The first sound I really heard in Black Hollow wasn’t the wind through the pines or the creak of my new front porch.
It was a howl.
Thin and distant, it slipped through my cracked car window as I sat in the gravel driveway with both hands locked on the steering wheel, knuckles pale in the late afternoon light. The sound rose, wavered, and bled away into the trees that circled the town like dark, waiting hands.
“Dog,” I told myself. “Coyotes. Whatever. Small-town nature soundtrack.”
My voice sounded too loud in the cramped car, too brittle. I let go of the wheel, flexing my fingers. I’d driven four hours from the city with the radio off, just me and the endless two-lane road and the low, constant hum of my own anxiety. Now that I’d arrived, my body hadn’t caught up to the idea of stopping.
The house in front of me was smaller than in the listing photos, the paint more peeled, the steps more slanted. But there were flower boxes under the front windows with last year’s dead stems still poking up like bones, and someone had swept the porch recently. The gravel was neatly raked. It felt…seen.
I did not want to think too hard about that.
I popped the trunk. Autumn air bit at my cheeks as I stepped out, cooler than it had any right to be in early September. The town lay quiet beyond my little rental—narrow street, leaning telephone poles, the faint smell of woodsmoke. No honking, no sirens. No one watching from a car parked too long outside my building.
That alone should have made my shoulders drop. Instead they stayed hitched around my ears like they’d been sewn there.
“New start,” I muttered. “You wanted quiet. This is quiet.”
The second howl came closer. Lower. It shivered across my skin like something with teeth.
“Or not,” I said under my breath.
“Wolves,” a voice answered.
I jerked so hard I almost dropped the box I’d just lifted. A man stood at the edge of the front walk, half-shaded by the wild lilac bush that had claimed one corner of the yard. Tall, broad-shouldered, black coat despite the mild weather. His hair was dark, his jaw was hard, and his eyes—
His eyes were a color I didn’t have a ready word for. Not quite gray, not quite green. Sharp as cut glass, locked on me with an intensity that did not feel neighborly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice thin. “What?”
“Wolves.” He nodded toward the tree line beyond the neighboring houses, the forest a wall of shadow and pine. “You hear them this time of year. They come down closer when the nights cool.”
I swallowed. “That’s…comforting.”
The man didn’t smile. He didn’t move closer, either, which somehow made him more imposing. He had the stillness of someone who knew exactly what he was capable of and saw no reason to advertise.
He lifted something I hadn’t noticed he was holding—a set of keys on a plastic tag. “You’re Avery Clarke.”
My heartbeat snagged. Instinct screamed stranger; old lessons whispered don’t confirm, don’t engage. But I’d been emailing with the rental agency for weeks. Someone had to bring the keys.
“And you are?” I kept the box between us like that would do anything.
