Chapter 1:The wrong path
I always took the shortcut.
Every single night for three years, ever since I moved to Coldveil and started working at Maren's Bookshop, I had walked home through Ashford Forest. It saved twenty minutes, it was quiet, and after a day of dealing with customers who treated paperbacks like weapons, quiet was all I ever wanted.
My coworker Sasha called me reckless. My landlord called me foolish. I called it efficient.
Tonight, I called it the worst decision of my life.
It started the way all terrible things do completely normally.
The October air was sharp and clean, carrying the smell of pine and damp earth. My bag was heavy on my shoulder, stuffed with two books I was reading and a leftover sandwich I never got around to eating. The trees rose tall on either side of the path, their canopies blocking out most of the moon, leaving only thin silver ribbons of light across the ground.
I had my headphones in. I was thinking about nothing. I was perfectly, utterly fine.
Then the screaming started.
Not human screaming. Something else a sound that split the night wide open, part howl and part something I had no language for. It vibrated in my chest, in my teeth, in the soles of my feet through the earth. Every instinct I had went rigid.
Run, something ancient inside me whispered.
I did not run.
Of course I didn't. I was Isadora Vane, and my greatest flaw, according to every person who had ever known me, was that I moved toward things I should have fled.
I stepped off the path.
The sound was coming from a clearing about thirty meters through the trees. I told myself I would just look. A quick look to make sure no one was hurt. Nothing that required me to actually get involved.
I pressed myself behind the widest oak I could find and looked.
There were three men in the clearing. That should have been the most alarming thing. It was not.
Because the men were changing.
No rational word existed for what I was watching. Their bodies were shifting expanding, reshaping, breaking and remaking in the silver moonlight with a sound like thunder heard underwater. Spines curving. Hands splitting into something wider, clawed. Heads dropping forward as jaws extended
I pressed a hand over my mouth.
This is not real, I told myself firmly. You are tired. You skipped lunch. None of this is happening.
One of the wolves, enormous and impossible in the moonlight raised its massive head and looked directly at me.
Its eyes were gold. Human eyes.
Run, that ancient thing screamed.
This time I listened.
I spun from the tree and sprinted the kind of running I hadn't done since secondary school, bag slamming against my hip, branches whipping at my face. The path was somewhere to my left. If I reached the path I reached the road. The road had streetlights. Streetlights meant people
Something hit me from the side.
Not violent. Not rough. Just impossibly fast. The world tilted and I landed hard on my hands and knees in the leaves. When I looked up, a man was crouched in front of me.
He had appeared from nowhere. Dark hair. A jaw carved by someone with strong opinions. He watched me with an expression so neutral it was more frightening than anger would have been. His pale grey eyes moved over me with the calm efficiency of someone cataloguing a problem.
"She saw," he said. Not to me. To someone behind him.
I twisted around. Three more men had materialized from the trees, surrounding me in a loose circle. I hadn't heard a single one approach.
"I didn't see anything," I said immediately. My voice came out steady. I was unreasonably proud of that. "I was walking. I heard a noise. I saw animals. I'm going home."
I started to stand.
"Don't," the crouching man said. One word. Quiet as a closing door.
I stopped. Something in his voice made my legs decide staying down was reasonable. Not fear exactly something older. Something that recognized authority the way a body recognizes cold.
"What's your name?" he asked.
I considered lying. His grey eyes told me not to bother.
"Isadora," I said. "Isadora Vane."
He studied me. Then he straightened to his full height and looked at the men behind me.
"Bring her in," he said. "Clean entry. No harm."
"Wait I started.
Something pressed against the side of my neck, smelling of pine and cold earth. The forest tilted. The moonlight folded. Everything went black.
The first thing I noticed when I came back to myself was the cold.
Stone cold the kind that lives in walls and floors and has never once been touched by sunlight. It pressed through the thin mattress beneath me and settled into my spine like a declaration.
I kept my eyes closed and thought before I moved.
I was lying down. The silence around me was totally no cars, no city sounds, nothing human. The air smelled like stone and something faintly metallic.
I opened my eyes.
Stone ceiling. Stone walls. An iron door with a small barred window set too high to reach. A cot, a blanket, a tin cup of water on the floor. One pale electric light on the wall.
A cell.
I was in a cell.
I sat up slowly, checking myself. No injuries. My bag was gone. My phone was gone. My headphones were gone. But I was still in my own clothes, still wearing my shoes which meant whoever had taken me had a specific purpose and hadn't felt the need to
The barred window slid open.
I went still.
A pair of eyes appeared in the gap. Young. Brown. Visibly nervous. They blinked at me. Then a voice, low and slightly apologetic:
"You're awake. Are you hurt?"
I stared at the eyes in the barred window.
"I am in a cell," I said.
A pause. "...Yes."
"I was kidnapped."
"I understand why you'd describe it that way
"Is there another way to describe it?"
The eyes looked pained. "I'm going to bring you food. Someone will come to speak with you soon." He hesitated. "I'm sorry about the room."
The window slid shut.
I sat in the cold silence and stared at the iron door. My jaw was tight. My hands were steady. I had survived worse than stone walls and locked doors I had survived worse than most things, actually and I was not going to fall apart in a cell for the benefit of people who thought k********g was a reasonable Tuesday evening activity.
I pulled the thin blanket around my shoulders, pressed my back against the cold wall, and lifted my chin.
Somewhere deep in the building above me, something shifted. A presence heavy and vast and ice cold, like pressure dropping before a storm. It moved through the walls the way thunder moves through the ground. There and then gone.
Every hair on my body rose.
I didn't know what it was.
But some part of me the same ancient, foolish part that had stepped off the path tonight already recognized it.
And that terrified me more than the cell ever could.
