Her father, a man of hard hands and harder whiskey, blamed rustlers. Her mother, who read her Bible by candlelight, blamed the end of days. Haylo blamed neither. She knew what she’d seen on the third night of the disappearances: a shape that walked on two legs but bent like a broken wishbone, its skin the color of mud and moonlight. It had stopped at the edge of the hayloft’s shadow. And then it had kissed the air—a wet, smacking sound—and the nearest ewe had simply dissolved into mist.

The thing screamed—a sound like a barn door tearing off its hinges—and collapsed into a heap of mud and moonlight. Where it fell, a single sheep’s skull lay, clean as porcelain.

She heard it before she saw it: a soft, rhythmic click, like knuckles being cracked one by one. Then the shape pulled itself up the ladder, not climbing so much as unfolding , joint by terrible joint. Its face—if you could call it that—was smooth as a river stone, featureless except for the slit where a mouth should be.

She looked at the shotgun. She looked at the salt. She looked at the thing that had haunted her hollow for a year.