The first rule of Blackwood is don’t cut through the woods after dark.
My mother’s voice repeats it like a prayer in my head as I turn off the main road anyway, tires crunching over gravel, headlights spearing into the trees. The forest swallows the sound of town behind me; the last porch light disappears in the rearview mirror like a dying star.
“This is stupid,” I mutter, fingers tightening around the steering wheel. “It’s twenty minutes faster, not worth dying for.”
But the hospital is in the next town over, and I’m already late. Claire had one of her spells while I was at the diner, the call from Mrs. Dalton shaky and apologetic: “She’s on the bathroom floor, honey, I think it’s her heart again.” The ambulance took her, and I’m stuck with a car that sounds like it’s one pothole away from just giving up on life, and a town whose roads are currently blocked by a flipped logging truck.
So: the forest. Wolf territory. The part of the map that every kid in Blackwood grows up knowing is labeled with invisible skull-and-crossbones.
The trees crowd closer as my little Honda climbs the narrow service road. The air changes—cooler, denser, a tang of damp earth and pine sap pushing past the stale coffee smell in the car. My high beams catch the reflective gleam of a hand-painted sign nailed to a trunk.
PACK LINE – NO VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT.
I slow, engine grumbling. At my left, the dark drops away into ravine; at my right, a wall of black trunks. My phone lies dead in the cupholder, battery long gone. Of course. My life in three objects: an overstuffed tote bag, a nearly empty gas tank, and a useless phone.
I could turn around. Go back, wait for the wreck to clear. Hope the hospital calls.
My chest tightens. I picture my mother on a stretcher, grey and small under fluorescent lights, waiting for a daughter who never shows.
I press the gas.
The engine lurches in protest—and dies.
“Seriously?” The word tears out of me as the car shudders to a stop. The dashboard goes dark. For a second there’s a hollow silence, the kind that makes your ears ring. Then the forest presses in, alive with small sounds: insects ticking in the bark, something rustling in the underbrush, an owl’s low questioning hoot.
I turn the key. It whines, coughs, then gives up.
“Come on, come on.” I try again. Nothing.
Panic scrapes a nail down my spine. I slam my palm against the steering wheel, then instantly regret the noise.
The woods listen.
Fine. I just need to get back to the main road and hitch a ride or… something. It’s not that far. I’ll stay on the gravel. I’ll be fast. I’ll be careful.
I grab my tote, shove the door open, and step into the night.
Cold air knifes under my thin sweater. The moon hangs low between the branches, a swollen, yellow-white disk, not full but close enough that the stories itch at the edges of my thoughts. Wolves run stronger near the full moon. Their alpha is meaner. Their territory stretches wider.
“Stop it,” I whisper to myself. “They don’t bother humans who stay out of the woods.”
I close the car door gently, like that will help, and start walking.
