Dark Trail

Preditor Becomes Prey

"I think that's everything," Oliver says while pulling a cooler behind him. Everyone let out a sigh of relief. The woods weren't as creepy as Ember imagined it. They seemed like regular old woods to her. The sun was bright, birds were chirping, they even saw a few deer on the way to their camping spot. There was no excessive amounts of cobwebs anywhere, rabbits with two heads, or ghosts dragging chains around like they knew what was up.

As if Alena was reading her mind, she asked, "Are you guys sure that these are Dark Trail woods? They don't seem very dark to me."

Salem looked up from the map that Ember and Eira had printed out. "This is it," he said confidently.

"Woohoo! This is gonna be a piece of cake!" Oliver said with a fist pump and a little dance.

"I'm going to go explore a bit," Eira muttered to her sister. Ember nodded absently at her and laughed with her friends.

After about an hour and a half after they got the tent set up, the sun said goodbye and went under the horizon. Ember shivered next to the fire. "Does anybody know where Eira went?"

"She said she was going exploring, remember?" Alena reminded, but Ember did remember. She just wanted to know where her sister was. She got up from her spot on a fallen tree that they had turned into a bench.

"I'm going out to find her. She should have been back by now," Ember told her friends and Salem hopped up off of the log.

"I'll go with you. We shouldn't be alone after dark," he told her. "It would be easy to get lost." Ember didn't reply because she knew that already. That's why she shouldn't have let Eira go alone.

The two called Eira's name time after time, always keeping track of which way they had turned. After an hour of searching, the anxiety that had been gnawing at her chest started growing. Ember closed her eyes and begged her sister. She yelled again.

"Eir-"

"I'm right here," Eira's quiet voice sounded like heaven to Ember. Eira stepped over a branch and her flannel shirt breezed behind her. Ember looked at the hand that Eira was cradling.

"What happened? Are you okay? What'd you do?" Ember stepped even closer to her sister and gingerly flipped Eira's palm up to the sky. A gash was opened on the fleshy part of her palm, right under her thumb. Eira looked away from her sister's motherly gaze.

"I slipped by a creek," she confessed sheepishly.

"C'mon. We should probably put some peroxide on that."

Ember couldn't help but admit that the woods were definitely creepier at night. The group was sitting around the campfire after Ember cleaned up her sister's hand. They were telling stories that they had researched about the different creatures in the woods.

Nobody really wanted to try and sleep. They were all to afraid of hearing a banshee's scream or seeing shadows of witches or harpies. Ember didn't blame them. They had all done their research and some of the stories they had read were pretty gruesome. The one story that Ember couldn't shake was about a group of eighteen year old boys that had come out here in the nineties. The boys had come out here to do exactly what Ember and her friends wanted to do. Prod at these creatures to see if the stories were true. Only one of the boys made it out of the woods and he was declared mentally insane. The boy, Finick Wilder, claimed that a creature with the body of a spider and the head of a woman trapped his friends in a web. The three that escaped were pecked to death by what he claimed were half birds and half women. He then proceeded to say that he was kidnapped by witches. They tortured him and branded him with a magical symbol that will stay on his skin for the rest of his life and ensure that spirits follow him wherever he goes. There was, in fact, a strange symbol that seemed to be burned into the boys abdomen, but doctors insisted that he must have fallen onto the campfire when the boys were freaking out about the sounds of the woods. Finick ended up committing suicide in his room of the insane asylum, but not before he gouged out his own eye balls with his fingers.

At midnight, the kids decided that they should probably go to bed. There were two tents set up, one for Ember, Eira, Alena, and Max. The other for the boys. It was colder than Ember had planned for, but luckily, Alena brought a space heater. Before long, Ember started ignoring the strange howls and rustle of leaves outside and drifted into a deep sleep.