8. Wren
WREN
EVERYTHING IS A SNAKE UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE
My father’s heavy, old hiking boots are a betrayal of everything I value about modern civilization, and the left one has a lace that comes undone every three hundred yards regardless of how many times I knot it.
I’m currently six hundred yards up the North Ridge trail, which means I’ve stopped twice to address the lace and approximately forty times to question my life choices.
I hate hiking. And when I say hate, I don’t mean that I prefer the treadmill or a casual stroll.
I mean I find the entire concept of moving vertically through a landscape that actively wants to trip, bite, or scratch you to be a personal insult.
Nature is fine from a distance—preferably through a triple-paned window with a glass of wine—but out here, it’s just a series of logistical hurdles made of dirt.
The trail camera is another half-mile up, strapped to an ancient hemlock that marks the boundary of what my father used to call the Deep Quiet.
I call it the place where cell service goes to die.
I’m out here because one of our high-paying ‘investigators’ complained that the sensors on camera four were glitching, and in the world of high-stakes cryptid marketing, a dark screen is a lost lead.
A branch catches the shoulder of my flannel shirt, jerking me back a step.
I mutter a word that would make Marge reach for the dish soap.
My calves are screaming, the dull, rhythmic ache reminding me I spent the last four years in an art history library where the steepest incline was the ramp to the restricted archives.
I am not built for the Cascades. I am built for climate-controlled galleries and soft lighting.
I stop to catch my breath, leaning my damp forehead against a moss-covered trunk.
The thick, wet air carries the scent of rotting pine needles and something sharp, like ozone.
It’s quiet out here, but not a peaceful quiet.
The silence here feels crowded, like the forest is holding its breath while it watches me struggle with my own cardiovascular system.
I pull my water bottle from the side pocket of my pack, the plastic crinkling loudly in the stillness.
I take a sip, then another, trying to ignore the fact that the dampness of my socks is starting to feel like a permanent state of being.
This is a chore. A cold, muddy, vertical chore that I’m doing because the Cassidy Lodge bank account is currently a series of red numbers screaming for help.
I start moving again, boots squelching in a patch of gray mud.
Every rustle in the undergrowth makes my neck prickle.
I know, intellectually, that there are no bears this close to the trail during the day.
I know that cougars are solitary and generally disinterested in grumpy lodge owners.
But my brain doesn’t care about silly facts like that when I’m in the woods.
Out here, my brain operates on a very simple, very primal binary: is it a stick, or is it a snake?
I round a sharp bend where the trail narrows between two massive granite boulders.
The ground is littered with debris from last night’s wind.
I’m looking at my feet, carefully navigating a slick patch of shale, when a long, dark, undulating shape catches the corner of my eye.
It’s coiled near the base of a fern, positioned exactly where my next step is supposed to land.
“Gah!” The sound that leaves my throat is not human. It is a high-pitched, undignified screech that echoes off the rocks.
I launch myself backward, boots skidding on the shale.
Arms windmilling, I perform a desperate, uncoordinated dance of survival that ends with me flat on my ass in a patch of damp clover.
My heart is a frantic bird hitting the inside of my ribs.
I scramble back, hands scraping against the dirt, waiting for the hiss, the strike.
The snake doesn’t move. It stays perfectly still, its dark, weathered skin catching the filtered sunlight.
I squint at it through the haze of my own adrenaline.
Not a snake, at all. It’s a length of old, frayed climbing rope, half-buried in the duff and stained dark by years of rain.
Some hiker probably dropped it a decade ago.
I sit there in the mud, my breath coming in jagged, shaky hitches.
The terror recedes, replaced by a hot, prickling wave of embarrassment that nobody is even around to see.
I let out a sharp, breathless laugh that sounds a little too much like a sob.
I am an adult woman with a degree. I am the mastermind behind a viral marketing phenomenon.
And I was just defeated by a piece of nylon cordage.
“Nice work, Wren,” I whisper to the empty trees. “Real survivalist energy there.”
I wipe my hands on my jeans, leaving dark, muddy streaks across my thighs.
The laughter helps break the tension that’s been coiling in my gut since I left the lodge.
I stand up, brushing the clover off my seat, and pointedly step over the rope.
I don’t look back at it. I have a job to do, and I’m already twenty minutes behind my internal schedule.
The trail levels out as I approach the hemlock grove.
The light here is different, dimmer as it filters through a canopy so thick it feels like a cathedral ceiling.
This is where I mounted camera four, tucked into a notch in the bark where it has a clear view of the game trail leading down to the creek.
It’s the sweet spot. We’ve caught three shadow sightings here in the last week, all of which I’ve carefully cropped and filtered for the hotline’s Instagram.
I slow my pace as the tree comes into view. I’m about fifty yards away when I see a flash of movement. It isn’t a guest. The CRU guys wear enough neon and Gore-Tex to be seen from orbit. This is a dark, muted shape, moving with a fluid, heavy grace that doesn’t belong to a tourist.
Stopping, I sink low behind a fallen log. My heart starts that bird-thumping thing again, but this time it isn’t the rope-snake adrenaline. It’s a cold, sharp curiosity. I watch through a gap in the rotting wood and stifle a gasp.
Rowan.
He’s standing by the hemlock, his back to me.
Somehow, he’s more massive here in the forest than he was in my cramped office.
He’s wearing a flannel shirt that looks like it was tailored for a giant, and his shoulders seem to span the entire width of the trail.
He isn’t moving like a man out for a stroll. He’s focused.
I watch as he reaches up. He doesn’t have to stand on his toes; he just extends an arm, his hand easily reaching the height where I had to use a step-stool to mount the camera.
