21. Wren
WREN
THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A JOKE
The wind is picking up, a low, persistent moan that rattles the panes of the lobby window.
Outside, the parking lot is a study in desolation, the single SUV belonging to the birdwatchers having long since gone dark.
The forest edge is no longer a collection of individual trees but a solid wall of shifting black, swaying in a rhythm that feels less like nature and more like a warning.
Opening the window, I adjust the Cassidy Lodge sign, though I know it’s still leaning five degrees to the left, stubborn and rotting in the damp air.
I pull my mother’s old cardigan tighter around my shoulders, the wool smelling faintly of her jasmine perfume.
The silence in the lodge is heavy tonight, the kind that settles into your marrow and makes you notice every floorboard that contracts against the cold.
I should go to bed, but the Bigfoot Hotline dashboard is glowing on my laptop, a series of red notifications blinking like a slow, electronic pulse.
It’s been a quiet evening. I’ve only received a few blurry photos of tree stumps and a voicemail from a man in Ohio who is convinced he heard a Sasquatch reciting Gregorian chants.
I sit back down and tap a pen against the oak desk, watching the clock tick toward ten.
The viral storm I kicked up has settled into a predictable hum of manageable chaos, a steady stream of tourists who buy shirts and leave before the real weather hits.
I’ve become good at the curation of mystery, the strategic deletion of anything that looks too much like Rowan.
It’s a business model built on a lie that keeps the lights on, a high-stakes joke that I’ve learned to tell with a straight face.
A new notification pings, the sound sharp in the quiet room.
It’s a direct call, not a voicemail. Most people don’t call this late unless they’re drunk or trying to be funny, but the number on the screen isn’t from the usual list of repeat pranksters.
It’s a local area code, the kind that usually belongs to a hiker who’s realized they’ve stayed out past the light.
I hit the speaker button, my voice dropping into the practiced, professional lilt of a woman who spends her days talking to people who want to see monsters.
“Bigfoot Hotline, what did you see?” I say, the words a familiar script that usually ends in a laugh.
There is no laugh on the other end. There is only the sound of ragged, wet breathing and the unmistakable whistle of wind through a microphone.
It’s a jagged, desperate sound that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
I sit up straighter, the cardigan sliding off one shoulder.
The levity I usually bring to these calls evaporates, replaced by a cold, sudden weight in the pit of my stomach.
“Hello? This is Wren at Cassidy Lodge. Can you hear me?”
“Help,” a voice rasps. It’s a man, his words thin and trembling, the consonants catching on a throat that sounds like it’s been screaming for hours. “Please. I’m… I’m on the Eagle Crest cutoff. I think I broke my ankle. It’s so cold.”
My hand tightens around the pen until the plastic groans.
The Eagle Crest cutoff is a brutal, high-altitude trail that gets mean the second the sun drops.
It’s miles from the lodge, deep in the kind of terrain where the cell reception is a gamble and the ground is mostly loose shale and ancient roots.
I look at the window, where the first drops of sleet are starting to smear against the glass.
“Stay on the line,” I say, my voice steady even as my heart starts to hammer against my ribs. “I’m calling 911 on another line right now. Don’t hang up. Tell me your name.”
“Mark,” he says, and then a sob breaks through, a raw, unvarnished sound of pure terror. “The clouds came down so fast. I can’t see the trail. I can’t see anything. My phone is on five percent. Please don’t let me die out here.”
I grab the landline with my left hand, dialing the emergency dispatcher with trembling fingers.
I explain the situation while listening to his shallow breaths through the laptop speakers.
I’m a lodge owner, a marketing person, a woman with a useless art history degree.
I am not a rescue coordinator, but I’ve lived in these mountains long enough to know that five percent battery and a broken ankle in a sleet storm is a body found in the spring thaw.
The dispatcher’s voice is calm, a stark contrast to the panic vibrating in my ear.
“We have the coordinates from his ping, Ms. Cassidy. But with the storm hitting the ridge, we can’t get a helicopter up there.
Our SAR team is mobilizing from town, but given the road conditions on the highway, they’re at least ninety minutes out from your trailhead. Maybe more.”
“Ninety minutes?” I look at the thermometer on the wall. It’s dropping toward freezing, and the wind is hitting forty miles per hour. “He’s in shock, and he’s wet. He doesn’t have ninety minutes.”
“We’re moving as fast as we can,” the dispatcher says. “Tell him to stay put and stay warm. We’ll be there as soon as it’s safe.”
I hang up the landline, my chest feeling like it’s being squeezed by a cold, iron band.
I look back at the dashboard. Mark is still there, his breathing getting slower, more rhythmic.
It’s the sound of a body starting to give up, of a mind retreating into the quiet of hypothermia.
I know this sound. I’ve heard it in the stories my father told that usually ended with a quiet funeral and a folded flag.
The hotline was supposed to be a joke. It was supposed to be about stolen Crocs and blurry photos and keeping the bank from taking my house.
It was never supposed to be the only thing standing between a man and his life.
I reach into my pocket and pull out my personal phone.
My thumb hovers over Rowan’s name, the screen glowing with a light that feels too bright for the room.
I am a responsible adult. I called the professionals.
I did everything by the book. But the book is ninety minutes away and the mountain is right outside my door.
Rowan can move through the old growth like he’s part of the air, and he can carry a man down a ridge without breaking a sweat.
I think about the trust we’ve built, a fragile, impossible thing born of brownies and secret hikes.
I hit the call button. He answers on the first ring, his voice a low, resonant rumble that grounds me instantly. He doesn’t say hello. He just waits, his silence a question that I’ve been learning since we entered into our partnership.
