And as if the mere thought of those past transgressions could summon them like due punishment to his side, he felt their energy needle at him from afar like blade tips probing at the base of his spine and the back of his neck before lancing through him, the distance closed in a blink. Electricity crackled along every nerve and fire writhed across his brain.

The cresting fever of them reached down even into Senora’s dreamless faint and drew her jolting from unconsciousness with a gasp gathered in her throat. He pressed his hand over her mouth and waited, waited for the wide flare of her gaze to ease with recognition.

When it did, he leaned to her ear. “Pretend to sleep.”

At first, she resisted when he tried to gather her to him. Her bloodshot stare flickered toward the heavy slumber sounds of the strangers mere feet away, then tried to crawl the faint lines of their unfamiliar surroundings through the muted near-morning light, but when she looked at him again and saw the silent pleading, the edge of panic he was sure lurked in his eyes, the resistance bled from her. His arm wreathed around her, and he tucked her head against his shoulder.

The gray light, already a mere gasp against the dimness, shivered in a way he could feel across every inch of his skin, and he knew one of them had come to being within that very room. Senora’s whole body twitched against him. He supposed the curse of his blood had stripped the shield of dullness from her human senses.

He didn’t look, couldn’t dare, but he knew what he’d see if he did: a column of absolute darkness like a hole in the world towering over them, spindly and narrow with the creeping grace of a spider and—if the light managed to carve enough territory around the being by which to see—the cutting angles of a nearly skeletal face sheathed in flesh like purest ice, smooth and white and nearly translucent. Its body might be the broad but spiny shoulders of one of the men, or the jutting hip bones and pinched waist of the woman. He’d seen the woman before in a stolen glimpse and knew that even if daylight found no purchase in this small sliver of space, her green eyes would shimmer through the dark like witch’s fire, like a night-cat’s gaze glinting through the brush.

He had only ever seen the Eldest in these nightmare shapes, and he wondered, in the brief snatches of lucid thought in which he could wonder, if they were too ancient to recall the shape of human skin or simply too primal to be bound in it.

Though he held himself in mortal guise with every spare inch of his control, his own Otherness lashed inside him, screaming to answer the threat of that crushing presence with a violence so strong it pounded at his temples and in his teeth and eroded his thoughts to stuttering fragments. Even with his eyes closed, even in the silence stifling all noise in the Thing’s wake, he could sense It drifting closer and felt his muscles strain to react.

This was the game, he tried to tell himself as it lingered, drawn by his quickening pulse. He’d survived their blind baiting a dozen times before without revealing himself. He simply had to wait.

Yet, a single thought kept looping among the clamor in his head and made his nerves rattle like broken glass beneath his skin: he was not alone this time. If It discovered him, if It grew suspicious… If it laid a bony talon to her flesh or bared Its fangs to her in threat, he would—

He swallowed the thought just before his body could lurch to action and considered vanishing. The Eldest would know him then, and all three would follow him until he came back to his vulnerable skin and bones, but he could at least lead them away from her. His throat worked against the heat of a rising growl and flames flickered and stretched across his thoughts, and he knew his time to decide would soon be lost.

A gasp fluttered against the suffocating quiet. The haze retreated from his thoughts just enough for a cold wave of shock to roll through him, but the noise hadn’t come from Senora. Across the room, the woman shifted in her bedroll. Then the Other was gone. The pressure abated. The violence inside him eased but kept thrumming like a sore wound.

He looked as much as he dared and found the woman blinking toward the space the Other had occupied. Somehow, she didn’t see him and Senora huddled in the floor of her home, too transfixed on the unseeable ghost of the Eldest’s presence. When the man beside her uttered some question in accented, sleep-slurred speech, the tension finally faded from her. The woman answered with words that sounded like dismissal and sank back to the warmth of her blankets and her family.

Still, he didn’t move. Not until he felt the burning energies of all three hunters cut away to the south and the west and the north and daylight washed unfettered through the window like air gulped into starving lungs. Only then did he lean back to look at Senora. The morning revealed her eyes glassy-wide and face colorless with lingering chill and terror.