by Fox, Logan
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up!
I spin again, and this time I topple to the earth. Sticks bite into my flesh, and I shoot up again, swiping damp hands over my ass.
I’m wearing a pair of boxers.
Silk.
There’s something overwhelmingly familiar about them.
“Wake up!” I yell.
But there’s no waking from this nightmare.
Something is trying to get my attention, and as I haul in a breath for another frustrated scream, it finally flags my brain.
I look down.
A piece of string dangled from my neck. It’s threaded through the corner of an envelope.
I recognize that Celtic seal. My finger is halfway through tearing open the envelope when I feel something moving in my hair.
I stick both hands in there, letting out a hoarse scream as I try to find whatever the fuck’s burrowing it’s way toward my brain.
A millipede.
Its legs tangle in my hair. I grab it in a fist and yank it out, taking out some of my hair in the process.
I stumble forward, a new yell in my throat.
Calm the fuck down!
But this nightmare isn’t ending.
And the pain is too fucking real.
“Help!” There’s a raw note to my desperate plea.
The note.
My hands shake as I tear open the envelope. I rip the string from around my neck, not wanting to confuse it for all the other creepy crawlies that are surely biding their sweet time in my mess of hair.
A piece of paper, folded once.
Hunter’s handwriting, and a perfect geometric shape.
Follow me
>
My gaze flashes up and fixes on that neon-yellow arrow.
I spin around, trying to pierce the dark shadows between the close-knit trunks of this gnarly forest.
Run!
The command comes from somewhere deep inside me. Neanderthal me is freaking the fuck out, and it’s choosing flight.
But why? What am I not seeing?
Creepy over grown forest—check.
Bugs in hair—fucking check.
A message from Hunter.
The man who dumped me here.
And then I feel eyes on me. I’ve been feeling them for a while, actually, but I distracted myself by flipping out about the bugs in my hair.
I spin around again, trying to find the owner of those eyes.
I expected to find Hunter.
Fucking hippy prankster.
Instead…
The hair on the back of my arms, neck and fuck it my entire body stand up at once as I see something moving there in the dark. Something big. Hunched. Monstrous.
I whirl around, facing away from the creature skulking in the dark.
The yellow arrow blurs as I lunge into a run.
I crash through moss and leaves, biting my lip so I don’t scream when I stub my toe on a rock buried under a drift of leaves.
I must be quiet.
Then the dark can’t chase me.
A nonsense thought of course, for someone hurtling through a forest without a care for the noise they make. Even my breath sounds like a steam engine. My heart a thundering army all dressed in armor.
A root trips me. I fall hard enough that stars sparkle behind my eyelids.
And just like that, what little fight I have dissolves.
I rock back on my heels, gulping for air through a lip that tastes of copper.
Get a grip!
I’m holding onto myself a second later, but it doesn’t help. I squeeze my eyes shut, but when I open them again, I’m still here. Still stuck in this nightmare.
I hear a whisper of a noise behind me.
The dark.
It’s found me.
I’m up a second later, throat too constricted for a scream as I plow through snaggle-clawed foliage desperate to trap me.
A beacon. Yellow, bright, precise.
Another arrow.
I don’t know which part of me decided it would be a good idea to turn in the direction it was pointing, my brain, my body, my soul.
But turn I did.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Hunter
It’s humid out, and no surprise—this forest has more than its fair share of bogs and streams. Despite the vegetation growing here, this place reminds me more of a jungle than a forest—the lianas strung from pine to pine like Samhain decorations, the mossy trunks, the liberal heaps of decomposing plant matter that make up the forest floor.
It’s any botanists wet dream.
A city slicker’s worst nightmare.
My nightmare. I was twenty when I got lost in this mesh of green and brown and black. Still had no idea what direction my life would take, or even that it needed one.
My family had enough money and too much power.
My father’s tyrannical rule was the thing of legends.
There’s a saying in Mallhaven that dates back three generations:
The Hills don’t make friends. They acquire people.
A warbler trills nearby, and I try to spot it through the trees. Shadow Fox is deceptive at best—sounds echo in strange ways through its living, beating heart of green. It distorts space and time like a black hole…and it’s just as thirsty.
But it welcomes me as I step into it, and for the first time in close to a week, I feel complete again.
* * *
I pause for a sip of water, closing my eyes and letting the forest in. The sounds, the smells—even the feel of the air against my skin—feels like homecoming.
A flying beetle lands on my arm, and I urge it off onto a nearby leaf.
Unfortunately, there’s precious little time for me to drink in the scenery.
I have to remain focused—something I would never have found difficult to do if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’m surrounded by such a vast ecosystem. I’ve spent years cataloging the botanical species in this forest, and I always find more on each trip.
But this isn’t one of those excursions.
I cap my water bottle, slide it into my backpack, and hoist the straps over my shoulders.
I’ve hunted in these woods before. Mammals are just as intricate a part of this unique ecosystem—the elk, the squirrels, the foxes.
