Twenty-three days of surveillance. No kills. No confirmed sightings. No James Wright. Just darkness. Waiting. Scanning empty buildings.
Wilson sat in darkness, studying the old community hall through night-vision binoculars. The Deninu Kue First Nation had built it three decades ago—hand-hewn timber, caribou antlers mounted above the doorframe. A faded drum circle poster still clung to the plywood over the nearest window. Hadn't had power in five years, windows boarded, door chained. Perfect nest for something that didn't need heat or light.
His hands were steady on the binoculars. Six hours on the scope. He could do six more.
The binoculars flickered. Image pixelated, then resolved. Battery indicator showed sixty-three percent. The cold drained lithium cells faster than the manufacturer's specs promised. He had maybe four more hours before the device died completely. Then he'd switch to the backup pair. Those batteries were at forty percent.
Everything died faster in the extreme cold.
Including human advantages. The cold numbed trigger fingers, slowed reaction times, turned crossbow mechanisms into reluctant machines that fired a half-second late. It deadened scent—at minus twenty-five, the air was too cold to carry complex chemical signatures more than a few meters, which meant Wilson couldn't smell a vampire's approach the way hunters in warmer climates sometimes could. The faint ozone-and-copper signature of a feeding vampire—the tell that experienced hunters learned to recognize—dissipated in Arctic air before it reached human nostrils. But the cold didn't limit vampires the same way. Their olfactory systems processed scent at concentrations a thousand times below human detection thresholds. The frozen air that blinded Wilson's nose sharpened theirs—preserving chemical traces the way a freezer preserved tissue. Every breath he exhaled was a signal flare. Every hour he sat in that truck, his position broadcast itself in the molecular language of sweat and caffeine and the diesel exhaust cycling through the cab's heating vents.
The cold didn't just threaten the hunters. It fought for the other side.
Fort Resolution was very quiet that night. Deninu Kue—End of the River, in Chipewyan. Population four hundred, spread across frozen streets and prefab houses. Smoke from woodstoves carried the faint sweetness of spruce and dried fish. Someone on the next street over was smoking moose meat—the richer, gamey scent drifted between houses. Most people were inside by 1900 that time of year. Smart. The darkness came early in October. Stayed late.
The Long Dark was returning again.
The truck's heater cycled off with a mechanical groan. Temperature gauge dropped immediately. His breath materialized in clouds. The cab would hold residual heat for maybe fifteen minutes before he needed to start the engine again. Idling burned fuel. He had three-quarters of a tank. Enough for another two days of surveillance if he was careful with the heater cycles.
If the engine started. Diesel engines hated extreme cold. That one was twenty years old, salvaged from a mining operation, held together with improvised repairs. It started seventy percent of the time on the first try. The other thirty percent required swearing and prayer in equal measure.
Wilson's breath fogged the truck window. He wiped it with his sleeve. The moisture immediately re-froze, creating frost patterns. He wiped again. Returned to surveillance. The community hall hadn't moved. Hadn't changed. Hadn't shown any sign of occupation in twenty-three days.
Twenty-three days. Five hundred fifty-two hours. Thirty-three thousand one hundred twenty minutes. He'd counted. At 3 AM when he couldn't sleep. At 6 AM when his shift started. At midnight when Emily relieved him. The numbers helped. Gave structure to the waiting. Gave meaning to the emptiness.
He counted other things too. Fourteen bolts in his crossbow quiver. Twenty-six stakes in the back of the truck. One hundred forty-seven days since Aurora. Thirty-three dead at Aurora. Seven more in the months since. Forty total. Forty people dead while Wilson hunted James Wright.
He recited them sometimes. The names. When he couldn't sleep. When the darkness pressed down. Kira. Dr. Chen. Peterson. The researchers whose names he'd learned too late. The trappers in Fort Resolution. The fishing crew in Inuvik. Forty names. Forty lives ended because James Wright existed. Because Wilson couldn't stop him.
The counting helped. Kept the grief organized. Kept the guilt compartmentalized. Turned mourning into mathematics. As long as he was counting, he was functioning. As long as he was functioning, he might still kill James.
