HUNTRESS - AWAKENING - BOOK 1

The woods were black and wet and I was already running.

I didn’t know where I’d started. That’s how it works in dreams. You get dropped into the middle of something with no beginning attached, and your body just accepts it. My lungs burned like I’d been going a while. Cold air, colder ground, pine needles slick under my bare feet.

Branches came at my face and I ducked them before I saw them. That was the part that felt wrong, if any of it felt like anything. My legs knew the route. Left around the split trunk. Down the bank. Over the root that came up out of the dirt like a knuckle. I wasn’t choosing any of it.

Something moved on my left.

It wasn’t chasing me. That’s the thing I kept coming back to later, when I was awake and trying to make it into a normal nightmare. It ran even with me, close enough that I could hear it breathing, and it never once tried to close the gap. When I cut right, toward a gap in the trees where the dark went gray, it was there ahead of me. Not blocking. Just there. And I turned without deciding to turn, the way water turns when the ground tilts.

It was a wolf. Too big for a dog, moving too smooth for anything that size.

Then, behind me, back in the trees, someone whistled.

Two notes. Low, then lower. Unhurried. The kind of sound you make when you already know where something is and you’re in no rush about it.

The wolf’s ears went back.

And I stopped running.

I came awake all at once, flat on my back, heart slamming, sheets kicked into a rope around my ankles.

For about four seconds I lay there doing the thing everybody does, which is wait for your body to catch up with the information that you’re in your own bed in your own room and nothing in the world is currently trying to eat you. The ceiling fan turned. The house made its usual noises. Somewhere down the hall Emery’s alarm went off and got slapped quiet.

Fine. A dream. I’d had worse.

I sat up and put my feet on the floor and felt something crunch.

Pine needles. Maybe a dozen of them, brown and curled, right where my feet had been under the blanket. There was dirt on the sheet too, a smear of it, the dark silty kind that comes off the bank of a creek and stains everything it touches.

I sat very still.

Then I did what any reasonable person would do, which is come up with an explanation immediately, because the alternative is sitting in your bed at five-forty in the morning losing your mind. I’d worn my boots up from the truck. I’d been in the yard yesterday. Emery was fourteen and constitutionally incapable of wiping his feet. Any of it. All of it.

Except my feet were dirty. The bottoms of them, gritty and cold, and there was a scratch running up the inside of my left forearm, four inches of it, thin as a paper cut.

It was already scabbed.

That was the detail I couldn’t get around. Scabs take hours. I’d gone to bed at eleven with clean feet and unbroken skin, and now the skin was broken and healing and the woods were in my bed.

I checked the window.

Closed. Latched. The latch was the old brass kind that sticks, and it was seated, and there was no way to work it from the outside without breaking the glass, which was still very much unbroken.

I sat back down on the edge of the mattress and pressed my thumb along the scratch until it stung, because pain is at least real, and I ran through it one more time.

Sleepwalking. I’d done it when I was little, the year after Dad died. Twice I woke up on the back porch and once at the end of the driveway with my hand on the mailbox, and Mom put a bell on my door for six months and never talked about it again. So. Sleepwalking. It came back sometimes. Stress. Junior year. Whatever.

That explanation had exactly one hole in it, and the hole was the latch.

I picked up the pine needles, all of them, and dropped them in the trash can under my desk, and then took the bag out of the can and tied it, which I could not have justified to a single living person.

Then I got up and got dressed, because it was the first day of school and there was nothing else to do.

Here is what I wanted from junior year, in order.

One. To get through it without my mother rearranging my life for reasons she declined to explain.

Two. My license, and then the truck in the side yard that had been on blocks since before I could reach the pedals.

Three. To go to homecoming.

That last one sounds pathetic written down. Whatever. Freshman year I bailed because Mom decided that night was a family night, which meant three hours of drills in the field behind the house and no discussion. Sophomore year I bailed because Maya’s cousin got us into a party in Halbrook and then didn’t get us into the party in Halbrook, and we ended up eating gas station taquitos in a Kroger parking lot, which was honestly not the worst night of my life but was also not a dance. Two years of being the girl who cancels. Maya had started saying my name in a particular tone when she asked if I was coming to things.

So...Homecoming. I was going to go to the stupid dance and wear a stupid dress and take stupid pictures on somebody’s stupid lawn like a normal seventeen-year-old girl.

I pulled my hair up, checked the scratch again, put on long sleeves in eighty-eight degree weather, and went downstairs.

Emery had cereal in a mixing bowl. Not a regular bowl. A mixing bowl, the big blue one, filled most of the way, because he’d hit fourteen and started eating like the house was going to be repossessed.

“You look like garbage,” he said.

“You look like a freshman.”

He winced. That one landed, and I felt bad for about half a second, which is the standard sibling window. He was doing the thing where he’d put on a shirt with a collar and then rolled the sleeves to look like he hadn’t tried. His backpack was already by the door. It had been by the door since Sunday.

“You want a ride,” I said. “That’s why you’re being nice to me.”

“I’m not being nice to you. And Mom said you’re driving me.”

“Then why’d you ask.”

“I didn’t ask, I’m telling you.” He shoveled cereal. “Don’t drop me at the front. Drop me at the gym doors.”

“Why the gym doors?”

“Because everybody stands at the front.”

I let that go, and made toast, and did not tell my little brother that six hours ago I’d apparently been in the woods barefoot. It’s not that we don’t talk. It’s that Emery’s radar for me being off is better than anybody’s in that house, and if he clocked it, he’d worry about it all day, and he already had enough going on being the shortest boy in his grade with a locker he hadn’t practiced opening.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Outside.” He said it around the cereal. “She was up when I got up.”

That wasn’t strange by itself. Mom opened the garden center out on Route 9 and she was usually gone by six-fifteen, keys jangling, travel mug, one hand already on the door. It was strange in the way that a lot of things about my family were strange, which is to say I’d stopped noticing years ago because it was just how we lived.

Mercers ran in the mornings. Mercers had a bag packed in the hall closet with a change of clothes and a first aid kit and two hundred dollars cash in it. Mercers knew where the property line was, which was the fence, and Mercers did not go past the fence after dark. Not because of anything. Just because.

There was a knife in my nightstand drawer. Had been since I was nine. Mom put it there herself, showed me how to hold it, made me repeat back the four things she wanted me to say if a stranger ever came to the door, and then we had spaghetti.

Other families had church. We had that.

I grabbed my bag and my keys and pushed out through the screen door into air that was already sticking to me.

The yard was silver with dew. The sun was barely up over the tree line and everything past the fence was still holding onto the dark, the way woods do, that flat gray-green nothing between the trunks.

And I saw the tracks.

They came out of the trees at the back corner of the yard and crossed straight through the wet grass, a clean single line of them, dark where the dew had been pressed out. Not wandering. Not circling. Whatever made them had come out of those woods with a destination in mind and had walked the entire way to my house.

They ended at the bottom porch step.

I was still standing there with my keys in my hand when I registered the sound of running water.

My mother was on the far side of the steps with the hose. She was in yesterday’s clothes. Her hair was still up from yesterday too, and there was creek silt on the knees of her jeans, and she was walking the spray slowly across the concrete, pushing everything off the step and into the grass, back and forth, back and forth, like she had all the time in the world.

She didn’t look up.

“Fallon.”

“Yeah.”

“Get your brother.” She moved the hose to the next step down. “And be home before dark.”