And the wolves that pass through here.
No—this forest belongs to its namesake—the fox.
Highly intelligent. Superbly evolved. And this place is their home. Their playground.
Their feeding ground.
This time of year, they should be well fed. Song birds are working on their clutches, and foxes can loot their nests once a day for eggs.
They don’t feed if they’re not hungry. They’re not greedy.
But they do like their little games, don’t they?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Clover
Another arrow. Then another. Soon my eyes are already hunting for the next as soon as I’ve raced past the last. My way through the forest becomes clear—a rough path with less overhanging branches and things to scrape and scratch.
My lungs ache for release, my legs are rubbery, my hips feel too loose.
I take stock of myself as much as I can while I sprint through the woods toward some indefinable destination.
That red hoody I saw on Hunter’s dresser? Turns out I’m wearing it. That, and his silk boxers.
Nothing else. Granted, I wasn’t wearing underwear when I arrived at his house, but it still means he dressed me. I don’t know how I feel about that. Violated? Not quite. But definitely pissed off.
Right, so what happened last night? What can I remember?
His cabin. The joint. The heroin in the joint. The sex.
Nothing unusual for Clover Vos, I’m afraid to say.
Leaves slap into my face because I’m looking back like a right fucking idiot instead of looking ahead.
It’s still chasing me.
Can I really outrun the dark? It’s the middle of the day—i
t should have been a fucking piece of cake—but in this forest, day just makes the shadows seem darker.
After the sex, Clover? What then?
Sugar water.
Aspirin.
I stop running, the last two lunging steps clicking my teeth together. My entire body feels wrung out like a dish rag.
Sweet forest air churns like fire in my lungs. My throat is dry, my lips feel cracked.
At least they stopped bleeding. I look up. There’s another arrow nearby.
Follow me.
I’m fucking done. Either I break my neck or I have a heart attack—fifty fifty.
I swing around. My gaze darts to every shadow clinging between the trees.
It’s gone.
I sink to my knees in relief, desperately hauling air into my lungs.
Follow me.
“Shut up,” I wheeze to myself.
A tiny sound—a twig cracking, maybe a crunch of leaves, who the fuck knows?—and my head snaps up. My eyes narrow as I scan the dark pools around me.
I find it seconds later. An indefinable, sentient shape lurking in the darkness beneath an overgrown bough.
My skin tries to crawl off my body, and I wish I could let it. I wish I could crawl away—but my body’s gone into shock.
Heroin and gym don’t mix well; the most exercise I think I’ve ever gotten was when I ran from the cops a few years ago.
Funny story—they weren’t even after me. They just happened to put their siren on a few seconds after I’d bought and my paranoia did the rest.
My gaze drops to the forest floor, and I see a mossy stone nudged up against an exposed root. I grab it, hoist it, hurl it.
Pretty fucking accurate shot if you ask me—but the darkness doesn’t budge. Either my eyes are fucking with me, or the darkness can’t be hurt by throwing stones.
Women hunted by darkness shouldn’t—
“Burn in hell, you motherfucking cocksucker!” I scream. My voice is hoarse, and the yell burns like acid in my throat.
The darkness watches, impassive as all shit.
“You hear me? Do you fucking hear me?” I hunt for another stone, find one, throw it.
It misses the darkness by a mile. I’m too wiped out by my sprint, so angry I’m shaking. I couldn’t hit the wide side of a barn with a tank right now.
I want to keep fighting—I burn to keep up this charade—but my spine collapses. I thump onto the floor, and for a second I want to start bawling like a baby who’s just filled up their diaper.
The squishy leaves under me feel just like shit. I run my hands down my face, laugh bitterly, and let my arms fall into the mulch underneath me.
Bugs. Beetles. Worms.
I don’t give a shit.
Above, the sun peeks through the leaves. It’s pretty. This forest is so fucking pretty.
But not the damp, rotting leaves under my ass. Not my stinging, aching soles. Not the crawling sensation I still have in my hair from those fucking horrible creatures who’d decided to build a nest in it.
Not the darkness.
It waits.
Silent.
Patient.
I manage to push myself into a sit.
“What do you want?” I put a hand on my throat, squeezing eyes shut as tears prick against my lid. I can’t keep yelling. Can’t keep running. I’m thirsty as fuck, exhausted, scared out of my mind.
I draw my legs up, put my head on my knees, and try to cry.
It doesn’t work.
I’m too fucking pissed off to feel sorry for myself.
For now, the darkness can’t touch me—there are too many gaps in the canopy above me.
But what if I don’t get out of here before night?
Chapter Thirty
Hunter
When I find her, it takes everything I have to control the burst of anger that floods me.
Clover may have followed the arrows, but she’s at least an hour behind schedule. I’d placed her IQ at around 115, which is on the high end of average. Her adjustment period is taking longer than I’d anticipated.
