“And did you find it?”
“Yeah,” she said, though she didn’t sound so sure. “See—I know you think I’m some city girl…but I actually grew up in Whiskey Trace, Arkansas, this tiny little town in the Ouachita Mountains.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Yeah, no one has,” she said with a bitter smile. “Anyway…we’re close enough to Appalachia that we get all kinds of folktales, right? Monsters and ghosts and demons and God knows what else. My grandmother loved telling scary stories, and the one that got me the most was the story of the Shadow Painter—this big cat, like a skeletal panther with wings and glowing eyes. If you saw it, they said it was an omen of death.”
I let her talk, listening as we went deeper into the woods. Maybe I was imagining it…but her story made me think I was seeing things—shadows in the trees, dark spots moving too fast in the underbrush.
“So I’m up late one night, looking out the window of our trailer—and I swear, I saw it,” she said. “Big lightning storm,thunder so loud it rattled the whole town…and there it was, in a tree.Watching me.”
“And was it an omen of death?” I asked—blurting out the question despite myself, not sure if I wanted to know the answer.
Noelle sighed.
“My brother died that night,” she said.
I looked over at her, but she didn’t meet my gaze. Her eyes were trained on the path, her mouth pulled tight.
“Overdose,” she said. “He was older—seventeen. I was twelve. He’d been clean for a while, or at least we thought he was. But that night…”
She trailed off, jaw clenched like she was trying not to spit out a taste that still turned her stomach.
“I didn’t even know what was happening at first. Just that he was locked in the bathroom and nobody could get in. We called 911, and when they came, he was already gone.”
She finally looked at me then—just a quick glance, like she needed to check I was still there.
“And I kept thinking about the Shadow Painter. About how I saw it the night before. About how the story says if you see it, someone dies.”
The air around us went still. Even the wind felt like it stopped listening, just for a second.
Noelle snorted softly and shook her head again. “It took me a while to find out that there was a mountain lion roaming through the area that same week. Somebody saw it in their chicken coop a few towns over, shot at it, but didn’t kill it. It was probably that. Just some half-starved cougar looking for food. But even when I knew that…”
She shrugged, and this time the smile she gave was brittle. “It felt like a joke. Like the universe thought it was funny to leave me scared of monsters while the real one was already inside our house.”
I had no fucking idea what to say to that—to this admission of something deep and painful from someone who’d put on a brave face since the moment I met her. She took another deep breath, then looked up at me.
“So,” she said. “I don’t think any of it’s real…and I disprove it so kids like me don’t have to be scared.”
“But the woods still freak you out,” I said.
She laughed a little. “I mean, you’re a true crime fan—don’t they freak you out?”
“Only when I forget my knife,” I said, half-joking, trying to offer a smile she could meet without feeling cornered.
She snorted, which I counted as a win, and kicked a pine cone down the trail ahead of us. Milo bounded after it. We both watched him pounce and skid, dirt flying under his paws, before she spoke again.
“I know it’s dumb,” she said. “But every time I’m in the woods, I still feel it. That thing. Like it’s behind me, waiting to catch up. I don’t actually think it’s real, not anymore…but I guess my body hasn’t gotten the memo.”
“It’s not dumb,” I said. “Fear’s a hell of a thing. Doesn’t always need permission.”
We walked in silence for a while, just the rhythm of boots on packed dirt and Milo’s panting keeping time. The trees stretched tall above us, dappling the path with filtered light, and even though I’d been out this way a hundred times, everything felt sharper.
Like I was paying attention to it through her eyes. Not just the forest…but the way she moved through it. Wary, alert, always tracking the exits.
“I have to admit,” I said. “I didn’t take you for someone up for sharing that kind of thing.”
She laughed. “I talk for a living,” she said. “I mean…it’s in my bio on the Whispers website, dead brother, broken family, all that shit. This is on you for not being terminally online.”
