3. Rowan #2
I look down at my hands. They’re steady, but my skin feels tight.
I expected her to fold. I expected her to be easily frightened like all the others.
Instead, she’s a rock in the middle of my stream, and the water is starting to pile up against her.
It’s an unfamiliar sensation. And it irritates me deeply.
I head deeper into the woods, my movements silent and efficient once more.
There is work to be done. The bees need tending, and the drone-frightened elk need to be led back to the high meadows.
But as I move through the dappled light, I find myself replaying the encounter.
She didn’t shrink from me. No, she treated an ancient forest guardian like an uninvited guest at a dinner party.
She’s going to be a problem. Not just the hotline, but the woman herself.
She doesn’t respect the rules of the veil.
Doesn’t respect the hierarchy of the mountain.
She is fire in human form, small but persistent, and if I don’t find a way to put her out, she’s going to burn everything I’ve worked to protect.
At the edge of the upper meadow, I stop. The sun is high now, and the forest is full of the sounds of summer—wind singing through the leaves, bees buzzing, and the distant, muffled thud of a lodge door closing miles away. I have survived the rot and the fire. I can survive a woman with a phone.
But for the first time in a century, I’m not entirely sure how the season is going to end.
I look toward the lodge, hidden behind the rise of the ridge.
Her scent, something like cedar and old paper, lingers in the air.
It’s a wholly human scent, tinged with anxiety, but it has an edge I haven’t smelled before.
It’s the scent of someone who isn’t going to go away just because the shadows get long.
Shaking my head, I disappear into the trees.
I need to check the hives. I need to be among things that understand their place in the world.
Because right now, the only thing I know for certain is that I am a seven-foot-tall creature who was just told to move along by a girl in oversized boots.
What makes it worse is that I think she meant it.
I spend the next few hours in a state of clinical, focused activity, which usually settles the hum in my blood.
I reset a deadfall that had shifted too close to a fox den.
I clear a clogged drainage pipe under the access road, pulling out a bunch of plastic wrappers and a soggy, discarded brochure for the lodge.
I even make a point of guiding a particularly confused family of tourists away from the boggy ground near the marsh by subtly snapping a heavy branch in the opposite direction.
They scrambled toward the gravel path like startled deer, their voices high and frantic. It always works.
But the memory of Wren remains stuck in my mind like a burr in a wolf’s coat.
I keep seeing her unflinching gaze. I have lived long enough to remember when humans saw me and fell to their knees in prayer or grabbed a pitchfork in a fit of holy terror.
Even the sensible ones, the ones who didn’t believe in monsters, usually suffered a momentary collapse of their internal logic when confronted with the sheer, undeniable physical fact of my presence.
They folded because the world stopped making sense, and I was the reason why.
Wren didn’t fold. She simply looked at me as if I were a particularly large, particularly inconvenient boulder that had rolled onto her driveway.
It was more than the lack of fear; it was the lack of acknowledgment.
To her, I wasn’t an ancient guardian or a creature of myth.
I was just a local causing a headache. To her, I was a trespasser in a forest that has known my heartbeat since the first cedar was planted here.
When the sun begins to dip, I find myself standing at the crest of the ridge again, watching the lights in the lodge flicker on one by one.
From here, the building looks fragile, a collection of rotting wood and desperate hopes clinging to the side of the mountain.
It’s a tiny, loud spark in a very deep dark.
I should feel the usual detached pity I feel for all human structures, because they all succumb to the rot and the rain eventually.
But for the first time in my long life, I feel a flicker of something else. A private, confused disgust.
I spoke to her with absolute authority, and it bounced off her like a pebble off granite.
I’m not used to being disregarded, and I’m certainly not used to being told where to find a cave.
The fact that my presence—my actual, physical self—wasn’t enough to make her stop that digital siren song is a violation of the natural order I have spent centuries maintaining.
She’s a problem I can’t categorize and solve.
Usually, if a human is troublesome, I wait.
I wait for them to grow old, or move away, or lose interest. But she has the Cassidy blood in her, and if her ancestors were any indication, that means she possesses a stubbornness that can outlast a drought.
I turn away from the lodge, my shadow stretching long and jagged across the moss.
The hotline will continue to ring. The ring lights will continue to glow.
And I will continue to be a ghost in my own home, watching over a woman who is far too busy checking her balance sheet to be afraid of the dark.
It is a deeply irritating prospect. And as I slip back into the deeper shadows of the valley, I find myself wondering, with a reluctant and sour curiosity, what she would do if I showed up at her front door. Probably tell me I’m late for dinner.