I pushed harder. The trees pressed closer. The air was thick with sap and loam and the sharp, bitter tang of moss. She tried to double back, a classic move, but she didn’t know I was used to hunting things that doubled back. I caught up at a break in the trees, grabbed for her arm, missed, and got a fistful of fabric instead.
It ripped, leaving me holding nothing but the sleeve. She shrieked, not like a person but like a rabbit caught by the leg. Then she scrambled away, found a gap in the trunks, and vanished again.
I gave chase, slower now, the adrenaline cooling just enough that I could feel my wounds. My hand was wet. My thigh was on fire. Still, I kept her in my sights.
The forest changed as we ran. The floor went from tangled undergrowth to a soft, even carpet of dead leaves. The trunks got thicker, older. Some of the oaks here were as wide as cars, roots pushing up through the earth like bones. The moon got brighter, less filtered, and for a second, I thought the world had lost its color.
Then I saw her.
She stood at the center of a clearing, back to me, arms wrapped around herself. The dress hung off her in rags. Her hair glowed pale in the moonlight. She looked impossibly young, and for a second I felt sorry, really sorry, for chasing her.
I stopped at the edge of the circle. The air was different here, charged, like the moment before a storm. My skin prickled. Every hair on my arms stood up.
She didn’t look at me. Instead, she stepped forward, into the very center of the clearing. There was a pattern on the ground—stones, maybe, or old tree stumps, I couldn’t tell from the edge. She knelt and put her hands on the dirt. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the air started to bend.
It was like heat waves off asphalt, but worse. The edges of her body shimmered, blurred, as if she was being erased from the world a millimeter at a time. My first thought was concussion, hallucination. But I’d never seen a hallucination that made the whole forest hold its breath.
She turned her head, just enough to meet my eyes.
“Don’t follow,” she said, voice warped and distant.
Then she vanished.
I stood there, stunned, all the old instincts warring in my head. Run? Chase? Pretend it didn’t happen? But the air where she’dknelt still buzzed, and the trees looked older than they should be. I reached out, slowly, to touch the center of the clearing.
It was warm. The heat crawled up my hand and into my arm, then vanished.
I took a step back, heart racing, and looked around. The forest was the same, but it felt different, less like a place, more like a wound.
I walked the perimeter, found nothing but stone and moss. No footprints. No sign of the girl, or anyone else.
For a long time, I just stood there, breathing, waiting for the world to right itself.
Eventually, I limped back toward the road, through the broken undergrowth and the last shreds of fog. When I got to the Harley, the headlight flickered back on, painting the trees a cold, pale blue.
I swung a leg over the seat, started the engine, and let the machine’s rumble drown out the sound of my own pulse.
I didn’t look back at the woods. Not once.
***
I should have gone home, or at least back to the club. But the woods kept pulling at me, the way a bad tooth begs for your tongue. So I killed the Harley outside the crash zone and walked in, boots silent on the soft dirt. The headlight was dead, but the moon had climbed higher, laying out the path in blue and bone-white.
The place she vanished wasn’t just a clearing. It was a circle, almost perfect, each ancient oak spaced just so, roots knotted like old hands. I stepped into it and felt the pressure change. The air grew heavy; the night's sounds peeled away. There was no wind, but the hair on my arms stood up, and my jaw ached with something like the start of a fever.
In the center, the dirt was bare, all the leaves blown aside by some wind I hadn’t felt. I walked to the edge of the bald spot, careful not to cross whatever line the trees had drawn. My boots stopped at the first root, and I crouched low.
The ground was hot. Not surface-warm but hot, as if something alive lay beneath it. I touched it, and static jumped up my arm, all the way to my shoulder, then fizzled out. I jerked my hand back and shook it, but the skin still tingled.
The tattoo on my forearm—the wolf, jaws open, eyes always hungry—burned. It felt as if the ink itself were waking up. I rolled my sleeve, expecting to see some new color, but it was just the same blue-black, old as memory. Still, I could feel it, the way you feel a tongue after a dentist’s needle. Present, insistent, impossible to ignore.
I stared at the empty space where she’d knelt. My brain offered up explanations such as heat stroke, head injury, and drugs, but I wasn’t buying. I’d seen weird, but never this weird. Even the Ghouls, with their graveyard rituals and dead animal tricks, never managed to erase a person from the world with nothing but fear and bad luck.
I wanted to step into the center, see if it would take me, too.
My left foot crossed the line. The heat got stronger. I reached out, palm open, and the air shimmered again. For a second, the woods doubled, two sets of trees overlapping, one old and one impossibly older. The static went full volume like the crackle of a downed power line, right up against your ear.