Or perhaps she’s just not the test subject I expected her to be.
I was only expecting to catch up to her in another two or three hours, yet here she is, stumbling through the forest like a drunkard. I pause in the shadows, willing myself to calm down as I watch her pick her way through the undergrowth.
Clover spins around as if she’s looking for something. Seconds later, she stares straight at me. I know she can’t see me. The woods only get darker the deeper in we go, and my clothing was precisely chosen for its camouflage properties.
Regardless, her gaze locks onto me.
She freezes, eyes widening, and then she starts looking at the ground.
A stone comes hurtling in my direction, and it’s all I can do not to move or make a sound when it strikes my cheekbone.
“Burn in hell, you motherfucking cocksucker!” she yells in a broken voice. “You hear me? Do you fucking hear me?”
She throws another stone, but this one misses.
Clover collapses to the ground, washing her hands over her face and muttering to herself.
Is she delusional, or just infuriated with her position? She huddles into herself as if she’s crying, but I don’t hear any sobs.
I take a moment to bring a finger to the tickle on my cheek.
She drew blood with that stone. I rub the liquid between my fingertips and then smear it off on my pants. Retaliation is to be expected. Fatigue, resignation. I had this all planned out but only in a few hours.
No…this is too soon. She has such a far path still to travel. My trial will be ruined if she gives up this soon.
Minutes later, Clover slowly falls to the forest floor. It’s more of a gradual unfolding than a faint, but it’s clear she’s fast asleep before that red head touches the floor.
It’s a trap. It must be. She saw me, and now she’s trying to lure me from the shadows.
Silently, I crouch.
And wait.
* * *
My patience is spread too thin for me to endure this anymore. I consult my watch and twitch my wrist in irritation.
Forty minutes have passed, and she sleeps like the dead. Her back is to me—I can see her shoulders rising and falling in that unmistakable rhythm.
Perhaps the dose of heroin she imbibed last night took a toll on her nervous system. After being clean for six months, it may have come as a greater shock to her body than I’d anticipated.
So many variables—and here I thought I’d calculated them all.
She has to get moving. She must understand how important this is.
But I refuse to show myself. I refuse to veer from my plan more than she’s already forced me to.
I grit my teeth, glancing around the forest as if in search of an answer.
And, as always, the forest provides.
Lured by the quiet, a cottontail rabbit jumps gingerly into a pool of light. It studies the girl, grabs a small clump of clovers, and chews it almost thoughtfully as it watches her unmoving body.
My hunting knife is in my hand. A second later, it’s between the rabbit’s ribs. There’s a wet, renting sound and a dull thump as it strikes the tree trunk where it was grazing. My gaze flickers to Clover, but the sound wasn’t enough to wake her.
I obviously haven’t impressed the importance of this journey onto her.
Was it because we fucked yesterday? Does she somehow think me softened because I was inside her?
It’s time to remind her just how little control she has, since she keeps forgetting who the fuck is in charge.
Chapter Thirty-One
Clover
I wake up, and the fact that I fell asleep scares me so much that I scramble up with a frantic yelp. I immediately check myself for bugs and don’t find any.
But then I see the blood.
I back up a few steps until the trunk of a nearby tree stops me. I feel behind me, clinging with desperate hands to the rou
gh bark.
It’s a bunny. Or a hare. I don’t even know the difference.
Correction: it was a bunny.
Now it’s a pile of fur and innards nearly black with flies.
And it fell from my lap as I shot to my feet.
I look down. Wished I hadn’t.
I spin around, puking into the leaves as I hold to the trunk for support.
Blood shines wetly on the bottom of my hoody and Hunter’s silk boxers. Blood runs down the inside of my thighs.
I puke some more, until there’s nothing left, and even then I can’t seem to stop.
Honestly, I want to rip my clothes off, but there’s nothing around here for me to clean myself with. I mean, the first plant I pick will probably be poison ivy.
News flash: Clover Vos can’t tell the difference between a rabbit and a hare and knows even less about plants.
Follow me.
Or what, you sick fuck?
I’ll end up looking like that rabb—animal? All inside out and shit?
My head reels as I stand, and I hold on to the tree for a bit.
Tree hugger. If Gail could see me now.
I want to laugh, but I can barely summon a smile.
Follow me.
“Fuck you.”
I push away from the tree, sway a little, and force myself to ignore everything—the blood, the trickles down my legs, the darkness—everything except the arrow.
I stare at it for the longest time. I want to stop, but I can’t.
That wasn’t there earlier. I would know because all the arrows up till this point have been immaculate, stenciled designs.
This one is angry. Rushed.
And red.
I stumble closer like a drunk on legs that curse me for ever taking that first wobbly step at age two.
When I touch the paint, I already know what I’m going to see when I turn my hand around.
It’s still wet.
And it’s not paint. It’s blood.
* * *
I’m supposed to run, but instead I walk. It’s all I’m capable of, right now.