That was all he had now. The numbers and the mission. Everything else—sleep, food, sanity—was secondary. Expendable.
Twenty-three days since the last confirmed James Wright sighting. Twenty-three days since they'd tracked him to Fort Resolution. Twenty-three days of staking out buildings he never entered. Roads he never walked. Shadows that never moved.
Maybe this was what hunting really was. Not stakes and crossbows. Not UV lights and ash. Just waiting. Hoping something happened before you lost your mind.
Across the street, Fort Resolution's single streetlight flickered. Once. Twice. Held. Sodium vapor from the 1980s. It cycled on and off randomly now. Electrical grid problems. The whole town ran on a diesel generator that needed replacing a decade ago. Power brownouts were common. Sometimes the lights dimmed for no reason. Sometimes they went out entirely for hours.
Perfect hunting conditions for something that thrived in darkness.
He pulled the thermos from the seat beside him. Unscrewed the cap. Coffee, lukewarm already. He'd drunk it hot three hours ago. The thermos was supposed to hold heat for twelve hours. In that cold, four was generous. He drank anyway. The caffeine helped. Not with warmth. With focus.
His father used to tell him about patience. Sitting in deer blinds in northern Ontario. Hours of silence. Watching for movement. "The animal doesn't come to you, Wilson. You come to the animal by not moving." His father had had patience like bedrock. Geological patience. The kind that measured time in epochs rather than hours.
His father had also left when Wilson was twelve. Packed a bag on a Tuesday morning, drove to the airport, flew to Yellowknife to work the diamond mines. Called once a month. Then once a season. Then not at all. Teaching Wilson the only lesson that mattered: you don't leave people. Not ever. Not for any reason.
And yet there he sat. In a truck in the Arctic. Leaving behind every relationship, every connection, every thread of normal life. Pursuing a monster across a frozen continent. Becoming his father's patience without his father's capacity to walk away.
The irony wasn't lost on him.
A sound reached through the glass. Distant. A dog, maybe. Or a wolf. In Fort Resolution, the line between the two blurred. Half the dogs in town had wolf ancestry. They howled at the darkness like their wild cousins. Warning. Mourning. Speaking in frequencies humans couldn't decode.
Wilson listened. The howl died. Silence returned. Deeper than before.
"Anything?" Emily's voice crackled through the satellite radio—hunter network standard issue, independent of civilian towers. She was monitoring the old fish processing plant three kilometers south. Their second suspected nest.
"Nothing."
"Same here."
Wilson checked his watch. 2100. Three more hours until shift change. Then Emily would take the community hall. He'd take the processing plant. Then six hours of sleep. Then repeat.
They'd been doing this for six months.
Six months since they'd confronted James Wright at Fort Resolution. Six months since he'd escaped, wounded but alive. Six months of hunting across the Canadian Arctic, following rumors and kills and shadows.
Six months of waking up reaching for stakes. Of scanning every dark corner for movement. Of dreaming about Kira's death and waking with his heart trying to break through his ribs.
Kira's notebook sat in his bag at the motel. Her research. Her life's work. The patterns of vampire attacks she'd spent thirty years documenting. Wilson read it every night. Memorized routes and timelines and body counts. Tried to think like James Wright thought. Tried to predict where a 282-year-old predator would strike next.
The problem was, James was smarter than Wilson. Not slightly. Fundamentally. James had been hunting humans since before the American Revolution. He'd survived wars, plagues, technological upheavals, and centuries of human advancement that should have made him obsolete. Every trap Wilson set, James had seen before. Every tactic, James had countered. Every pattern Wilson identified, James had already evolved past.
Wilson was playing chess against an opponent who had memorized every game ever played.
Three months ago, they'd tracked him here. Back to Fort Resolution. Back where it had started.
Then... nothing.
No kills. No sightings. No evidence James was even in the region.
Emily thought he'd fled. Ingrid thought he was hibernating—some ancient vampires could sleep for decades when threatened. Marcus Chen thought he was dead. Wilson knew better.
James was patient. James was watching. James was waiting for them to make a mistake.
Wilson was doing the same thing. The question was which of them would break pattern first.
