Chapter Four #2
The realization takes time to sink in, shock dulling the edges of thought as I inventory myself piece by piece. Fingers twitch when I will them to. Toes respond, distant but present. Pain blooms everywhere at once now that adrenaline loosens its grip, but it’s pain I can feel, and that matters.
I turn my head.
The man in the passenger seat is motionless.
His head is tilted at an angle that defies anatomy, neck bent in a way that leaves no room for hope.
His eyes remain open, wide and glassy, terror still frozen in them, but whatever had been looking out through them is gone.
The dashboard’s emergency lights reflect faintly in their empty shine, illuminating a face already slack with death.
“Oh God.” The words scrape out of me, raw and barely audible. “Oh God, oh God, oh—”
My hands fumble at the seat belt, fingers clumsy and numb as panic begins to claw its way past the shock.
When the latch finally releases, my weight lurches sideways, and I nearly spill across the center console, catching myself on the door as the world tilts sickeningly around me.
Something warm trickles into my left eye, blurring my vision, and when I swipe at my face, my fingers come away slick and red.
Blood.
The door resists when I shove at it, the frame warped and jammed from the impact, but fear lends strength where pain tries to steal it. I slam my shoulder into the metal again and again until it shrieks and gives way, opening just enough for me to stumble out.
Cold air crashes over me. November bites hard, cutting straight through denim and fabric, stealing the heat trapped in the wreck as steam curls up around me. I stagger clear of the car, breath fogging white in the dark, legs shaking before the reality of what just happened finally, fully lands.
I stumble out onto uneven ground, boots slipping on loose stones and dead snow-covered leaves as I put distance between myself and the twisted metal coffin that used to be my car.
Each breath burns, ribs protesting movement, but I force myself to keep going because staying means looking at the body, at what’s left of a man who grabbed my wheel and sent us careening to his death.
‘They’re coming,’ he’d said. ‘Before they catch our scent.’
The words echo in my head as I look around, trying to orient myself in the darkness cut only by the car’s dying headlights. Trees loom on all sides, skeletal branches clawing at a sky that shows no stars, no moon, nothing but oppressive black that presses down like physical weight.
Then I see them.
Lights in the distance, warm and yellow against the darkness, maybe half a mile through the forest if I cut straight instead of trying to find the road.
Civilization.
Help.
Someone who can explain what happened, who can call for rescue, who can tell me the dying man’s ravings about monsters were just trauma and blood loss talking.
I start walking before conscious thought catches up with survival instinct, one foot in front of the other, following the lights like a moth drawn to flame. My phone is somewhere in the wreckage, probably shattered along with my cameras and any hope of salvaging this trip.
But phones can be replaced.
Equipment can be replaced.
I can’t be replaced.
The forest closes around me with each step, branches snagging at my jacket, roots trying to trip me in the darkness.
Blood continues running into my eye, and I swipe at it impatiently, smearing crimson across my cheek.
My head throbs with each heartbeat, and there’s a high-pitched ringing in my ears that might be permanent hearing damage or might be shock.
The lights grow closer. Not a house like I’d hoped, not even a ranger station.
Something bigger. A compound of some kind, stone and timber built directly into the mountainside as if it grew there naturally instead of being constructed.
Multiple buildings connected by covered walkways, everything designed to withstand harsh winters and probably things worse than the weather.
The main structure dominates the clearing, three stories of rough-hewn logs and fieldstone that look more like a fortress than a home. Lights glow from windows on all levels, but there’s no movement visible, no shadows passing behind curtains to suggest occupancy.
I hesitate at the tree line, every instinct suddenly screaming that this is a mistake, that I should turn around and take my chances alone in the forest rather than approach whatever place this is.
But cold seeps deeper into my bones with each passing second, the blood won’t stop running into my eye, and the alternative is stumbling through wilderness until exposure, blood loss, or both finish what the car crash started.
The decision makes itself.
I step out of the trees and cross the clearing on legs that shake more than they should, each step bringing me closer to the massive timber door at the compound’s entrance. There’s no doorbell, no knocker, just iron straps and hinges that look hand-forged, metal dark with age or deliberate shine.
My hand reaches for the latch before I consciously decide to touch it. The metal is cold enough to burn exposed skin, and when I test the mechanism, it moves smoothly despite its apparent age.
Unlocked.
I should run.
I should turn around and take my chances with the forest, with the cold, with anything except walking uninvited into a place that radiates danger the way normal buildings radiate heat.
But the door is already swinging open under my tentative push, revealing darkness beyond that smells of smoke and something else, something that makes my brain want to flee even as my higher functions insist I need help, need warmth, need anything except freezing to death in the November night.
I step inside, and the ceiling seems to reach up the entire three stories. Why they need an opening this big, I have no idea.
The door closes behind me with a sound like finality.
And in the center of the vast space that opens before me, surrounded by shadow and silence, a flame burns inside a crystal dome, colors shifting and dancing in ways that fire shouldn’t move, slowly dying like something that’s been waiting a very long time to extinguish.
What have I just walked into?