Mated

If you can see them, then you’re already dead. If you can hear them, then you’re not far from it. If you can smell them, like the forest they live in, then avoid danger at all conceivable costs.

Because they’re the monsters in the shadows of Harvey Hill’s forests, and their king needs his queen.

In the deepest hours of the night, when the moon was as powerful as it could be, the beasts lurked. Crawling through the streets of the tiny, secluded town, they passed the doors marked with their symbols and took the offerings at the edge of the town’s limits. On all fours, as they usually traveled beneath the moon, they were lithe and lethal, and the residents of Harvey’s Hill listened to their claws scraping over the tarmac while they pretended to be asleep.

No one wanted to be the next Ann Marie, or the next Jessica, or the girl from last week, Clair. They wanted their windows closed and a red symbol painted on their door to ward against the evil. They wanted ammonia on their doorsteps to hide their scents lest a beast finds them… appetizing and worth the effort of getting past the ward. And most certainly, they didn’t want to be the mothers, fathers, sisters, or brothers who wake in the morning to find one bed empty within their house and footprints that seem like men’s feet, caked in dirt, leading to their loved one’s bedroom.

Here in Harvey’s Hill, when the clock hits ten, you best be inside, under covers, and praying to the moon that the beasts will pretend you’re not there.

That was what Charlotte has been doing for the past twenty years. She took her online courses so she won’t risk a class running late at the community college three towns over. She didn’t party because the other girls were usually taken from a risky gathering, passed out drunk by a bonfire. Charlotte painted the symbol on her family’s door herself because she loved to draw… even if it means warding off the thing of her little town’s nightmares, and she went through the exhausting training by the elders to learn the protective symbols, all of them, vested to only those capable of handling their magic. It has taken her years to learn them from her grandmother.

She got the best grades, was the best daughter, and had the best little brother in the entire world. Her dog, Gilmore, was an asshole, but she loved the ridiculous husky, and she swam in the local creek for hours.

But Charlotte lived in a small town with more woods than houses and more wild animals than not. And because they didn’t know any better, a deer decided to cross the road just as Charlotte was coming back into town lines.

The sun had already descended, and the beasts were surly waiting for the clock to strike ten to make their appearance. She has been driving fast. It was eight. Sure, she still had two hours, but she needed to pour ammonia on their driveway and front steps still, draw the symbol on her door, and close the shades. In her mind, it didn’t register that her family, realizing she was late, had already done all those things. She was speeding because it was all she knew to do.

She has been damning the stupid conference she was attending even though the discussion on hybridized energy development was fascinating to her. She was damning the speaker for giving her five minutes afterward even though she practically begged to speak to the professor. She was damning the fact that he found her smart enough, interesting enough, to talk for the next hour and a half while the sun made its effortless journey downwards.

And when the deer came from nowhere as they usually did, she damned her brakes, and her tires, and the road, and the fact it was past sundown and no cars would be passing by until sunrise. No one would see her and her car, no one would find her.

It was past dark, after all, and it was the beast’s time to roam.