Chapter 32: THE MISSING NIGHTS

Georgia

I started keeping a calendar of the nights everyone disappeared.

The idea forms slowly, over a quiet Sunday afternoon, while I sit cross-legged on my bed with my notebook open in my lap. The tuft of fur is still tucked away in my desk drawer, where I shoved it three nights ago, unable to look at it directly for longer than a few seconds at a time. I’ve been staring at the same pages for a while now, flipping back and forth between entries, and something about the rhythm of it starts nagging at me in a way I can’t quite name. It’s the kind of feeling that sits at the base of my skull, refusing to be ignored no matter how many times I try to shake it off.

Something’s here. Something I’ve been refusing to see.

I start working backward through my notebook entry by entry, pulling out every date I actually bothered to record and listing them on a fresh page. My handwriting grows messier the further back I go, evidence of how distracted I must have been in the moment, how little I understood then about what I was actually documenting. The full moon night, when the whole campus went eerily quiet and I saw that massive shadow at the tree line. The night Alexa froze mid-sentence over a howl that was supposedly just coyotes, her face going pale in a way that still bothers me when I think about it. The gathering I watched from my window, dozens of figures assembled in that clearing with Puck standing near an older man I didn’t recognize, his posture different somehow, more rigid, more deferential than I’d ever seen him.

I list them out, one after another, and somewhere in the middle of it I realize I’m not just recording dates anymore. I’m hunting for a pattern, and some small, frightened part of me wishes I could stop before I find one.

I pull up a lunar calendar, my thumb moving before I’ve fully decided why, some instinct guiding my hands faster than thought. I search the date of the full moon night first, and there it is, confirmed, exactly as I already suspected.

Full moon.

My stomach tightens, but I keep going, cross-referencing every other date against the same calendar, my breath coming a little shallower with each match I find.

The night of the gathering in the clearing sits three days before a full moon. "Stay out of the woods after sundown," Mandi had told me that first week, her tone clipped and strangely final. "Trust me on this one, Georgia."

I remember thinking she sounded almost frightened, though I hadn’t let myself dwell on it. Now the memory feels heavier, weighted with everything I didn’t know to ask. That warning fell a few days out from a full moon too.

I go back further, digging through every strange, unexplained absence I’ve noticed since I got here. Every time Puck vanished from a class without explanation. Every time the campus went quieter than usual for no discernible reason, as though everyone else had been let in on some rule I’d never been given.

I map it all against the lunar calendar, one entry at a time, my hands moving faster now, a low, steady hum of adrenaline building in my chest as the pattern takes shape.

It isn’t random. Every single date clusters tightly around the full moon, some falling exactly on it, others sitting close enough before or after that the connection is impossible to write off. I sit back against my headboard, staring at the growing list, my pulse hammering in my throat, my mouth suddenly dry.

I think about Puck specifically, cross-referencing every unexplained absence of his against the dates. Every single one lines up. Every hockey practice he mysteriously missed. Every time Liam covered for him with some flimsy excuse, "He’s got a family thing," eyes sliding away from mine in a way that hadn’t registered as strange until right now. Every stretch of days where Puck simply vanished from campus, no explanation offered and none expected by anyone else. All of it clusters around the same lunar rhythm, tight and consistent, too consistent to be anything but deliberate. My chest aches a little, thinking of him, of the distance he’s put between us since that night in the woods.

The twins fit the pattern too. I think of Bianca’s voice at registration, pitched too low to be meant for human ears, she doesn’t smell like a skater, and of the comment I overheard after the hockey game, he’s showing off for her again, and I cross-reference the handful of times I’ve noticed the twins absent from classes together, always both of them, never just one. Those dates line up as well, falling into the same tight cluster around the full moon.

I sit there for a long time, notebook open in my lap, phone glowing beside it, staring at the pattern built out of months of scattered, half-understood observations. It’s not a coincidence. The math is too precise, too consistent across too many people.

I think about the massive paw prints in the forest. The warm fur still sitting in my desk drawer. The golden eyes at the tree line, watching me without attacking. The howling, always dismissed as coyotes by people who have known better the entire time I’ve been here.

My hands start to shake as I write it all down properly, organizing the scattered notes into one clean, undeniable list, dates lined up against moon phases in careful columns down the page.

I don’t want to write down what it actually means. Some part of me has known for weeks now, circling the edges without ever landing directly on the thought. Connecting the dots means accepting something I have no framework for, something that would have sounded insane to me just months ago.

But the pattern sits right there in front of me now, undeniable, laid out in my own careful handwriting, refusing to let me look away any longer.

At the bottom of the page, my pen moving slower than the rest of my writing, pressed just a little harder into the paper, I finally write it down.

That can’t mean what I think it means.