The wind picked up. The truck rocked gently on its suspension. Temperature dropped another degree. The diesel in the fuel lines thickened. He could feel it in the way the engine turned over—sluggish, reluctant, each revolution a negotiation between mechanical will and thermodynamic reality.
Out here, the cold wasn't weather. It was a presence. It entered through gaps in clothing, through microscopic pores in glass, through the spaces between heartbeats. It didn't attack—it simply occupied. Took residence in fingers and toes first. Then joints. Then deeper tissues. The body responded by retreating inward, pulling blood from extremities, conserving heat for vital organs. A siege mentality written into human biology.
Wilson had been under siege for twenty-three days. His body had adapted. His fingers worked in the cold now. His lungs didn't burn when he breathed. His eyes didn't water in the wind. He was becoming something suited to this environment. Something that could survive the cold.
Something that could hunt in it.
The radio crackled again. "We should talk."
"We're talking."
"In person. I'm coming to you."
Wilson wanted to say no. Wanted to maintain surveillance. But Emily's tone said this wasn't negotiable.
"Fine."
She arrived ten minutes later. Her truck pulled up beside his. She climbed into his passenger seat, bringing cold air and frustration.
"We need to reconsider," she said.
"Reconsider what?"
"This. Fort Resolution. The surveillance." Emily gestured at the community hall. "It's been twenty-three days, Wilson. No activity. No kills. No James."
"He's here."
"You don't know that."
"I know."
Emily's jaw tightened. The green glow of the night-vision monitor caught the tension in her face. She was exhausted. They both were. But her exhaustion was different—it carried frustration, impatience, the weariness of someone watching a partner self-destruct one surveillance shift at a time.
"We've been hunting for six months," Emily said. "Norway. Alaska. Yukon. We've killed nine vampires. Saved probably a hundred lives. But we're chasing James specifically. And he's winning because we're staked out at empty buildings instead of hunting actual threats."
"He killed thirty-three people at Aurora Station."
"I know. I was there." Emily's voice sharpened. The scar on her forearm—James's parting gift—caught the dim light. She never talked about it. Never touched it in front of him. But Wilson had watched her trace the ridge of scar tissue when she thought no one was looking. Late at night. Alone. Her own private inventory of damage.
"But sitting in a truck for six months won't bring them back," she finished.
Wilson didn't answer. She was right and wrong simultaneously. James was here. Had to be. But proving it required patience Emily didn't have anymore.
"Ingrid called," Emily continued. "Vampire activity in Whitehorse. Three disappearances in two weeks. She wants backup."
"So go."
"Wilson—"
"I'm not leaving. James is here."
"You're obsessed."
"I'm thorough."
Emily exhaled. Her breath fogged the air between them. "This isn't healthy. You're not sleeping. You're not eating properly. You sit outside empty buildings twelve hours a day, hoping a vampire who might not even be in Canada anymore suddenly appears."
"He's here," Wilson repeated.
"Prove it."
Wilson couldn't. That was the problem. No bodies. No witnesses. No physical evidence James Wright was within a thousand kilometers of Fort Resolution.
Just Wilson's certainty. A feeling that lived below logic. Below evidence. Below the rational methodology Kira had taught him. A hunter's instinct that said the predator was close—the same instinct that had kept humans alive in caves while sabertooth cats prowled outside.
Emily turned to face him fully. The green glow of night-vision cast her face in sharp relief. "Wilson. I need you to hear me. Actually hear me."
He met her eyes.
"I want James dead too. He killed everyone I worked with at Aurora. He killed Kira. He nearly killed us. I want to stake him and watch him burn." Her voice was steady. Controlled. The microbiologist's precision she brought to everything—even grief. Even rage. "But I can't partner with someone who's losing himself to revenge. I've seen what that does to hunters. Marcus Chen lost his wife. Ingrid lost her brother. The obsession takes everything."
"I'm not—"
"You are. You've lost fifteen pounds since Aurora. You flinch at every shadow. You talk in your sleep. Do you understand what you say?"
Wilson didn't answer.
"Names. Over and over. Kira. David. Sarah Chen. The people who died at Aurora." Emily's jaw tightened. "You're carrying them. All of them. And you'll break under the weight if you don't let some of it go."
