The night was black and thick with ghosts.

Shadows peeled from the branches, fingers of fog poking through the dark forest just steps from where Sadie stood trembling. She was barefoot, wearing nothing but Felix’s old sweatshirt, and a damn fool.

A scream had dragged her from bed, sent her racing through the unfamiliar house and down the front porch steps. Her whole world was reduced to cold grass, a throb of tangled trees, the jut of a craggy peak, shiny as a dragon’s scales in the light of a quarter moon.

It was an animal. It had to be. Something small and injured. Maybe a coyote. A wolf? But it didn’t sound like any of those things. It sounded human.

“Sadie!”

In a moment she was in his arms, caught from behind with her back pressed tight to his naked chest. “What are you doing?” Felix whispered.

“I heard . . . ” Sadie trailed off as a shattering, keening wail made her clutch at her husband’s arms where they wrapped around her chest. “What is that?”

“A fox,” he soothed, lips against her hair. “It’s just a fox. Their pups are being born right about now and they’re very territorial.”

“It’s awful,” her voice broke, and the last remnants of the nightmare that snatched her from sleep began to dissipate. Sadie was home. Not home home—that designation was reserved for their small bungalow in equally small Newcastle, Iowa—but in the house where Felix grew up. A ramshackle two-story craftsman with dormer windows and mossy eaves planted deep in the heart of the North Cascades, a place so different from their quiet, Midwestern town they might as well have moved across the world. A winding, hard-packed dirt road, an isolated homestead on a mountain that felt like it exhaled long and slow beneath her bare feet. Waiting. What she really wanted to say was: I hate it here.