The beam of her flashlight wavers, stops, then swings wildly to the left. She's heard something. Seen something. The predator smell grows stronger, closer, mixed now with the acrid scent of fear.
My wolf claws at my control, demanding I shift, demanding I claim what's mine and tear apart anything that threatens her. But shifting means questions I can't answer, secrets I can't reveal. Not yet.
The flashlight beam disappears entirely.
"Ellie." Her name tears from my throat, raw and desperate, as I crash through the final barrier of undergrowth between us.
13
ELLIE
The forest doesn't welcome me, but it doesn't chase me away either. It simply exists around me, dense and patient, like a library after closing time. I force my steps into an even rhythm, although my extra weight means I’m soon winded despite my easy pace.
"Just another assignment," I half-gasp, my voice barely above a whisper. The sound gets swallowed by the canopy overhead. "People disappear from hiking trails all the time. Document, analyze, move on."
Except people don't usually disappear from trails that lead nowhere.
I sweep my flashlight beam across the ground where a victim named Sarah Chen supposedly fell. According to the police report, she tumbled down a steep embankment after losing her footing on loose rocks. Simple. Clean. The kind of accident that happens when city people overestimate their outdoor skills.
But the terrain here slopes gently, almost apologetically. No dramatic drop-offs. No treacherous scree fields. Just soft earth carpeted with decades of fallen leaves that would cushion a tumble, not cause a fatal one.
I manage to bend down and brush away the top layer of debris. The soil underneath bears strange gouges—deep, parallel marks that don't match the pattern of a falling body. They look deliberate. Carved.
My pen scratching notes across the page.
"What the hell were you doing out here, Sarah?"
The question hangs in the air unanswered. I photograph the marks with my phone, the flash creating harsh shadows that make them look even more unnatural. The timestamp on the police report puts Sarah's disappearance at 3:47 PM on a Tuesday—broad daylight, perfect weather, visibility for miles.
Yet somehow, no one heard her scream even though she wasn’t that deep in the forest.
I stand and brush off my hands, scanning the area for anything else that doesn't fit. The official timeline has her entering the forest at 2:30 p.m. and being discovered missing when she failed to return by 6 p.m.
But there's a coffee shop receipt in her car dated 3:15 p.m.—thirty minutes after she allegedly entered these woods.
Unless Sarah Chen could teleport, someone got their facts wrong.
The forest noises stop all at once, like someone flipped a switch. I freeze, pen hovering over my notebook, suddenly aware of how loud my heavy breathing sounds in the unnatural quiet. Even the wind seems to have paused, leaving the forest suspended in a bubble of absolute stillness.
My footsteps crunch louder than they should as I move toward a cluster of pine trees where the police found Sarah's backpack. But when I glance down, the leaves beneath my feet barely rustle. It's as if the sound is being amplified and muffled simultaneously, fed through some cosmic audio mixer with a broken dial.
"Hello?" I call out, testing the acoustics.
The word dies three feet from my mouth, absorbed so completely it might never have existed. But somewhere behind me, a twig snaps with the clarity of a gunshot.
The flashlight beam cuts through darkness in erratic sweeps, and I force myself to breathe steadily despite the hammering in my chest.
Am I about to have a heart attack because of the size of my ass or the size of the axe murderer somewhere behind me?
Each step deeper into Ravenwood Hollow feels like walking into a trap, but the missing files won't explain themselves.
This time, a branch snaps behind me.
I freeze, listening. Wind through leaves. The distant call of an owl. Nothing else.
Except when I start walking again, there it is—the soft crush of footfall on dead leaves, perfectly timed to mask itself beneath my own movement.
You know if you have to run from anything, you’re big ass is screwed, right?