Wilson stared at the community hall. Dark. Empty. Mocking.
"I'm not sure how to let go," he said quietly. "They died because I wasn't fast enough. Wasn't smart enough. I should have seen what was happening sooner."
His father's voice echoed from somewhere deep: You can't save everyone, son. Sometimes people leave and they don't come back. The memory stung—his father saying those words, then proving them true by walking out when Wilson was twelve. Never coming back. Teaching Wilson the only lesson that mattered: you don't leave people. Not ever. Not for any reason.
"So should I. So should everyone at that station. Guilt doesn't make you a better hunter. It makes you a reckless one." Emily put her hand on his arm. Her grip was firm. Grounding. "We're partners. Equal partners. That means you listen when I tell you we're losing this fight."
Wilson's throat tightened. She was right. The weight of that settled in his chest, heavy and undeniable.
"One more week," Emily said. "If there's no sign of him in one week, we go to Whitehorse. Help Ingrid. Hunt vampires we can actually find."
He wanted to argue. Insist James was close. Explain the certainty burning in his gut.
Instead, he nodded. "One week."
"Thank you." Emily opened the door. Cold rushed in, so absolute it felt solid. "I'm going back to the plant. Call if anything changes."
She left. Wilson returned to surveillance. The community hall sat dark and dead across the street. Mocking him with its emptiness.
Maybe Emily was right. Maybe James was gone. Maybe Wilson was chasing ghosts.
The streetlight flickered again. Died. Came back weaker. The shadows around the community hall shifted and resettled. Nothing moved. Nothing had moved in twenty-three days.
Wilson lifted the binoculars. Adjusted focus. Watched.
His phone rang at 2300.
Unknown number. Local area code.
Wilson answered. "Hayes."
"This is Constable Mercier, RCMP Fort Resolution. You're one of the researchers staying at the Northern Motel?"
"That's right." Their cover story: climate researchers studying Arctic permafrost. Explained their equipment, their odd hours, their interest in remote areas.
"We need you to come to a location. Twenty kilometers northeast. Trapper's cabin." Mercier's voice was tight. Professional but shaken. Young. The kind of voice that hadn't had enough practice delivering bad news. "We have a body."
Wilson's pulse quickened. "What kind of body?"
"Dead. That's all I can say over the phone. Can you come? Your background listed medical training."
It did. Emily's background as a microbiologist. Wilson's geology fieldwork involving remote medical response. All true. All cover for their real purpose.
"I'll be there in thirty minutes."
Wilson called Emily. Told her about the body. She was already moving.
They met at the location forty minutes later. RCMP truck was parked outside a small log cabin. Generator lights illuminated the scene. Constable Mercier waited outside, breath streaming in thick clouds, hands jammed deep in parka pockets. He stamped his feet. Not from cold. From nerves.
The generator chugged and stuttered. Old diesel model, probably from the seventies. Five kilowatt output when it was new. Maybe three kilowatts now with a worn piston ring and carbon buildup. The lights it powered flickered every few seconds. Cast shadows that lurched and jumped. Wilson recognized the sound—fuel injector misfiring. Probably gummed up with paraffin wax. Diesel gelled below minus fifteen. It was minus nineteen that night. The fuel filter was clogging as they stood there. Give it another hour and the generator would stall completely. The whole setup was fragile. Temporary. One fuel line failure away from total darkness.
Wilson scanned the area. No other lights for kilometers. The cabin sat isolated, surrounded by boreal forest and frozen earth. Spruce trees crowded close, their branches weighted with ice. They creaked in the wind like old doors. The nearest neighbor was three kilometers south. No one would hear screaming out there.
"Appreciate you coming," Mercier said. He was young. Maybe twenty-five. Looked older that night. "Fair warning. It's bad."
"We can handle it," Emily said.
The generator hiccupped. Lights dimmed for two seconds. Shadows deepened. Then power returned. Mercier pretended not to notice. Led them inside.
The cabin was one room. Basic furniture. Wood stove cold and dead. Sleeping area. Trapping gear hung on wall pegs—snares, wire cutters, a skinning knife with a bone handle worn smooth by decades of use. A half-finished caribou hide stretched on a frame. The work of a patient man.
