Chapter 1: Lightning Strikes & Ripped Seams
The mist didn’t just obscure the path; it swallowed it whole. Kade moved through the white-out with a practiced tension, every sense tuned to the mountain’s shifting voice. The wind was a brute force shoving against his chest, and the rain had long since soaked through his layers, finding the skin with a cold, intimate kiss. He’d been a fool to cut through the pass this late, but the shortcut was supposed to shave two hours off his return to the trailhead. A calculated risk that was currently calculating his death.
Then he saw it—a splash of color that wasn’t rock or pine. A deep blue, half-buried in a fresh, dark slide of mud and rock.
“Hey!” he yelled, his voice ripped away by the gale. He fought his way closer, boots sinking deep. It was a backpack. And attached to the backpack was a person.
The hiker was on his side, torso pinned by a tangle of root and earth, one arm flung out as if reaching for a path that had vanished. Unconscious, or close to it. Kade dropped to his knees, his own fatigue forgotten, and started digging. The mud was a cold, thick glue, but he clawed at it, heaving chunks of debris aside until he could get his hands under the man’s shoulders.
“Come on, man. Wake up.” He gave a firm shake.
The hiker—young, with brown hair plastered to his forehead—stirred. His eyes fluttered open, dazed and wide with panic. “My leg,” he gasped. “It’s stuck.”
“I’ve got you. Name’s Kade. What’s yours?” He kept talking, a steady stream of calm he didn’t feel, as he followed the line of the man’s body down to where his leg was trapped under a hefty, mud-slicked branch.
“Eli,” the hiker choked out. “Eli Thorne.”
“Okay, Eli. This is going to hurt. On three.” Kade braced his feet, wrapped his hands around the branch, and pulled. The wood shifted with a wet suck. Eli cried out, a sharp, strangled sound, but as the pressure released, he scrambled backward, free.
Kade dropped the branch, panting. “Can you stand?”
Eli nodded, his face pale as he tried to push himself up. Kade moved to help, hauling one of Eli’s arms over his shoulders. The moment he took the man’s full weight, he felt it. A tremor, deep and rhythmic, running through Eli’s frame. It wasn’t a shiver from the cold. It was something else, something internal and violent.
“Just need a second,” Eli mumbled, his head lolling.
“We don’t have a second.” Kade tightened his grip, his fingers digging into the sodden fabric of Eli’s jacket. The tremor intensified into a convulsion. Eli’s body went rigid, his back arching violently. A guttural groan tore from his throat, one that was all wrong, too deep and resonant for the lanky form Kade was holding.
“What the hell—” Kade’s words died as he felt the muscle under his grip begin to change. It swelled, hardening and expanding against his palm. He tried to adjust his hold, but it was like trying to hold onto growing stone.
Eli’s gasps were ragged, punctuated by the sickening sound of fabric straining and then tearing. The zipper on his jacket popped. The shoulders of his shirt split open at the seams. Kade stared, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. Eli’s chest, which a moment ago had been lean, was now broadening, the pectorals thickening and pushing outward, stretching the skin taut. His frame seemed to be lengthening, his height increasing in jarring, palpable increments.
Kade stumbled back, his survival instincts screaming a primal alarm. This wasn’t exhaustion or injury. This was impossible.
Eli collapsed onto his hands and knees in the mud, his breathing a series of ragged, painful-sounding heaves. The storm howled around them, indifferent. The transformation, or whatever it was, seemed to stall. The convulsions subsided into shudders.
The man who now knelt in the muck was not the man Kade had pulled from the mudslide. He was broader, thicker, his shredded clothes hanging off a physique that belonged on a heavyweight fighter. He lifted his head, and his eyes, when they found Kade’s, were wide with a terror that had nothing to do with the storm or the mountain. It was the terror of someone seeing their own nightmare reflected back at them.
Kade’s pulse hammered in his ears, a frantic drum solo against the symphony of the gale. He took a hesitant step forward, his mind racing through a dozen questions, each more insane than the last. Who was this guy? What was he?
Eli opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He just stared at Kade, his expression a desperate, silent plea.