Bloodbound in emberfall

Ashgrove Ridge

Sena told herself she wasn’t trespassing. Technically.

The marker stone from Caleb’s photo sat exactly where his notes said it would, half-swallowed by moss at the edge of what any map would call Ashgrove land, though no fence marked the line and no sign warned her off. She’d parked a half mile back on the fire road, telling herself that if anyone asked, she was still following the official search grid — never mind that the official search had stopped combing this section two days ago, never mind that the light was already going soft and grey through the trees.

She crouched in front of the stone and ran her fingers over the carved letters the way Caleb must have. CALLOWAY. Beneath it, worn nearly smooth, three more names she couldn’t fully make out — ASH, something, and a fourth eaten away entirely by a century and a half of weather. A boundary marker. A treaty stone. Or a grave marker, and the thought of that put a cold line straight down her spine.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

She was on her feet and turning before the voice finished, adrenaline sparking hot and fast, and found herself facing a man who had somehow closed thirty feet of forest without a single sound. Tall, dark-haired, dressed like someone who belonged to these woods rather than someone visiting them. And something about the way he held himself — coiled, careful, deliberately still — made the animal part of her brain that had gone off at the tree line last night sit up again, sharp and certain.

“This isn’t posted land,” she said, when she trusted her voice.

“It doesn’t need to be.” He wasn’t hostile, exactly, but there was an edge under the calm, something coiled tight and controlled. “You’re Sena Calloway.”

Her pulse spiked at her own name in a stranger’s mouth. “You have the advantage.”

“Ronan Ashgrove.” He said it like he expected the name to mean something, watching her face for the reaction, and when she only frowned, something in his expression shifted — surprise, maybe, or a recalculation. “Your brother knew that name too. Toward the end.”

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “What do you know about my brother?”

“I know he came looking for the same thing you’re looking at right now.” Ronan nodded, once, at the stone between them. “I know he asked questions in town that made people nervous. I know the last place he was seen was inside a half mile of where you’re standing.”

“That’s not an answer. That’s you telling me you know exactly as much as the search parties do.” She hated how thin her voice sounded, how much she wanted him to be lying and how certain she was that he wasn’t. “If you know something, say it. Don’t circle it.”

Something like respect flickered across his face, gone almost as fast as it came. “It’s not that simple.”

“It’s exactly that simple. My brother is missing. You clearly know something about why. Tell me, or get out of my way, because I am not leaving these woods again without an answer.” She hadn’t meant to step closer when she said it, but she had, close enough now to see that his eyes weren’t quite brown — something darker, amber-edged, wrong in a way she couldn’t name and didn’t want to look away from.

“If I tell you what I actually know,” Ronan said, low, “you’re not going to sleep again until this is over. And there’s a real chance it gets you killed faster than not knowing would.”

“I already don’t sleep.” She held his gaze, refusing to be the one who looked away first. “Try me.”

For a long moment he said nothing, and the forest around them seemed to hold that silence with him — no birds, no wind moving the canopy, just the two of them and a stone with her family’s name cut into it. Then, finally: “There’s a reason your name is on that marker. A reason it matters that you came back to this town instead of some other Calloway who might have had the sense to stay away. I’m not going to explain a hundred and forty years of family history at the edge of the woods with the sun going down. But I will tell you this much — whatever’s out here that people don’t talk about, it isn’t finished with your family. And your brother found that out the hard way.”

“Is he alive?”

The question came out smaller than she meant it to, and something crossed Ronan’s face that looked almost like it cost him something to answer honestly. “I don’t know. I want to. That’s the truth, even if it’s not the one you came for.”

She believed him, which frightened her more than a lie would have. “Then help me find out.”

“You don’t want my help.” His jaw tightened. “You want a straight line from here to your brother, and I can’t promise you that’s what this turns into. What I can promise is that if you keep digging alone, the way you’re digging now, you’re going to find things faster than you’re ready for them, and there won’t be anyone there to catch you when you do.”

“So catch me.” The words were out before she’d fully decided to say them, and she watched them land on him like something physical — his expression flickering, just for a second, into something that wasn’t caution at all.

“That’s not — “ He stopped himself, visibly recalibrating, putting the careful distance back between them like a wall he’d nearly forgotten to keep up. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Then explain it to me instead of deciding for me what I can handle.” She held her ground, close enough now that she could see the muscle working in his jaw, the tension coiled through his whole frame like he was holding something back by force of will alone. “I buried my mother when I was seventeen. I’ve handled things. Don’t tell me what I can’t survive.”

Ronan looked at her for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his expression — calculation, maybe, or the particular helplessness of a man who’d already decided something he knew he shouldn’t. “Come back tomorrow night. Same spot. I’ll tell you what I can.” A beat. “And Sena — don’t come out here alone again before then. Not because of me. Because of what’s actually in these woods, and it doesn’t care whose land it’s standing on.”

He was gone before she could answer — not running, just turned and stepped into the tree line and somehow simply wasn’t there anymore, the way he’d arrived. Sena stood alone at the marker stone with her heart going too fast and her brother’s name-that-wasn’t-quite-his-name carved into rock in front of her, and understood, with a clarity that scared her more than the eyes at the tree line had, that she’d just agreed to come back to the one place in Emberfall everyone had spent her whole life warning her to stay away from.

She was going to be there tomorrow night regardless.

She made herself walk back to the truck at a normal pace, resisting the urge to look over her shoulder every few steps, though she felt watched the entire way — not threatened, exactly, just tracked, the way she imagined a deer must feel crossing open ground it knew wasn’t safe. By the time she reached the fire road her hands had steadied, but her mind hadn’t. A hundred and forty years. He’d said it like a fact she was supposed to already understand the weight of, and she turned the number over and over on the drive back into town, trying to make it fit anything she knew about her own family. Her mother had never mentioned Ashgrove land. Her grandmother, before the dementia took the specifics from her, used to get strange and quiet whenever the subject of the old mining days came up, and Sena had always chalked it up to grief for people long dead. Now she wasn’t so sure grief was the only thing that silence had been protecting.

She thought about calling Dell, laying it all out — the journal, the marker stone, the man who’d known her name before she’d said it. She knew exactly how that conversation would go. He’d hear werewolf-shaped nothing dressed up as protective town folklore and gently suggest she get some sleep. She was on her own with this, at least until she had something more solid than a feeling and a stranger’s warning to bring to anyone.

Tomorrow night, she told herself, pulling onto the main road as the last light gave out behind her. Tomorrow night she’d have answers, or she’d have nothing at all, and either way she wasn’t backing off the one thread that had finally, finally pulled taut.