The fog in Ross Hollow never used to feel like this.
It used to be soft, a curtain that turned the streetlights to halos and made Liam’s laugh sound closer than it was. Now it presses cold and wet against my skin, swallowing the sound of my boots on the cracked sidewalk as if the town itself is holding its breath.
I should have come back in daylight.
My duffel hangs heavy off my shoulder, biting into skin through my jacket. The houses are mostly dark, half-hidden behind bare-limbed trees and creeping ivy. The same peeling white fences. The same sagging porches. The same hollow in my chest that opens wider with each step toward the edge of town.
Home.
“Just a few weeks,” I mutter to myself as another curl of fog slides across the road like a living thing. “Long enough to make sure she’s okay. Then gone.”
The hospital’s voicemail had said "worsening" and "come if you can." My mother’s text had said nothing at all. That silence was louder than any diagnosis.
The turnoff to our lane appears out of the gray like a memory. I stop at the rusted signpost for half a heartbeat, knuckles whitening around the strap of my bag. Three years. I swore I would never walk down this road again.
My phone is dead, of course. No map, no distraction, nothing to look at except the familiar path into the trees and the shadows that never quite behaved like normal shadows here.
I draw in a lungful of damp air that tastes faintly of pine and iron and something older, then start down the lane.
The forest reaches in close almost immediately, branches knitting overhead, shutting out what little light leaks through the mist. The sound shifts—city noise replaced by the hiss of leaves, the distant murmur of water, the quiet thud of my heartbeat in my ears.
Don’t think about him.
A twig snaps somewhere to my left.
I stop. Every instinct I don’t want to claim goes wire-tight, all my attention funneling toward the sound. It comes again, heavier this time, like deliberate steps pacing just beyond the edge of the path.
“Probably a deer,” I whisper, but the words feel thin, foolish.
The smell changes. Not just wet earth now. Muskier. Wilder. A thread of copper rides the air, metallic and hot, and my skin crawls.
“Okay, Emma,” I tell myself, voice barely more than breath. “You’re not fifteen. There’s no such thing as—”
A low growl rolls out of the shadows.
It’s not loud. That almost makes it worse. A quiet, rumbling sound that vibrates through the soles of my boots and slides up my spine. My pulse kicks hard. Fight, flight, freeze—my body can’t decide.
Then it steps onto the path.
I’ve seen wolves before. Nature documentaries, late-night internet rabbit holes. They do not look like this.
This thing is massive, shoulders nearly level with my chest even at a crouch. Its fur is a mottled, dirty gray, patchy around the ribs as if it’s been in too many fights. Its eyes catch what little light there is and twist it into something red-gold and wrong. Its lips peel back slowly, deliberately, off teeth that are too long for its mouth.
I can’t move.
Breath saws in and out of my lungs with a faint wheeze. My fingers have gone numb on the strap of my bag. Somewhere beneath the frozen panic a smaller, colder voice catalogues all the ways this doesn’t match any normal predator. The way its gaze sticks to me, not my throat or my hands or my bag, but my face. The faint shimmer of…heat?…around its paws on the damp ground.