And in a chair by the window, a body.
The interior temperature hovered maybe five degrees above freezing. Wilson's breath fogged immediately. The cabin had been losing heat since the victim died. Maybe six hours based on the temperature drop. The wood stove had ash but no coals. Dead longer than that.
Outside, the generator coughed. The single light bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered. Steadied.
Male. Fifties. Dressed in winter layers. Head tilted back. Eyes open. Mouth slack. His hands rested on the chair arms—not gripping, not clawed in pain. Just resting. Peaceful. As if he'd simply stopped living mid-thought.
Two puncture wounds on his neck. Precisely placed. Professionally done. The marks sat exactly over the external jugular—not too deep, not too shallow. Surgical precision born of centuries of practice.
No blood left in the body. The pallor said everything. The skin had collapsed against the skull. Drained completely.
No blood anywhere else either. Not on the floor. Not on the walls. Not on the chair. Not a single drop. James was too experienced, too refined, to spill a meal.
Vampire kill. Textbook.
Wilson knelt beside the body. Studied the victim's face. Weathered skin. Deep lines around the eyes. The face of a man who'd spent decades outdoors. Who'd known this land. Who'd understood its rhythms and dangers better than any researcher or tourist ever could.
Pierre Lavoie. Wilson read the name from a hydro bill on the counter. Sixty-three years old, probably. Had trapped beaver and marten for forty years. Had lived alone by choice. Had found something most people never found—a purpose, a place, a way to live that made sense.
And James had killed him like he was nothing. A meal. A body to drain. Pierre Lavoie's forty years of survival expertise had meant nothing against two hundred and eighty-two years of predatory evolution.
"Heart attack?" Mercier asked. "Medical event?"
Wilson examined the neck wounds. They were already healing closed. Vampire saliva had coagulation properties. Sped healing. Hid evidence. In another twelve hours, the punctures would be invisible.
But not fast enough.
"When was he found?" Wilson asked.
"Two hours ago. His neighbor expected him for cards. Found the door open."
"Cause of death?" Emily asked.
"Don't know yet. Waiting for medical examiner from Yellowknife." Mercier looked at the body. "But he looks... I don't know. Deflated? Is that a medical term?"
"Severe blood loss," Wilson said. "Massive hemorrhage. Internal bleeding, probably."
It was a lie. But it was a lie Mercier wanted to believe. Better than the truth.
They examined the scene for another twenty minutes. Took photos. Made notes. Played their roles as helpful researchers with medical backgrounds. Wilson cataloged every detail—the angle of the chair, the position of the body, the way the door had been left open. Not forced. Not damaged. James had walked in. Pierre probably never woke up. The puncture placement suggested James had fed while Pierre slept. Quick. Efficient. Merciful, if you could call anything James did mercy.
Then they left.
In the truck, Emily stared at Wilson. "That was—"
"I know."
"James?"
"Has to be. Signature matches. Location matches. Timing matches." Wilson started the engine. Diesel turned over twice before catching. The cold was winning. "He's been here the whole time. Hunting carefully. No pattern we could track."
"Until now."
"Until now."
Emily's hands curled into fists. "We wasted six months staked out at buildings while he killed people."
Wilson's jaw tightened. He kept his eyes on the road. The headlights cut through darkness so absolute the beams seemed to lose their way. Trees materialized from nothing—white spruce, balsam fir—then vanished behind them. The road was packed snow and ice. The truck's tires found purchase through memory and luck.
"We couldn't have known," he said.
"We should have known." Emily's voice cracked. "That trapper died because we were posted at the wrong places."
Wilson didn't argue. Because she was right.
They drove back to Fort Resolution in silence. The darkness pressed against the windows. Absolute. Consuming. Alive with possibility. Every shadow could be James. Every tree could hide a predator. The Arctic darkness wasn't passive—it was a medium. A substance. Something that could be weaponized by a creature that had spent centuries learning to use it.
James Wright was still here.
And he was hunting again.
The waiting was over.
Now the real hunt began.
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