Chapter 1
MAREN
The morning fog rolls through the redwoods with purpose, curling around tree trunks and pooling in hollows where the light can't quite reach.
I've photographed coastal fog before—spent three weeks in Big Sur chasing the perfect shot of marine layer meeting forest—but nothing compares to what happens here in Redwood Rise.
Here, the fog shimmers.
My camera captures it in the LCD preview: iridescent threads weaving through the mist like someone spun moonlight into vapor.
The shimmer appears only in specific locations, always near the places where my compass spins uselessly and my phone signal dies completely.
I've been documenting the phenomenon for eight months now, ever since I stumbled across this town while researching locations for my photography book on Northern California's old-growth forests.
The rational part of my brain knows there's probably a scientific explanation.
Atmospheric conditions, mineral deposits in the soil, some quirk of geology that creates optical effects.
But the part of me that's been having the same dream for six months—the part that wakes up gasping with the taste of salt water in my mouth and a man's name on my lips—that part knows better.
I adjust my tripod, framing the shot through a grove where three massive redwoods form a natural triangle. The shimmer is stronger here than I've ever seen it, pulsing in waves that prickle my skin with static electricity. The hair at the back of my neck stands up.
Through my viewfinder, the air itself looks liquid.
I squeeze the shutter release. The camera clicks. And the liquid air splits open.
No. Not splits. Tears. Like fabric ripping along an invisible seam, revealing something beyond that defies comprehension—neither darkness nor light, but something in between that lurches my stomach sideways.
The edges of the tear ripple and pulse, throwing off heat I can feel from twenty feet away.
My camera's autofocus hunts frantically, unable to lock onto whatever exists beyond that threshold.
Through the opening, I catch glimpses of a grey landscape that shouldn't exist. Stone that looks wet but isn't. Light that casts no shadows. The wrongness of it crawls across my skin like static electricity, raising every hair on my body.
A figure stumbles through the tear, and the edges seem to resist him.
He's fighting his way through, pushing against something I can see distorting the air around his body—like he's forcing himself through invisible molasses.
For a heartbeat he's caught between—half here, half there—and the agony on his face steals my breath.
For one impossible moment, I think I'm hallucinating. The sleep deprivation finally catching up, the dreams bleeding into reality. Because the man collapsing onto the forest floor twenty feet from my camera is the same one I've been seeing every night for half a year.
Dark hair. Broad shoulders. The kind of build that suggests both strength and endurance—a swimmer or a climber, someone who moves through water or scales cliffsides with equal confidence.
Even unconscious and sprawled in the dirt, there's something magnetic about him, something that tightens my chest with recognition I don't understand.
I know his face. The exact angle of his jaw. The way his eyebrows draw together when he's concentrating—details I shouldn't possibly know about a stranger.
The tear in the air pulses once more, then seals itself with a sound like wind through tall grass.
The shimmer intensifies, radiates outward in concentric circles that disturb the fog.
My camera is still clicking—I must have accidentally switched to continuous shooting mode—and some distant part of my photographer's brain catalogues the unreal images being captured.
The man doesn't move.
I'm moving before I decide to, closing the distance between us, my boots making soft crunching sounds through frost-stiff vegetation. He's wearing a torn drysuit, for god's sake. Black neoprene shredded in places, revealing skin covered in black lines that web outward like cracks through marble.
I drop to my knees beside him, fingers pressing against his throat. His pulse thrums beneath my touch—too fast, too hard, like his heart is trying to beat its way free. His skin burns fever-hot despite the morning chill.
"Hey." My voice comes out rougher than intended. "Can you hear me?"
No response. His breathing is shallow, rapid. The dark veins pulse beneath his skin, creeping outward even as I watch. Whatever happened to him—wherever he came from—it's still happening. Still hurting him.
I need to get him to shelter. The old ranger cabin I rented to use as a base camp sits a short distance northeast, stocked with emergency supplies I keep for extended shooting sessions. It's not much, but it's better than leaving him exposed on the forest floor.
The rational voice in my head screams that I should call for help.
