Chapter Three
I stood outside the bakery, arms folded against the early evening chill, watching the last of the customers trickle out of Halloway's Hearth.
The sun had dipped low behind the trees, throwing long shadows across Main Street, and the storefront lights flickered on one by one, bathing the town in a warm amber glow.
It should have been peaceful.
The unease that had settled in my chest that morning still hadn't let go.
I tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear and tapped my foot against the cobblestones, waiting for Orias to finish locking up.
The dream from last night had sat heavy on my mind all day, and no amount of cinnamon-scented distraction had managed to shake it loose.
The whispers had felt real. Close. And the pull — the same one from my dream — had stayed with me all day, a thread tugging at the back of my mind, getting worse with every hour that passed.
I wasn't sure I was fully awake anymore. My brain had gone somewhere between the whispers and the dream and never quite come back.
The worst part was how familiar it felt. Like the pull I used to feel as a kid whenever Rowan and Orias were around — that same shimmering thread of magic under their skin that I'd always been drawn to and never understood. I didn't let myself finish that thought.
I took a breath, trying to clear my head.
Leaves stirred on the street, a soft rustle that sent a shiver down my spine.
I pulled my jacket tighter and glanced toward the edge of town, where the Pines stood like dark sentinels, branches swaying in the breeze.
They looked farther away than they actually were, like the forest was keeping its distance on purpose.
But I could feel it anyway. The pull. The invitation.
I shook my head at myself. This was ridiculous. I wasn't some girl in a fairy tale, drawn into dark woods by mysterious whispers. I was tired. Too many long hours, too many late nights getting ready for the festival. That was all this was.
Still, the feeling lingered.
The bell above the door jingled, and Orias stepped out, pulling his jacket over his shoulders. He locked the door behind him and turned to me with that familiar half-grin, though something sharper flickered under it tonight.
"You good?" he asked, glancing between me and the treeline in the distance.
I forced a smile I didn't fully feel. "Yeah. Just thinking."
"About anything worth sharing?" He arched a brow. "You've had that face on all day."
I nodded and lied through my teeth. "It's just a lot. Festival stuff. I'm tired."
The Halloween Festival was the biggest thing Autumn's Hollow did all year — the whole town dressed up in everything spooky and magical, drawing visitors who wanted a taste of real magic on the one week it ran strongest. Halloway's Hearth always sat at the center of it, pastries and sweets for every event on the calendar.
Normally it was my favorite time of year.
Tonight it just felt like one more thing pressing down on a town that already felt too heavy.
Like something was wrong underneath all of it.
"Walk you home?" Orias asked, shrugging his jacket the rest of the way on.
"I'm fine."
"Amber."
"I mean it. I'm fine." I said it lighter than I felt, mostly for his sake. "I moved out last month so you'd stop feeling like you had to babysit me every night, remember? Kind of defeats the point if you walk me home anyway. Or you keep inviting me to stay."
Something flickered across his face — not quite hurt, not quite something else. "It's not babysitting."
"I can handle a walk home." I bumped his shoulder with mine, softer than I meant it. "Seriously. It's fine."
He studied me a beat too long, the kind of look that made my skin feel too thin, like he could see straight through the lie sitting under the bigger one. "Fine," he said eventually, though he didn't sound like he meant it. "Text me when you're back."
"I always do."
He hesitated, then reached out and tucked the same loose strand of hair back behind my ear that kept slipping free, his fingers warm against my temple for half a second too long. "Be careful," he said, quieter now, all the teasing gone out of his voice. "I mean it."
"I will."
Before I could think better of it, I rose onto my toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek, quick, the kind of thing a sister was allowed to do. His jaw was rough with stubble under my lips, and he went very still for the half second it lasted.
"Night, Orias."
"Night, little witch." He hummed.
I turned and walked before I could see whatever was on his face, because I already knew what was on mine, and I didn't need the confirmation.
