Chapter Four – Ash and Footprints

  Adam stumbled out of the tree line and almost missed it at first.

  Smoke.

  Thin at the base, thickening as it rose, smeared gray against the low clouds. It wasn’t the quick curl of a cookfire or the lazy drift of a hunter’s signal. This was heavy smoke—work smoke. The kind that came from something burning long and hot.

  Adam stopped dead.

  His gut tightened.

  “No,” he whispered.

  Rain still fell, steady and cold, soaking his makeshift armor and plastering his hair to his face. For smoke like that to still be rising in this weather, the fire would have had to be massive. Unchecked. Fed.

  Village-sized.

  The thought hit him like a punch.

  Adam started running.

  His boots tore at the mud as he pushed himself harder than he had all day, lungs burning, legs screaming in protest. Branches whipped at his face and arms, tearing at already-frayed cloth. He barely noticed.

  All he could see was the smoke.

  Too much, his mind kept repeating. Too much for a camp. Too much for an accident.

  The forest thinned abruptly, trees giving way to churned earth and trampled grass. Adam burst out of the undergrowth—and slipped.

  Mud took his feet out from under him. He went down hard, sliding several feet before he caught himself on one hand. He skidded to a stop and looked up.

  And his body forgot how to move.

  The village was still smoldering.

  Charred wooden frames jutted up from the ground like broken ribs from a corpse. Roofs had collapsed inward, beams blackened and cracked, embers glowing faintly beneath the rain like failed torches in the dark. Smoke drifted low, clinging to the ruins, carrying the thick, choking smell of burned wood… and flesh.

  Corpses were everywhere.

  Adam staggered to his feet, his breath coming shallow and fast.

  Bodies lay where they’d fallen—some sprawled in the open, others half-buried beneath debris. A man slumped against a burned-out doorframe, his chest caved in. An elderly woman lay facedown in the mud, her hand outstretched as if she’d been reaching for someone who never came back.

  Blood mixed with rainwater, turning the ground slick and dark.

  Adam’s vision tunneled.

  The sounds of the forest faded, replaced by echoes that didn’t belong here—shouts, gunfire, the hollow thump of explosions. The smell shifted in his mind, layered with cordite and dust.

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  Not again, god please not again.

  His hands began to tremble rapidly as the memories continued to surface.

  “No, no, no…” he murmured, forcing himself to breathe, to stay here. “You’re not there. You’re not there.”

  Adam didn’t move right away.

  He stood there in the rain, ash sticking to his boots and the hem of his ruined clothes, eyes fixed on the tracks disappearing into the forest. The village crackled softly around him—embers shifting, a beam collapsing somewhere with a tired groan.

  It sounded too much like the aftermath of shelling.

  Adam swallowed hard and forced himself to turn back toward the bodies.

  He moved slowly now, methodical, the way he’d learned to move through places like this. Not rushing. Not looking away. Respecting the dead by acknowledging them.

  A man lay near the center of what had once been a communal square, his torso twisted unnaturally, eyes open and glassy. Adam knelt beside him, fingers brushing the man’s wrist out of habit before he caught himself.

  Pointless.

  He closed the man’s eyes gently anyway.

  Nearby, two women lay side by side, hands clasped together even in death. One had taken a blade to the chest. The other bore the unmistakable marks of blunt force trauma—crushed ribs, collapsed sternum.

  Adam’s jaw tightened.

  “Execution,” he murmured. “Not a fight.”

  He moved on.

  The rain revealed details fire had tried to erase—drag marks where bodies had been pulled aside, boot prints layered over one another, the chaotic scarring of a raid rather than a battle. There were no defensive wounds on many of them. No signs of weapons being raised.

  These people hadn’t stood a chance.

  Adam’s breath hitched as another wave of memory surged up—faces under red light, cries cut short, the weight of bodies carried out under rain that smelled just like this.

  He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, grounding himself.

  You’re here. You’re now. You’re not helpless.

  He opened his eyes again.

  Adam stared at them for a long moment, rain streaking down his face as something heavy and cold settled into his chest.

  He straightened and took a slow breath, then another. The forest seemed to watch him, silent and patient, as if waiting to see what kind of man he would be when it mattered.

  Adam rolled his shoulders and flexed his hands.

  The pain was still there—bruises, cuts, exhaustion pulling at his muscles—but it sat far beneath his resolve. Compared to what he’d lived through, this was background noise.

  “I’ve chased worse monsters than you,” he said to the empty air.

  He moved deeper into the village, boots crunching softly on ash and broken pottery. He forced himself to look—to really look—at the bodies.

  And that’s when the pattern hit him.

  They were all adults.

  Youngest maybe twenty. Oldest easily eighty. Weathered faces. Calloused hands. Lines of hard work etched deep.

  No children.

  No small bodies. No tiny hands.

  Adam stopped cold.

  His jaw clenched so hard it hurt.

  He scanned the edges of the village, the paths leading out.

  At the far edge of the village, he found what he’d been dreading and expecting in equal measure.

  Tracks—small ones.

  “Children,” he said softly.

  Something inside him went very still

  Adam crouched, pressing his fingers into one of the impressions.

  Bare feet. Soft shoes. Some uneven, as if their owners had been dragged or stumbled. They overlapped the deeper boot prints, tangled together in a messy line that told its own story.

  Children herded.

  Taken.

  The mud was torn up there—deep impressions pressed into the wet earth. Boot prints. Heavy ones. Too deep for men walking unburdened.

  He followed them with his eyes.

  They ran in a wide track, churned and uneven, as if something heavy had been dragged between them. A cart. Overloaded. The ruts were deep, the sides smeared where weight had shifted and scraped.

  In all his years of service—through blood, chaos, and loss—there had been one line he never crossed.

  Never.

  Adam stood slowly, rain running down his face, ash clinging to his boots. The trembling in his hands faded, replaced by something colder. Sharper.

  He turned toward the trail of footprints leading away from the ruined village.

  A look of absolute determination settled over his features.

  “Alright,” he said quietly, voice steady as stone. “Now its time to hunt.”

  And Adam Commeree stepped onto the trail.