Vacation Turns Wolfcation

Chapter Two: The Garden That Shouldn't Exist

I wake up before my body remembers it's allowed to rest.

For a full, disoriented minute I don't know where I am , the ceiling too high, the sheets too soft, sunlight pouring gold and clean through gauzy curtains instead of fighting past my apartment blinds. Then I remember. The Aurelia. Priya. The concierge who looked at me like he already knew my whole life story and found it disappointing that I didn't.

Priya is a starfish on the other bed, one arm flung over her eyes, snoring softly in a way she'd deny to her grave. My phone is somewhere in the bottom of her suitcase, confiscated and probably buried under three pairs of shoes I've already told her not to pack. My sketchbook, though , that's on the nightstand, exactly where I left it, and exactly where I don't remember leaving it open.

I don't look too closely at the page. I already know what's on it.

Instead, I pull on the least wrinkled sweater in my bag, lace up my sneakers, and slip out into a morning so quiet it feels like the world hasn't started yet. The hallway carpet swallows my footsteps. Somewhere below, I can hear the soft clink of breakfast being laid out, but I'm not ready for people yet. I'm barely ready for myself.

I just want air. Trees. Something that isn't a screen.

The resort grounds unfold in that impossible, manicured way expensive things do , gravel paths swept clean, hedges trimmed into shapes too perfect to be natural, a distant glint of water that must be the infinity pool Priya promised. There's a marked trail looping through the tree line, a tasteful little sign requesting guests stay on the path for their own safety, and I obey it for exactly six minutes before the trees on my left seem to lean apart, like they're inviting me somewhere the path was never going to take me.

I should turn back. I know I should turn back.

I don't.

The forest swallows the resort behind me almost instantly, the manicured hush replaced by something wilder , moss-slick roots, the smell of cold earth and rain that never came, birdsong that stops the deeper I go, like the woods are holding their breath along with me. My pulse ticks up, not from fear exactly. From recognition. Like my body knows this place even if I don't.

And then the trees open into a garden that has no business existing.

Star-shaped violet flowers , the same ones from the lobby , spill across a clearing in obscene, glorious excess, climbing over a crumbling stone archway, wrapping around a dry fountain like they've been growing here for a hundred years and yesterday, both at once. Frost silvers half the petals while the other half bloom fat and full, as if summer and winter got tired of taking turns.

I've seen this. I've drawn this.

My hand is already digging for my sketchbook before my brain catches up, flipping past pages of invoices and grocery lists and my mother's face from memory, until I find it , three pages back, done in the dead hours somewhere over the Atlantic, the pencil marks smudged from where I must have rested my palm without thinking. The archway. The fountain. Even the wrongness of the frost, half-shaded in soft graphite like I already knew.

"You shouldn't be here."

The voice doesn't startle me the way it should. It settles into my chest instead, low and even, and something in my ribs goes quiet for the first time in two years.

I turn, and he's just , there. Tall enough that the archway looks smaller behind him, dark hair, eyes an unnerving pale blue-silver that catch what little light filters through the canopy. He's dressed too formally for a forest at seven in the morning, like he stepped out of a boardroom into the trees, and he's looking at me with an expression I can't fully name. Not anger. Not quite alarm. Something closer to recognition, the same way the garden looked at me.

"I got lost," I say, which is half true.

"No," he says. "You didn't."

It should unsettle me more than it does. Instead I find myself studying him the way I'd study a subject I wanted to draw , the set of his jaw, the careful stillness in how he holds himself, like every movement is a decision made twice before it happens.

"I'm Marin," I offer, because someone has to say something, and he clearly isn't going to.

A pause, just long enough to notice. "Kieran."

"Do you work here?"

"Something like that."

Vague answers. I've built a career reading clients who don't want to tell me what they actually want, and every instinct I have says this man could out-vague all of them combined. But there's no threat in it, not exactly , more like he's choosing each word the way you'd choose footing on ice.

"This garden," I say, nodding toward the impossible flowers, the frost that shouldn't share space with bloom. "It's not on any map I've seen."

"It's not supposed to be found." His gaze drops, just for a second, to the sketchbook clutched against my side, and something flickers behind his eyes , gone before I can name it. "You should get back to the resort. Breakfast will be finishing soon."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

I should be unnerved. I should feel the way I felt about the concierge , that prickling, wrongness-under-the-skin awareness that something here doesn't add up. Instead there's just this strange, sinking calm, like my whole body finally exhaled after two years of holding its breath, and it's happening because of a stranger in a forest who won't tell me his last name.

"Don't come back here after dark," he says, and it isn't a suggestion. It's not even really a warning. It's a fact, stated the way you'd tell someone water is wet, or fire burns , something so obviously, immutably true that arguing with it would be absurd.

"Why not?"

For the first time, something almost like hesitation crosses his face , a flicker of a man deciding how much truth a stranger can survive before breakfast.

"Because after dark," he says quietly, "this garden isn't the only thing here that isn't what it seems."

And then, before I can ask what that's supposed to mean, he's gone , not walking away, not turning to leave through the trees the way a person should. One second he's three feet in front of me, and the next, the space where he stood is just empty, cold air and the faint, impossible scent of pine and rain that never fell.

I stand there a long moment, sketchbook pressed to my chest like a shield, staring at the place where a man simply stopped existing.

Then, because my hands apparently have a mind of their own lately, I open the sketchbook again , and find a fresh page, filled in graphite I don't remember using, of silver-blue eyes staring back at me from the dark.