I hold my breath as he grips the camera housing. He turns it. It’s a slow, deliberate movement, rotating the lens away from the game trail and toward the uninteresting trunk of a nearby cedar.
My stomach drops. This whole time, the camera wasn’t glitching.
There’s nothing wrong with its batteries or sensors.
The red notifications on my dashboard, the complaints from the birdwatchers, the missing data…
It’s all because of Rowan. He’s been out here, methodically blinding my eyes in the forest.
He steps back, nodding once to himself, and then he simply... vanishes into the shadow of the hemlock. It’s as if the forest absorbed him. One second he’s solid, and the next, there is nothing but the shifting light on the moss.
I stay behind the log for a long time, the dampness of the earth seeping into my knees.
My brain is trying to file this under Eccentric Local Behavior.
He’s a conservationist, I tell myself. He hates the tourists.
He’s just protecting the wildlife from the intrusion of technology.
It’s a bit extreme, but it’s logical. It’s a human reaction to a modern problem.
Except, nothing about what I just saw feels human. The way he moved and vanished is all wrong. It’s a piece of a puzzle that I’ve been trying to force into the wrong box.
I think back to last night. Everything he said in my office was true.
And I laughed at him. I can see it now, as clear as a high-def playback—the way his jaw had tightened, the brief, flickering shadow of something that wasn’t anger.
It was a quiet, centuries-old patience. He had looked at me the way a mountain looks at a summer storm.
He had told me exactly who and what he was, and I had patted his hand and told him he was ‘just a guy.’ I had commended him for being so committed to the act.
A cold shiver that has nothing to do with the mountain air crawls up my spine. I hadn’t been laughing at a bit. I had been laughing at a confession.
I look at the hemlock tree, at the camera now staring uselessly at a patch of bark. I came out here to fix a technical error. Instead, I found the boundary of a world I don’t know how to navigate.
Holy shit. He wasn’t joking.
I stand up, my legs feeling heavy and strange, as if the gravity of the ridge has suddenly doubled.
I don’t go to the camera to fix the angle, turning instead to start the long, muddy walk back down the trail.
I don’t care about the boots or even the stupid shoelace that keeps loosening.
I need to get back to the lodge, to the fluorescent lights and the humming computers, and try to figure out how to apologize to a man who might be a myth.
I don’t look back at the Deep Quiet because I have the feeling that if I do, I might see him watching me. And for the first time in my life, I’m not sure if that’s a shadow I want to catch on film.
The descent is worse. It always is. Gravity is a cruel bitch who wants to see you face-plant into a patch of stinging nettles.
Every step down the North Ridge is a jarring impact that vibrates through my teeth, and my knees are currently sending me a very clear, very loud cease-and-desist letter.
But the physical pain is almost a relief compared to the mental gymnastics I’m performing.
I’m replaying every interaction I’ve had with Rowan—every dry remark, every silent entrance, every time I treated his seven-foot-two frame as just a quirk of the genetics in this particular valley.
I stop at the rock bend, the site of my glorious victory over the climbing rope.
The rope is still there, looking even more like a piece of garbage and less like a predator than it had ten minutes ago.
I don’t laugh this time. Hot, prickly shame crawls up my neck.
I think about last night in the office and how I patted his arm, which probably has enough muscle density to snap a cedar sapling, and told him he was being “meta.”
“God, Wren,” I mutter, my voice sounding thin against the vastness of the trees. “You didn’t just miss the point. You invited the point to lunch and then told it its fly was down.”
I had been so condescending. I’d treated him like a child playing dress-up, or a lonely man desperate for a role to play.
I’d offered him peach cobbler as a consolation prize for his performance.
The memory of it makes me want to crawl into a hollow log and stay there until the next century.
He had stood there, in that cramped office, looking at me with those eyes that I now realize weren’t just intense, but ancient.
He had tried to hand me the most vulnerable, dangerous truth a creature like him could possibly possess, and I had turned it into a marketing win.
I’d practically given him a gold star for staying in character.
The guilt is a physical weight, heavier than my pack.
I think about my dad. He must have known.
All those Deep Quiet jokes, and him always leaving the North Ridge alone, the cryptic references to quiet neighbors when we had no neighbors.
The Cassidy family hadn’t just been lodge owners; we’d been the administrative assistants for a myth.
And here I was, the failure of a daughter who’d come home and turned the whole thing into a viral circus for the sake of a few room bookings and a TikTok following.
I reach the lower trail, where the lodge finally comes into view through the thinning trees. The peeling paint and sagging porch look different now. A failing fortress instead of just a financial burden.
A group of tourists are near the trailhead, brandishing thermal scanners like they’re in a low-budget sci-fi movie. I have a sudden, violent urge to tell them all to go home. To pack up their ring lights and their “research” and leave this mountain alone.
But I can’t. I’m the one who invited them with the beacon I built. I’m the one who laughed at the guy who was trying to tell me the beacon was burning him.
Marge is standing on the back porch, shaking out a rug.
She looks up, her keen eyes taking in my muddy state, my shaken expression, and the way I’m practically vibrating with a new, terrifying kind of clarity.
She doesn’t ask if I fixed the camera, just watches me with a knowing, heavy stillness that confirms everything I just realized on the ridge.
Rowan isn’t an eccentric local or a method actor.
He’s the thing I’ve been selling, and I’ve been selling him by the pound while he watched me from the shadows.
I walk toward the back door, gravel crunching under my boots, every sound feeling like an indictment.
I need to find him. I need to apologize.
I need to figure out how to stop the fire I’ve started before it consumes the very thing it was meant to save.
Most of all, I need to figure out how to look at him again, knowing that the man I’ve been teasing is the guardian of the ground I’m standing on.
I thought I was running a hoax. It turns out, I’m the only one who didn’t know the truth.