It was because I liked him. Just as much as I'd once liked Rowan, if I was honest with myself — only Rowan had left town, and it was easier to pretend I didn't think about someone who wasn't around to remind me every day.
It was a lot harder to do that with Orias, when I saw him half-dressed in our own kitchen on a near weekly basis, when his voice was the first thing I heard most mornings and the last thing most nights.
I liked him more than a girl was supposed to like the boy her mother had married into the family, more than I had any right to after everything he and Rowan had already given up to keep me steady these past three years.
I couldn't live under his roof anymore, sharing a hallway, hearing him move around the kitchen at two in the morning, because staying meant being close to him, and being close to him had turned into something I couldn't pretend was sisterly anymore.
It had never been sisterly. Not once.
I wanted things I had no business wanting. I wanted his hands on me the way they'd been on my jaw a hundred small, deniable times. I wanted to know what he tasted like instead of guessing. I wanted, God help me, more than I would ever let myself have.
It was too much. He was too much, and I was too tangled up in what was left of my family to risk breaking the only piece of it I still had. I couldn't lose him as family for the sake of wanting him as something else.
I'd done it once.
I'd kissed Rowan. I'd thought about how I liked him. Wanted him. So I'd kissed him.
And he'd run out of town to get away from me. Which told me all I needed to know.
So I walked, and I let the distance do what it always did, and told myself the ache in my chest would fade by the time I got home.
The streets were quiet now, most of the shops dark, lampposts casting long golden beams into the gathering dusk. The wind stirred again, carrying pine and damp leaves.
Without meaning to, I looked toward the Whispering Pines, my gaze snagging on the dark line of trees at the edge of town. They stood silent and still, and somehow alive all the same. Watching. Waiting.
I told myself to keep walking. To go home and stop letting a stupid dream get under my skin.
My feet didn't listen.
I wondered if my dad had ever gone into those woods on purpose.
I wondered if that was why he'd vanished one day and never come home. Because it had not been a choice... he'd just been desperate to do it and couldn't control his brain anymore.
The pull sharpened, a soft tug at the edges of my mind, drawing me toward the trees. The rational part of me screamed to turn around. The other part — the part that had always felt tied to this place, to whatever ran under its skin — pulled harder.
I hesitated. Then I took a step toward the forest anyway.
The air cooled the closer I got, the whisper of leaves growing louder in my ears. I couldn't explain it, but it felt like I was meant to go. Like something in the woods was waiting on me specifically.
Another step. Then another, pulse climbing as I left the bakery's warmth behind. Cobblestone gave way to dirt and fallen leaves as the lamplight thinned out behind me, swallowed by the dark. The trees loomed taller now, branches swaying like they were beckoning me in.
I stopped just short of the treeline, heart slamming, my boots skimming the edge of a leaf-choked puddle. The forest stretched out ahead of me, dark and endless, its depths folded into shadow. The whispers were louder here. Almost words.
This was ridiculous. There was nothing in those woods but stories — old ones, meant to scare kids into staying close to home. Stories I'd grown up on and never once believed.
And yet.
I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more underneath it. The forest had always felt alive to me in a way I couldn't explain, like it knew things, like it was waiting for the right moment to show me what.
I took another step toward the treeline, breath catching. The wind stirred the leaves around me, and for a second I thought I saw something — a shadow slipping between the trees, too fast and too silent to be human. Too wrong to be ordinary magic.
I blinked, and it was gone.
"Amber," a voice whispered, soft and distant, carried on the wind.
I froze, pulse pounding in my ears. The same voice from my dream. The same whisper that had said my name in the dark and refused to let go of it since.
I stepped back from the treeline, hands trembling. This was a mistake. Whatever waited in those woods, whatever had learned my name, wasn't something I wanted to find alone in the dark.
I turned and walked fast, back toward town, putting distance between myself and the trees. The wind followed me anyway, carrying the faintest trace of that voice. That invitation.
I wasn't ready to answer it.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.