Chapter 31: The Eyeless Wolf
I took the first watch.
The grey-haired man had said two hours, but I knew he wouldn’t wake up that fast. He was dead on his feet. The others were already asleep, breathing heavy, lost to exhaustion the second their heads hit the snow.
For a while, the night was quiet. Too quiet for a forest that had tried to kill us every day.
The moon hung high in the sky, a perfect, cold white circle, shining brighter than I had ever seen it before, because there were no clouds up here, no smoke from villages. Just clean, freezing air.
Its pale light covered the mountain in a thin layer of silver, making the snow glitter like crushed glass, making the old stones of the path look like bones.
I pulled the coat tighter around myself, double-layered now, but still the cold found a way in through the seams, through my legs.
Even though we had climbed high into the mountains, struggling for every meter, I could still see the path we had come from. The cliff we had nearly died on.
It looked small from up here. Pathetically small.
Almost like a thin line, a scratch disappearing into the black forest far below. All that suffering, all that climbing, and from up here it looked like nothing.
I stared at it for a moment, my breath fogging.
So that’s where we came from... That tiny line. We were ants down there.
I could barely make out the remains of the route below, the switchbacks, the place where the thin prisoner fell. Everything looked different from this height. Peaceful. Like it wasn’t trying to kill you.
Danny slowly looked around, turning his head, sweeping the tree line. Left, right, up the path, down the path.
Nothing.
No movement.
No sound.
Just the wind moving through the pines, making them sigh, and the faint snoring of the thin prisoner behind me.
For a second, I thought maybe tonight would be okay. Maybe the mountain would let us sleep.
"Hm?"
Something caught his attention down below, a flicker of movement where there should be none. A dark spot against the silver snow, moving against the wind.
Danny narrowed his eyes, leaning forward over the edge of the old path, ignoring the vertigo.
"What...? What is that?"
He looked toward the lower part of the mountain, toward that thin line that was our climb. His eyes strained, trying to make sense of it in the moonlight.
Something was moving down there. Slow, deliberate.
At first, he thought it was an animal. A deer, maybe, or a bear coming out at night.
Then he saw something small and round roll across the snow, bouncing off rocks, leaving a dark trail behind it.
A head.
Not an animal’s.
A human head, hair still attached, slowly rolled down the slope before stopping against a rock, face-up, mouth open in the moonlight.
Danny froze. His entire body went cold, colder than the wind.
His eyes widened until they hurt.
A human head slowly rolled down the slope before stopping against a rock. Whose? There were no other climbers.
Danny’s breathing stopped. He forgot how to inhale.
"What the..." he whispered, voice barely air.
Then he heard it, faintly at first, carried up the mountain by the wind.
Crunch.
Danny slowly turned his head toward the sound, toward a cluster of dark pines just below the old path, maybe thirty meters down, where the moonlight didn’t quite reach.
Crunch. Crunch.
The sound of something biting into flesh, chewing, breaking bone, echoed through the darkness, wet and loud in the otherwise silent night.
His heart began pounding so fast and so hard he was sure the creature would hear it.
He carefully stood up, legs shaking so badly he had to hold the stone pillar to stay upright. He didn’t dare call out to wake the others yet. Not until he knew.
His eyes searched the darkness below, past the rolling head, to the shadow behind it.
Then he saw it. Half-hidden by snow and branches.
A large figure crouched over a body, its back to him. The body was wearing clothes like the caravan drivers. Fresh.
Its pale, almost translucent skin was almost invisible beneath the moonlight, white on white. If it hadn’t been moving, he would have never seen it.
Its head slowly lifted from its meal, as if it had heard Danny’s heart.
Danny’s blood ran cold, turning to ice water in his veins.
There were no eyes.
No eyes at all.
Just smooth, stretched skin where they should have been, like someone had erased them. No sockets, no scars. Just blank flesh.
Its mouth was covered in blood, black in the moonlight, dripping down its chin, steam rising from it in the cold.
The eyeless wolf. The same kind that hunted them in the forest below. But bigger. Much bigger. This was an alpha, an adult.
The creature sniffed the air, long, slow inhalations, its nose twitching, pointing up.
Danny didn’t move.
He barely breathed. He remembered what the grey-haired man had told him: They can’t see. They hunt by sound and smell. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.
The eyeless wolf slowly raised its head higher, standing on its hind legs for a second, taller than a man, its long arms dangling.
Its nose twitched again, faster now, excited.
It had found something. A new scent. Fresher than the dead driver.
It turned in Danny’s direction, its blank face pointing straight at the old path, straight at where Danny was hiding.
Danny’s heart dropped into his stomach. His knees almost gave out.
No. No no no. Not us. We were hidden, we were high.
The wolf sniffed again, a deep, hungry snort, and then its lips slowly pulled back, revealing rows of sharp, yellowed teeth, far too many teeth, layered like a shark’s, all covered in gore.
A low growl started in its chest, vibrating through the cold air, through the stone under Danny’s feet.
Danny’s eyes widened, his whole body trembling so hard the coats rustled.
Damn it...
His hands trembled, searching for a weapon, finding only a cold rock. The others were asleep behind him, defenseless.
It found us.