It was more than most girls in my place could hope for.
That night, exhaustion took me before the darkness had fully settled. I curled myself around the warmth of the coals, cloak tight, knife in my hand. It was a sleep full of snags and thorns, never deep enough to hide from the world. I drifted in and out, always alert to the snap of a branch or the mutter of wind against the boards.
At some point, the line between waking and dreaming vanished. I found myself once more at the ring of trees, the ground damp and yielding underfoot. This time, the moon wasbloodless, and the woods around were silent as the grave. I stood at the center, arms open, as if to receive a blessing or a blow.
He came from the shadows, the rider. Not astride the beast, but walking, boots silent on the wet grass. In the dream, his face was not so fearsome. The lines of it were strange, foreign, but his eyes held only a kind of mourning, as if he carried the sorrow of a thousand lost things. He stopped just outside the circle, as if barred by some invisible wall, and looked at me with a question I could not answer.
I stepped forward. He did, too. Our hands met at the edge of the stones, his skin shockingly hot, the lines on his arms flickering with blue-white light. When he touched me, the air filled with the scent of burning—sweet, unfamiliar, not wood or oil but something alive. I was afraid, but also not. I wanted to step closer, but the ground dissolved beneath my feet, pulling me down into a current of wind and flame and sound, the roar of his world drowning everything else.
I woke with a cry, heart punching my ribs, skin damp with sweat. The fire had gone out, but a thin seam of daylight spilled through the cracks in the wall. I sat up, fighting to breathe, knife clenched in my fist. The world came back in pieces, slowly, the lodge, then frost, the memory of a dream that was not just a dream.
I brushed the straw from my hair and stood, joints stiff from the cold and fear. I felt changed, somehow. Older, or else more real than I had been before. The hunger was still there, gnawing at my belly, but it was no longer the sharpest pain. Instead, it was the ache of wanting to know, to understand what lay beyond the trees, and who the man was that haunted both my nightmares and my waking mind. And then I did something thought to be an abomination. I sat again, close to the fire, and spread my legs, working my hem toward my waist. The flames flickered and cracked as I pushed my undergarments aside andleaned back against the cold wall. My fingers gingerly moved up my bare thighs, the dark bush between my legs moist and shimmering from firelight. I closed my eyes and saw the man once again, my fingers slipping between my cunt.
My touch was nearly nothing, at first, too gentle for more than a shudder, but I grew bolder with each slow stroke, pushing past the embarrassment that wanted me to stop. My scalp prickled, my throat tightening with every muffled sound that threatened to slip out unbidden. I let myself imagine his hands instead of mine, those broad, marked knuckles running over the soft skin high on my thighs, the press of his thumb where I needed it most. His eyes were there, in my mind's vision, sharp, knowing, awed, and predatory all at once. The more I pictured them, the more my hips rose from the straw, seeking more, until I almost moaned the sound of his name, a name I did not know, only the shape of it, jagged and unfamiliar as stone.
I bit down on the corner of my cloak, trying to keep quiet, even though it was just me and the mice and the ghosts of every dead animal that ever cowered in this ruined hut. The rhythm built, faster, tighter, the air inside my chest sharpening until there was no room for anything but the need to touch and be touched, to know the shape of what had nearly undone me in the woods—a danger that was more than danger, a promise of something as unknown as it was irresistible.
Heat flooded me, all the way from scalp to toes, and my hand jerked against myself, sharp and sudden. I choked a gasp into the wool, tasting old sweat and my own spit. The rough pad of my thumb found the small, trembling knot in the center of me, and the world shivered, vision gone soft and silver. The memory of his eyes, how they widened, how I’d seen my own fear and his own wonder reflected in them, pushed me past any shame. I circled my palm, steady and cruel, until the ache unraveled in athin, helpless noise. I let it come, slow and stuttering, a bloom of relief after so many days of nothing but fear and ice and hunger.
I lay slumped, limp as a discarded rag, chest fluttering with little aftershocks. The hush after was absolute, almost holy. For several minutes, I could think of nothing but the weight of my breath and the ember-glow behind my eyelids. My skin felt too loose for my bones, every muscle rung out like laundry on a line. I laughed a hoarse and animal sound, and pressed my own palm hard against the weak place inside me, daring myself to remember what it felt like to be alive. The fire was only embers now, but I warmed my hand over the coals before pulling my knees up and wrapping the cloak around me. There was a sense, difficult to name, that I had done something dangerous.
I dressed, wrapping the food tight in its linen, stashing the knife at my belt. I packed the few things I owned, slung the water skin across my shoulder, and kicked dirt over the cold ashes in the hearth. Before I left, I touched the edge of the table where my mother’s hands had once pressed dough, long ago. I let myself remember her face, just for a moment, then let it go.
Outside, the world was brighter than I expected. The snow had melted back from the trees, leaving everything raw and new. I walked to the top of the rise and looked back at the lodge, its roof sagging under the weight of a hundred small griefs.
Then I turned my face toward the woods. I didn’t know what I would find, or if the man from the dream would come again. But I knew, absolutely, that I was no longer running from my fate. I was running toward it.
Moab
Imade the ride to the RBMC clubhouse on autopilot, the familiar roads passing in a blur that had nothing to do with speed and everything to do with how little I wanted to arrive. By the time I rolled into the gravel lot, the sun was a rumor behind wet clouds, turning the world to the color of old bones and making the cinderblock walls of the clubhouse look like a mausoleum for bad decisions. My leather cut was streaked with road filth and blood where my Band-Aids had started to leak, but I wasn’t about to let that slow me down. Not when the day ahead promised fresh hell from every direction.
Inside, the place was already alive with voices, most of them angry or pretending not to be. Shivs, with his face like a prison yard and his hands never still, was running point at the table, his finger slashing through the air as he mapped out territory problems on the battered dry-erase board.
Shivs caught me hovering and called me out. “Sarge, you okay. Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Yeah,” I said
Vin’s office was a crypt of stone walls, blackout curtains, a single lamp on the desk illuminating stacks of leather-bound ledgers and a vintage abacus that no one but him knew how to use. Vin gestured for me to take the seat, and I did, feeling the wood dig into my back even through the layers of leather.
He didn’t speak right away. Instead, he poured two fingers of bourbon into a glass, slid it across the desk, and then poured one for himself. It was the closest thing to a peace offering I’d ever gotten from him.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Vin’s voice was soft, but it could have sandblasted paint at ten paces. “You haven’t been yourself, and now you look like shit. Did you lay your bike down?”
I sipped the bourbon and tried to find a starting point that didn’t make me sound like a lunatic. “There was a woman in the woods,” I said. “Blonde. Dressed wrong for the year, let alone the season. She came out of the trees, middle of the night, no shoes, nothing.”
Vin’s eyes flicked to my face, then down to the notebook in front of him. He wrote something, not breaking eye contact for more than a split second. “And this woman...?”
“She ran. I followed. She was scared, like, prey-animal scared. Not tweaker scared. She knew the woods, doubled back, and almost lost me. Then she went into a clearing. A circle of old oaks.”
Vin made a show of patience. “And then?”
I set the glass down, harder than I meant to. “She vanished. Not run off, not hid. Just... gone. I stepped in after her, and the air felt like it was going to rip my fucking skin off. There was something wrong with it.”
He considered this. “You hit your head?”
“Probably,” I admitted. “But this wasn’t concussion shit, Vin. I’ve had concussions. This was different.” The tattoos on my arms seemed to pulse, the skin tightening like it wanted to crawl off and leave the rest of me behind.
Vin leaned back, folding his arms. “You want me to believe you saw a ghost.”