My satellite phone sits in my camera bag—required safety equipment that the sheriff's office insisted on when I first started working out here.
I'm supposed to check in every evening by six.
If I miss a check-in, Sheriff Hayes sends someone to my last known location.
But the sat phone takes three minutes to acquire signal, and I don't have three minutes. By the time I get through to the sheriff's office and someone drives out here from town, this man could be dead. The corruption marks are racing faster now, snaking up his neck toward his face.
I hook my arms under his shoulders and pull.
He's heavier than he looks. Solid muscle that feels like moving a fallen tree. I dig my heels into the soft earth and haul, putting my back into it, using techniques I learned helping my uncle move hay bales on his ranch in Montana.
My boots slip in the damp undergrowth. I adjust my grip, locking my hands together across his chest, and try again.
This time I get momentum, dragging him backward through ferns that catch on his drysuit.
Twenty feet. My shoulders burn. Thirty. I have to stop, gasping, my thighs trembling from the effort.
His head lolls to the side, and a scent cuts through the drysuit and corruption—salt and cedar, impossibly clean and wild. Familiar in a way that spikes my pulse.
I glance back toward the cabin. Seems so far. Too far. But I can't leave him here, can't let whatever's happening to him finish its work while I go for help that might not come in time.
I readjust my grip, ignoring the protest in my lower back, and pull again. Forty feet. Fifty. My breathing comes in harsh gasps now. A root nearly trips me, and I catch myself at the last second, the unconscious man's weight threatening to topple us both.
The corruption is spreading faster. I can see it crawling up his neck, black tendrils branching like root systems beneath his skin. Whatever limited time we had is running out.
Halfway to the cabin, the fog begins gathering.
Not dispersing with the rising sun as it should, but condensing. Coalescing. Taking shapes that look almost solid if I don't look at them directly. When I turn my head to focus on them, they dissolve back into mist. But from the corner of my eye, they look like figures. Like shadows given form.
The cabin appears through the trees—weathered wood and a tin roof, the front porch sagging but solid. I manage to get the unconscious man up the three steps, my shoulders screaming protest, and kick the door open.
Inside smells like old wood and the peppermint tea I've been brewing.
My sleeping bag is rolled out in one corner next to my camping stove.
Photography equipment covers every flat surface—cameras, lenses, memory cards, the portable printer I use to check color balance.
Not exactly a medical facility, but it'll have to do.
I drag him to the sleeping bag, roll him onto it as gently as I can manage. His eyes move beneath closed lids, rapid and erratic. Dreaming, maybe. Or delirious.
The shadow corruption has reached his jawline now. Up close, the inky tendrils look organic and wrong, like poison threading through his veins. I press my fingers to his wrist, checking his pulse again. Still too fast. His skin is getting hotter.
I need water, something to cool him down. Maybe fever reducer if I have any in my first aid kit. I'm rummaging through my supplies when the temperature drops.
Not gradually. Not the normal cooling that comes with morning shade. This is instant, violent. My breath mists in the air. Frost forms on the cabin windows in fractal patterns that branch too fast to be natural.
And the shadows gather.
I spin toward the door just as they materialize—three figures made of smoke and malice, their forms constantly shifting between solid and vapor. No faces, but I feel them looking at me. Feel their hunger, their wrongness, the way they trigger my hindbrain to scream predator, run, hide.
They don't move like normal things. They flow, defying physics and geometry, bending around corners that shouldn't accommodate their mass. The temperature drops another ten degrees as they fully manifest, and my breath comes out in white clouds.
One drifts toward me, and I stumble backward. It's not here for me though. I can tell by the way it angles past, dismissing me like I'm furniture. An obstacle, not a target.
They're here for him.
The three shadow creatures converge on the unconscious man with terrible purpose. They flow past like water around stone, reaching with appendages that seem to multiply as I watch. Fingers become tendrils become claws, all grasping toward the man on my sleeping bag.
The protective instinct that surges through me is instantaneous and overwhelming. I don't think. Don't plan.