I glared at him, keeping my focus on his craggy face that looked strangely handsome in the burning glow of his cigar. “The man wasn’t a savage.”

“If that’s the case, then who was he?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted stupidly. “I only saw him for a second and there was barely any light. He was pale though, white as a sheet, with eyes bluer than a robin’s egg. But the same smell that I’ve been picking up the last few days,” I gestured ahead into the forest, “it’s coming from him.”

He frowned, eyes glittering with thought. “Interesting.”

“I thought so.”

“You know what the smell is?”

I shook my head. “Something rotten. But familiar.” I don’t know why I kept on talking, divulging information to him. “The other day, I smelled it on our neighbor’s horse that went rabid and tried to kill us.”

He coughed, his eyes bugging out. “I beg your pardon, Pine Nut?”

I sighed and quickly told him what happened with Nero, knowing it would be met with disbelief.

I turned to face him and was surprised by his silence. In fact, his mouth was set in a rather grim line. “Rabies is Latin for madness.”

I raised my brow. “I didn’t know that. Is it possible that whatever infected the horse had infected this man? He did look rather mad.”

He snorted. “You have to be more than ‘rather mad’ to bite someone’s finger clean off.”

I cringed and looked back at the cabins. “How is Meeks?”

He took in a large drag of his cigar and let the smoke slowly trail out from his full lips. “He’s alive. Unconscious. I don’t know what else we can do for him.”

“Surely one of us will be going back to River Bend tomorrow with him.”

“Won’t be you. Won’t be me.” A smirk tugged at his lips. “Mayhaps it’ll be Avery. I’d hate to see you cry though.”

“Oh, you’d love to see me cry,” I countered. “And I wouldn’t cry over Avery.”

“You two seem awful close for being just a couple of pals.”

“I don’t see how this is any of your business, nor how it could possibly interest you,” I told him. I lowered my voice. “Besides, he is my only friend in this world.”

“I see. That explains it then,” he said, another puff of smoke rising up to the trees.

“Explains what?” I asked defensively. “And why are we always out here sparring in the middle of the night?”

He shrugged casually. “Last night you came out to spar with me, Pine Nut.”

Before I could say anything to that, the faint crackle of crushed ground came from the woods. Isaac and Hank appeared first as shadowy dark forms before I could see them clearly.

“Find anything?” Jake asked them.

Isaac shook his head while Hank’s cold eyes fixed on me.

“Perhaps we need to take the tracker with us,” Hank said, reaching for my arm. I took a step back into a tree, trying to escape his grasp.

“Think it’s a bit late for that,” Jake said to him, his voice taking on an edge. “We’ll have a look around in the morning.”

Hank scowled at him but dropped his hand. “You really think you’re in charge of this, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t, but I do know better than you. Technically Merv’s in charge cuz Merv has the money.”

“Too bad Merv is in there dying,” Hank said without a hint of remorse.

Jake took in one last puff before he flicked the cigar at the ground between Hank and I. “Tomorrow will figure itself out. Merv may have lost his finger but he hasn’t lost his life. If he seems worse by morning, we’ll get someone to take him down to River Bend.”

“Well it ain’t going to be me,” Isaac snapped at him. “This is my uncle out there.”

“So you keep saying,” Jake said, stroking at his rough beard. “I reckon you must be the most loyal nephew on earth to keep going after him so…passionately.”

The two of them stared at each other in a silent showdown, Jake not breaking his gaze for a second. Finally Isaac muttered, “Get out of my way,” and tried to push past Jake before he realized that Jake was solid and immovable as a tree. He ended up going around him.

Hank stared at me with his leering eyes and licked his cracked lips before he followed after him. I shivered with revulsion.

“Best get you inside too,” Jake said as he eyed me. Little did he know I wasn’t shivering because I was cold.

Once we were back inside the cabin, I saw that Merv was propped up in his bed and still unconscious. His hand was fully-wrapped in muslin with only a small amount of blood soaking through, and his body was piled high with blankets.

Donna was washing her hands in a bowl of hot water beside Avery who smiled at me with relief.

“How is he?” I asked.

“I managed to stop most of the bleeding,” she said, her voice shaking. She pushed her blonde curls out of her eyes with her forearm, her hands still soapy. “The challenge is keeping the wound clean. We’ll need to keep changing the bandages.”

“Will we have to take him back to River Bend?” Jake asked, appearing beside me, still in those long johns.

She kept her God-fearing eyes averted and looked down at Meeks’ body instead. “Not if we keep him here for the next day or two. He shouldn’t be on the move, either back to River Bend or continuing north.”

“Ah, what the hell does she know?” Hank’s voice came from the other side of the cabin.

Donna’s cheeks burned with anger. “I know enough,” she said, lowering her voice. She looked at Jake, keeping her eyes above his neck. “He’ll be too weak to ride. For goodness sake, I feel too weak to ride. That was a horrible thing that just happened. Wicked and evil, like Satan crawled right here in this cabin with us.”

Jake exhaled loudly. “Don’t you think it makes sense then that we move on?”

“We could split up,” Tim mused from the corner of the cabin where he was sitting on a stool, appearing deep in thought. “Some of us can stay here, some of us can keep going.”

“Splitting up didn’t exactly worked for the Donner party, did it?” Jake pointed out.

I looked at Avery in fear, not wanting us to separate. He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder, his head lowered toward mine. “Don’t worry, Eve, whatever we end up doing, I’m not leaving you. Not until I teach you how to fire a gun, anyway.”

Jake snorted loudly.

Avery lifted his head and gave him a dirty look. “Do you think that’s funny? Eve needs to know how to protect herself.”

His smile twisted. “A woman with a gun is a bad idea, boy. You’d be putting all our lives at risk.”

“Only your life,” I muttered under my breath. From the way his lips twitched further, I knew he had heard me.

He walked over into the center of the room by the roaring fire and addressed everyone. “I know we’re all worried about old Merv here pulling through. I know we’re all worried about finding what we’ve come out here to find. And I know we’re all worried that something or someone has already found us. But there just ain’t no use in worrying tonight. I’ll keep watch until sunup in case the finger-biting bastard comes back. Then we’ll start figuring out what to do.”

With the phrase “finger-biting bastard” rolling around in my head, it was a wonder I got any sleep at all.

Overnight, five inches of snow had fallen and more kept coming by morning, prompting Jake to nail boards to the broken window. Meeks was in a delirious state, more so than I would have thought. In the end, it was only his pinky finger that was missing, not a leg or anything so crucial as that, and yet he kept moaning about being ruined for the rest of his life. After everything, I would have thought he’d be more concerned with how his finger was taken but he wasn’t.

However, he was the only one who seemed unconcerned about that. As much as Isaac had been chomping at the bit to go forth to the next site, this morning he was hell-bent on finding the culprit. By now, theories about what it was were rampant, especially after they heard my testimony of what I saw. For whatever reason, Isaac and Hank seemed to want to track down this monster, even though the two of them seemed to have little regard for how Meeks was doing.