of light. She left James standing alone in the churned mud, in the ceaseless drizzle, at the edge of a deepening mystery. The ghost of their past and the horror of the present had collided here, in the dark woods, and the echoes of that collision were only just beginning to sound.
The administrative block of Camp Whitemoor stood apart from the barracks and parade grounds, a low, concrete-slab building that seemed to hunker against the perpetual Scottish damp. It was a place of filing cabinets and stale air, far removed from the kinetic energy of the training fields. As James Wilson approached, the only sounds were the distant, rhythmic thump of boots on tarmac and the ceaseless, sighing drizzle.
The entrance hall was a tomb of polished linoleum and faded regimental portraits. A bored corporal at the reception desk barely glanced up from his magazine as James flashed his identification. "Commander Holt's office. End of the corridor, on the left."
The corridor was a study in oppressive minimalism. It stretched into gloom, lit only by two widely spaced, frosted-glass sconces that cast weak, yellow puddles of light on the floor. Their glow did little to push back the shadows, merely accentuating the length of the walk. James's footsteps echoed with a hollow, official finality. The air was chill and carried the faint, iron-tinged smell of radiators and rainwater seeping through old concrete.
At the far end, where the light was thinnest, stood a single door. It was heavier than the others, reinforced with iron strapping, painted a chipped, institutional green. From behind it, voices were raised in heated, if muffled, debate. James slowed his pace, the investigator in him overriding protocol.
A woman's voice, sharp with frustration and something else—grief, perhaps—cut through the quiet. "The fallen comrade had reported on the werewolf club!"
The words, so absurd and yet so terrifyingly specific, hung in the damp air of the corridor. James stopped walking entirely, becoming a statue in the poor light.
From within, a deeper, dismissive baritone retorted, "That's just nonsense."
James moved closer, silent, positioning himself beside the doorframe, his presence masked by the arguing voices and the groan of a pipe in the wall.
"We saw them, when we went to protect the villagers last week," the woman insisted, her voice pleading now, trying to bridge a gulf of disbelief.
The man's reply was louder, as if volume could crush inconvenient truths. "It's just myths! How can a military officer be so stupid?"
There was a beat of furious silence. Then the woman's voice returned, colder, laced with a bitter finality. "Well, guess the myths came true. That's how they identified him."
A moment later, the iron-strapped door was wrenched open. A woman in the crisp uniform of a Captain stood framed in the doorway. She was in her late twenties, with a severe, intelligent face currently etched with raw anger and a profound, helpless disappointment. Her eyes, a stormy grey, swept the corridor and immediately locked onto James, who had no time to pretend he wasn't listening.
Her gaze was not one of surprise, but of grim recognition. It was the look of someone who had just been screaming into a void, only to find a stranger had heard her—a stranger who represented another branch of the same obstructive system. In that split second, her expression conveyed a clear, damning message: You're part of this cover-up. You're here to mop up, not to understand. It was a look that wished him, or perhaps the whole rotten situation, a swift and terminal oblivion. Without a word, she turned on her heel and strode down the long corridor, her footsteps sharp and furious until she was swallowed by the gloom.
James took a steadying breath and knocked on the open door.
The office within was a pocket of shadows. The overhead lights were dead, victims of the storm, leaving the room illuminated by a single, old-fashioned kerosene lamp perched on the desk. It cast a restless, orange glow that danced over metal filing cabinets and maps pinned to the wall, making the shadows sway and leap.
Behind the desk, Commander Declan Holt was a man carved from the same granite as the surrounding Highlands. Late fifties, with a shaven head that gleamed in the lamplight and a face of clean, uncompromising lines. He did not look up immediately, his attention on a small, blue thermos flask. He poured a careful measure of steaming coffee into a battered tin cup, the scent of strong, cheap grounds cutting through the kerosene fumes. A field telephone, an older model, sat beside the thermos.
Only after a deliberate sip did he raise his eyes. They were the colour of flint, and just as welcoming.
"Detective Wilson," Holt said, his voice a low rumble. It wasn't a question. He placed the cup down with a soft clink and reached for the telephone. His movements were economical, utterly controlled. He cranked the handle, waited, and spoke into the receiver.
"Hello? How may I help you?" a faint, female voice filtered from the earpiece.
A small, deliberate pause. Holt's eyes remained fixed on a point on the wall above James's head. "Lieutenant Imogen Finch. Transfer Genevieve Sterling to Station 13." He hung up without ceremony, the click unnaturally loud in the quiet room.
