Chapter 31: THE FOREST, DEEPER

Georgia

I end up at the tree line at dusk, the same spot I’ve stood at more than once since I got here, and this time I don’t stop. I keep walking.

Three days since Puck left me standing in that classroom with a sentence that explained nothing. Three days of him avoiding every hallway I might be in. Skating didn’t burn it off tonight, so I’m here instead, doing the one thing everyone at Rosethorne has warned me not to do.

*Come find out, then,* I think, daring the trees, the dark, whatever’s been circling the edges of my life since the night I got here. *I’m done waiting for someone to tell me the truth.*

The forest swallows the last of the light fast once I’m actually inside it, the canopy thick enough overhead that dusk turns to something closer to full dark within a few dozen steps. I should turn back. I know that, some small, sensible voice in the back of my head insisting on it with every step I take deeper in. I don’t listen. Whatever’s been pulling at me toward this place since that very first howl finally has enough of me to work with, and I let it.

The ground grows softer the further in I go, damp and uneven beneath my boots, and that’s when I see them.

Paw prints. Pressed deep into the mud, several of them in a loose trail leading off between the trees.

I crouch down without thinking, and my breath stops.

They’re massive. Far larger than anything I’ve ever seen from any dog or wolf, each print easily the size of my own spread hand, the claw marks at the tip of each toe cut deep and sharp into the mud like whatever made them was carrying real weight behind every step.

I reach out before I can stop myself, some instinct making me need to touch it, to confirm it’s real and not some trick of the fading light. The edge of the print is solid, defined, undeniable.

That’s when I hear it.

Breathing. Slow, deliberate, deep enough that I feel it more than actually hear it, some low, rhythmic sound coming from somewhere close in the dark, close enough that the small hairs on my arms lift instantly beneath my sleeves.

My fingers dig into the mud. *Move,* I tell myself. *Move now.*

I go completely still instead, my heart hammering, straining to place the direction it’s coming from. It doesn’t sound frantic or threatening. If anything it sounds controlled, patient, like whatever’s breathing out there in the dark has all the time in the world and isn’t in any particular hurry to reveal itself.

I turn, slow and careful, scanning the shadows between the trunks.

Nothing.

No shape, no eyes, nothing at all visible in any direction, and yet the breathing doesn’t stop, still there, still close, impossibly close for something I can’t see anywhere around me. My pulse pounds hard enough that I can feel it in my throat, some old animal instinct screaming at me that I’m not actually alone out here no matter how empty the forest looks in every direction I check.

I don’t wait to find out what it is. I start walking back the way I came, faster now, my earlier boldness draining out of me fast, replaced by a cold, crawling unease that makes every shadow between the trees look like it might be hiding something.

Puck

I stay a good thirty yards back the entire time, close enough to track her but far enough that she won’t catch a glimpse of me through the trees if she turns at the wrong moment.

*Stupid girl,* I think, and there’s no heat in it, only fear dressed up as irritation because it’s easier to carry that way. *Stupid, brave, reckless girl.*

She shouldn’t be out here. Not tonight, not any night, not this deep.

Every instinct in me is screaming to close the distance, to put myself between her and the dark she has no business walking through alone. I don’t. I can’t, not without giving away exactly what I am.

So I herd her instead. Gently, careful never to let her actually see me, angling my path just enough each time she drifts the wrong direction to nudge her back toward campus without her realizing I’m doing it at all.

When she stops to look at the prints I left without meaning to, I hold my breath. Thirty feet. She’s thirty feet from me in the dark, crouched in the mud, and if she looks up now.

*Don’t look up,* I plead silently, every muscle locked. *Please, Georgia, don’t look up.*

She turns eventually, spooked by something, my own breathing probably, and starts walking back the way she came. I stay with her the whole way, matching her pace exactly, until the tree line finally breaks ahead of her and the lights of the dorms come into view.

Only then do I let myself fall back, watching until she’s safely inside.

*Not tonight,* I think, jaw tight, eyes burning at the edges with something that isn’t quite human anymore. *Whatever’s coming, it doesn’t get her tonight.*

Georgia

By the time I make it back to my room, my heart’s finally slowing, the panic of the forest fading into something more manageable now that I’m surrounded by ordinary walls and ordinary light again. I shrug off my jacket, ready to collapse onto my bed and pretend the last hour didn’t happen.

That’s when I see it.

Caught in the fabric of my sleeve, snagged on a loose thread near the cuff, is a small tuft of fur. Dark, coarse, thick enough that it couldn’t have come from anything small. I pluck it free carefully and hold it up to my desk lamp, turning it between my fingers.

It’s warm. Still warm, radiating a faint, steady heat against my skin that has no explanation at all, not from anything I’ve been near, not from any source I can point to and account for.

"What are you," I whisper, voice low and unsteady, "and why do you keep following me?"

The fur doesn’t answer, obviously, but the warmth against my palm feels almost like a response anyway, patient and certain, the way the breathing in the forest had been.

I stand there holding it for a long time, the warmth of it pressing into my fingertips.

Then I close my fist around it and shove it deep into my desk drawer, beneath the notebooks I haven’t opened since I got here.