I poured another drink, tried to steady my hand, and failed. “You believe in ghosts?” I asked, the words surprising me as much as him.
He took the glass, downed it, and set it gently on the bar. “I believe in what I can stab. The rest is just noise.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”
We sat there, two men hollowed out by different kinds of war, the whiskey doing its best to fill the spaces left behind. Eventually, Shivs stood, patted my back twice, and left.
I watched the shadows in the bar grow longer, and the bottle grow lighter, until only the wolf tattoo under my skin was left to keep me company.
***
The next seventy-two hours passed in a kind of trance, the world narrowing to the radius of my room and the junkyard perimeter outside. I slept little, ate nothing, and let the beast inside me chew its way through every thought until only the strongest remained. My hands ached from where I’d raked them across old books and the brittle edges of newsprint, the skin raw and ink-stained, the fingernails darker than blood. The desk in my room was littered with artifacts. A battered laptop with a dying battery, stacks of xeroxed newspaper clippings, and a map of the county with circles gouged into it by a ballpoint pen. You could have built a conspiracy wall with what I’d found, but it all came down to the same three words, repeated in every generation. Whispering. Fucking. Oaks.
The stories were older than the club, older than the highways and the county lines. Every decade, someone vanished near the circle. Children, hunters, a pair of surveyors, a Mennonite woman with her hair down to her waist. The explanations were always the same. An animal attack, a river accident, and a woman ran away from home. But if you lined up the dates and the lunar cycle, something nobody but a lunatic or a prisoner would bother with, it all traced back to the circle. There was even a mention of a witch. But the legend went that if you stepped inside after sunset, you wouldn’t come out. Or if you did, you came out changed.
I didn’t want to be changed. I just wanted to know.
The first night I tried to sleep, the dreams were worse than the waking. I saw the girl again, her face pale and fierce, eyes wideand hungry for something I didn’t have a name for. She reached for me, arms bare, and every time I tried to touch her, she turned to mist, leaving only the sound of her voice, which was nothing like a voice at all but more like the shriek of metal under strain.
When I woke, my mouth was full of the taste of ash and copper. My hands were clutching the sheets so hard that I’d torn them.
By day three, the only thing left in the bottle was a smear of brown at the bottom. I lit a cigarette, smoked it to the filter, and waited for night.
***
The moon was a slice in the sky, thin and bright enough to cut through the clouds but not to light the way. I left the Harley at the edge of the old service road and walked in, boots silent on the wet dirt. The woods felt different this time: colder, the trees closer together, the hush absolute. Every step was measured. I stopped breathing except for shallow sniffs, letting the air tell me if anything was waiting for me.
When I reached the clearing, it was exactly as I remembered. Thirteen oaks, spaced so evenly you’d think they’d been planted by a surveyor with a death wish. Moss ran up the trunks like veins. The circle of ground inside was bare, not even a weed pushing through. The only sound was my own pulse, a hollow boom that echoed in my chest and behind my eyes.
I stepped up to the line. My feet buzzed with static, the hair on my arms standing straight out. Every instinct told me to walk away, to call Vin and tell him I’d done my job, perimeter checked, nothing out of place. But the pressure behind my eyes was building. The wolf tattoo on my forearm was a live wire, pain shooting through every nerve.
I took a breath, then stepped inside.
The first thing I noticed was the smell, the smell of her. The air was thicker, and every movement slowed. My ears rang, a tone so high I thought my teeth would crack. I forced myself to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, into the center of the ring.
As soon as I reached it, the world snapped shut.
The heat hit first, a dry burn under my skin, followed by a spike of cold that made my teeth chatter. My tattoos lit up like road flares, white-hot pain searing down my arms and across my spine. I fell to my knees, clutching at my sides, but the pain doubled, then tripled, turning into a full-body seizure. I bit through my own lip to keep from screaming.
My hands splayed on the dirt, nails tearing into the mud. The bones in my fingers popped, the skin stretching, claws forcing their way out of flesh and pushing my real nails off like rotten leaves. My jaw locked, the muscles fighting each other until my face was a mask of rage and agony. My vision split, colors going sharp and unnatural, reds and blues blooming in the darkness where nothing should be.
I saw her then, the girl, not as a memory but standing right in front of me. She was naked except for her hair, which hung down in tangles, and her skin was covered in swirling black marks, more like scars than tattoos. She crouched beside me, one hand on my shoulder, and I could feel the heat of her touch. Her eyes were bright with terror and fascination.
“Don’t follow,” she whispered.
But I did.
I lunged at her, my mouth full of fangs and spit, and she moved like a wraith, slipping out of my grip and melting into the air. I crashed into the ground, face-first, claws digging a trench in the wet earth. I howled, not a human sound, but a noise ripped from some older, angrier version of me.
The pain reached its peak, then snapped. I lay there, shaking, the muscles in my back spasming, my heart pounding so hard Ithought it would explode. I tried to move, but all that came was a twitch and a gasp.
When I could finally raise my head, the girl was gone, the clearing empty. The air was cooler, the pain fading to a dull throb. I looked down at my hands, still hands, but the nails were splintered, the skin torn. My arms were covered in mud and blood. The tattoo on my forearm had changed. The wolf’s eyes glowed yellow, the fur bristling, and the lines had moved, curling in new directions I didn’t remember.
I tried to laugh, but all that came out was a dry, cracked sound.
I rolled to my back, staring at the branches above, the moon flickering through. My chest heaved with every breath. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to cry or claw my own face off.
I lay there until the sun started to edge the sky, the birds waking up one by one. When I finally stood, my whole body shook. I felt hollowed out, but lighter. I was still me, but more.