The call was a performance. A demonstration of channels, of orders given and received, of a machine functioning while he dealt with an external irritant. Station 13. James filed the call-sign away. A transfer. Or a containment.
Finally, Holt gestured with a curt nod towards the single visitor's chair. James entered fully, closing the heavy door behind him with a soft thud that seemed to seal them in the flickering cave of light. He took the seat, the cold leather creaking under his weight.
"Commander Holt," James began, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. The kerosene flame reflected in his pupils. "I'd like you to cooperate with me. This investigation can't proceed in the dark."
Holt took another sip of coffee, watching him over the rim of the cup. "Cooperation implies a shared goal, Detective. My goal is the security of this base, the morale of my men, and the integrity of our operations. Your goal, as I understand it, is to poke at a tragic, if bizarre, training accident with a set of civilian theories."
"The forensic evidence suggests it was no accident," James said, keeping his tone level. "And the 'civilian theories' seem to be shared by at least one of your own officers. The Captain who just left seemed to think the victim had filed a report on a 'werewolf club'. That's a rather specific detail for a myth."
A muscle twitched in Holt's jaw. The lamp's flame guttered in a draft. "Captain Sterling is grieving. She was a friend of the deceased. Grief breeds irrationality. She sees monsters in the shadows because the real monster—random, violent death—is too hard to look at directly."
"She mentioned protecting villagers," James pressed. "An operation last week. I'll need the mission logs for that, and any reports filed by the deceased afterwards."
"Not possible," Holt said flatly. "That falls under active operational security. It is, and I quote the regulation for you, 'an internal security matter.' My people will handle the internal review."
"Your people missed the mineral traces in his wounds," James countered, his own voice hardening. "Your people didn't catch the synthetic compounds on his uniform. My pathologist did. This has gone beyond your perimeter, Commander. A civilian is now involved in the forensic analysis. The 'internal' line has been crossed."
Holt's flinty eyes finally focused on him with full intensity. The friendly pretence was gone. "Then let me be perfectly clear, Detective. You are here on sufferance. A courtesy to the civil authorities to placate the newspapers when they inevitably sniff around a dead soldier. You will have access to the site—which you've had. You will receive a sanitised version of the victim's service record. You will be told it was a tragic wildlife incident during a nocturnal navigation exercise. And that, I'm afraid, is the full extent of our 'cooperation'."
James held his gaze. "You're afraid."
For the first time, a crack appeared in Holt's granite composure. Not fear, but a flash of pure, undiluted fury. It was in his eyes for only a second before it was banked, controlled, buried under layers of discipline. But it had been there.
"I am afraid of many things, Wilson," Holt said, his voice dangerously quiet. "I am afraid of espionage. I am afraid of panic among my ranks. I am afraid of the damage wild speculation can do to the reputation of this unit and the families of the men who serve here. What I am not afraid of is fairy stories. Now." He placed his hands flat on the desk. "I have a base to run. A base that is currently on high alert because of this incident. You have your direction. Follow the wildlife theory. Write your report. And do not," he paused, letting the word hang, "attempt to interview my personnel without my express authorization. Is that understood?"
The dismissal was absolute. James knew the wall he was facing was not just one man, but an entire institution closing ranks, its foundations trembling not from a mythical beast, but from the terror of what acknowledging that beast would mean. The silence in the room was no longer just an absence of sound; it was a presence, thick with secrets and orders already given—like the one to transfer a grieving, talkative captain named Genevieve Sterling to some distant, silent outpost called Station 13.
James rose from the chair. "Thank you for your time, Commander."
Holt did not reply. He simply picked up his tin cup and looked down at a report on his desk, the conversation already erased from his reality.
Out in the long, dim corridor, the air felt even colder. The two pools of light from the sconces seemed weaker, the shadows between them deeper. James walked back slowly, the echo of his own footsteps now sounding like a retreat. He thought of the Captain's furious, despairing eyes. Genevieve Sterling. He thought of the phone call. Station 13.
The military wasn't just stonewalling him. It was performing a hurried, ruthless triage. It was silencing its own, hiding its logs, and preparing a narrative as flimsy and deliberate as the staged body in the forest. They weren't investigating the monster. They were building a cage of lies around it, and willing to sacrifice anyone—a fallen comrade, a vocal captain—to keep the door bolted shut.
He needed to find Captain Sterling before she vanished into the system. And he needed Eleanor Thompson to tell him exactly what those synthetic compounds were. The truth was in the science, and in the anger of those being forced to swallow a lie. All he had to do was follow the threads before the great, grey machine of Whitemoor cut them all.
Camp Whitemoor's main gate was a statement of controlled power: reinforced barriers, a guardhouse with bulletproof glass, and soldiers with watchful eyes and SA80 rifles.
Captain Miller was in the guardhouse, reviewing the log, when the call came from the outer perimeter. "Two vans, civilian plates. No prior auth. Driver insists on entry."
"Turn them around," Miller snapped into the radio. "No exceptions."
He stepped outside, expecting to see a lost delivery driver. What he saw instead made his blood run a degree colder.
Two large, unmarked vans had rolled to a halt at the painted stop line. The lead vehicle was a Ford Transit Custom, a high-roof, long-wheelbase model in plain white. It was aggressively generic, the kind of van used by telecom engineers or utility workers. The second was a larger Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, also white, with the tell-tale thicker walls and muffled hum of a refrigerated unit.
Their anonymity was their threat. They bore no logos, no markings, just clean, featureless white panels. Their windows were deeply tinted. They did not look lost. They looked placed.
The driver's window of the Ford Transit buzzed down. A woman with sharp features and cool eyes—Eleanor Thompson—held up a laminated card and a sheaf of documents against the glass. Miller squinted. The card bore a seal he didn't fully recognize, but the authority on it was unmistakable. The top document was stamped with the insignia of the Home Office's Special Forensic Liaison Unit, a branch so shadowy its very letterhead was a quiet command.
"We're expected," Eleanor said, her voice carrying through the drizzle without raising. It wasn't a request.
Miller keyed his radio, his voice tight. "Sir, we have a situation at the main gate. The… consultants. They're here. In vans."
From the other end, Commander Holt's voice was a grim scrape. "How many?"
"Two vehicles, sir. A Ford Transit and a refrigerated Mercedes Sprinter."
The pause that followed was filled with the idle diesel rumble of the two white vans. They were a blockade of pure, bureaucratic force. The Transit was the mobile lab, the brain. The Sprinter was the mobile morgue, the cold, final word. Together, they represented an entire investigative apparatus arriving on Holt's doorstep, bypassing his chain of command, and announcing with their very presence that his "internal security matter" was now irretrievably, devastatingly external.
"Let them through," Holt finally said, the words sounding like a surrender. "Escort them directly to the secure hangar. Do not let them talk to anyone."
The barrier arm lifted with a hydraulic whine. The two white vans—the Ford Transit leading, the Mercedes Sprinter gliding silently in its wake—rolled forward onto the hallowed, regimented tarmac of Camp Whitemoor. They moved with a slow, inexorable confidence, a show of force not of weapons, but of jurisdiction. Holt's control over the narrative had just been parked, in sterile white steel, in the middle of his base.
The secondary crime scene was a gravel pull-off deep in the forestry commission land, a place where lovers parked by day and, it seemed, monsters conducted business by night. A persistent, icy drizzle had turned the ground into a slurry of mud and pine needles.
Two vehicles dominated the makeshift cordon, parked so close their side mirrors almost kissed.
On the left, James Wilson's Mitsubishi Shogun sat like a dormant beast. Its matte-black paint drank the weak afternoon light, and rivulets of rain streaked its flanks, giving it a perpetually weeping quality. Mud, fresh from the access track, spattered its wheel arches and lower doors. It was a car of grim purpose, its cabin dark behind the tinted glass.
Beside it, Eleanor Thompson's Land Rover Discovery presented a study in contrast. Its Keswick Green paint, though muted by the weather, held a dignified sheen. It was cleaner, but not spotless; a fine layer of road grime and a splash of forest muck on its All-Terrain tires testified to a journey taken, not a showpiece parked. It looked capable, expensive, and quietly authoritative.
They were parked side-by-side, but the space between them felt cavernous. The Shogun's driver door was ajar, a triangle of light from the interior lamp cutting into the gloom. The Discovery's engine ticked softly as it cooled.
James stood under the open tailgate of his Shogun, pulling on a fresh pair of latex gloves, his back to the green Land Rover. Eleanor was at the boot of her Discovery, methodically arranging evidence tubes and camera equipment into a hard case, her focus absolute on the task.
Their avoidance of eye contact was a tangible force in the damp air. He knew the precise cadence of her movements from his periphery; she sensed the solid, impatient weight of his presence just yards away. The silent dialogue between the two vehicles said everything their occupants would not: Here we are again. Our tools, our territories, pressed into unwilling adjacency. Your darkness next to my resolve. Your solitary hunt next to my clinical precision. The only sound was the drumming rain on sheet metal, a fitting soundtrack to a partnership built on five years of silence.