“Rowan,” I say, and my voice breaks, the fear I’ve been holding back finally leaking through. “There’s a hiker. His name is Mark. He’s on the Eagle Crest cutoff. Broken ankle, stage one hypothermia. SAR is ninety minutes out. The storm is… it’s bad, Rowan. He’s not going to make it.”
There is a beat of silence on the other end, the kind of stillness that only someone who has lived for centuries can truly master. I can hear the wind on his end too, but it sounds different—deeper, more ferocious. He’s already outside. He’s already watching the ridge.
“I know,” he says. The words are short, unadorned, and heavy with the weight of his office. “The air turned an hour ago. He’s near the split where the shale slides.”
“Rowan, you can’t let them see you,” I whisper, the logic of our arrangement clawing at the edges of my panic. “SAR is on the way. If you go, if you help him, you’re taking a risk. A huge one.”
“He is in my territory,” Rowan says. There is no anger in his voice, only a flat, ancient certainty. “I am the Guardian. The risk doesn’t matter.”
I close my eyes, leaning my forehead against the cool glass of the window.
This is the moment. The pivot. I’m asking a man who has spent hundreds of years hiding from humanity to walk right into the middle of a rescue operation.
I’m asking him to be the monster the world thinks he is so he can save a man the world will forget.
If he gets caught, if a thermal camera catches his heat signature or a body camera records his face, the lodge is gone.
His peace is gone. Everything we’ve built becomes a target.
“Go,” I say, and the word feels like a confession. “Please, Rowan. Just—be careful. Don’t let them see what you are.”
“Wren.” My name sounds like a complete sentence when he says it. “Stay by the phone. I’ll find him.”
The line goes dead. I stand in the lobby, clutching the phone to my chest and watching the shadows dance across the gravel lot.
The Bigfoot Hotline is still pinging, a relentless pulse of digital noise, but I don’t look at it.
I look at the dark wall of the forest, imagining him moving through it, the bark of his skin matching the hemlocks, his heart beating in time with the mountain.
The joke is over. The marketing gimmick has become a lifeline, and the man I’m falling for is walking into a storm that could destroy us both.
I sit back down at the desk and start to wait, the ticking of the clock sounding like the slow, steady heartbeat of a secret that’s finally getting too big to keep.
I pick up the hotline phone again. Mark is still there, his voice a soft, unintelligible murmur.
He’s fading. I can feel it through the speaker, the way the light in a room dimming before a fuse blows.
I start to talk to him, telling him about the lodge, about the peach cobbler Marge makes on Sundays, about the way the light hits the ridge at sunrise.
I talk to him because it’s the only thing I can do, a steady stream of human noise to pull him back from the edge of the dark.
“Hang on, Mark,” I say, my eyes fixed on the tree line. “Someone is coming. You just have to wait.”
I don’t tell him that the someone coming isn’t quite human.
I don’t tell him that he’s about to be rescued by a legend.
I just keep talking, watching the storm whip the trees into a frenzy, waiting for a sign that the mountain is through with its secrets for the night.
The sleet turns to snow, thick and heavy, and as the world outside turns white, I realize that I stopped being a skeptic a long time ago.
I’m a believer now, and the person I believe in is out there, somewhere in the cold, proving that some myths are worth the risk.
Seconds turn into minutes, each one stretching like pulled taffy.
The glowing screen of my laptop is a beacon of artificial light against the encroaching gloom of the lobby.
Mark’s breathing has become a rhythmic, terrifying rattle, the sound of a body shutting down its extremities to protect a fading core.
Every time he goes silent for more than ten seconds, I prompt him again, my voice cracking with a desperation I can’t quite hide.
I tell him about the first time I saw a black bear cub in the parking lot, about the way the lodge floorboards groan in July, anything to keep him tethered to the world of the living.
I’m not just a woman on a phone anymore.
I’m more a conductor trying to manage two separate, colliding realities.
On the landline, I have the SAR dispatcher giving me agonizingly slow updates.
The first rescue vehicle is still twenty miles out, crawling through a mudslide on the lower pass.
On the other line, I have Rowan. I have no audio for him, no GPS ping, only the terrifying, exhilarating knowledge of what he is.
I know he’s moving faster than any human could, ignoring the slick shale and the blinding sleet that would have had a professional team turning back for their own safety.
The guilt is a cold knot in my chest. I sent him out there.
If he’s seen while saving Mark, the life he has maintained for centuries will be over.
I’m choosing a stranger’s life over Rowan’s safety, and the weight of that responsibility might actually snap my ribs.
“Mark? Mark, are you still there? Tell me about the boots you’re wearing,” I urge, my eyes fixed on the tree line. The sleet is hammering the roof now, a frantic percussion that drowns out the quiet ticking of the clock.
“Heavy... hiking... leather,” Mark whispers, his voice a ghost of a sound. “I can’t... feel... my toes, Wren. Everything is... getting quiet.”
“Don’t let it be quiet,” I snap, my heart racing. “Talk to me. Tell me why you went up there. Was it the Bigfoot? Did you come here for the hotline?”
“I wanted... to see... something real,” he rasps. “Something that... didn’t feel... like a screen.”
The irony is a bitter pill. He wanted something real, and the most real thing in these mountains is currently sprinting toward him with a strength no camera could ever truly capture.
Suddenly, the audio on the laptop spikes.
There’s a sound of crashing brush—not the frantic, heavy-footed sound of a human, but a deep, resonant snap of wood that vibrates through the speaker.
Then, a low hum. It wasn’t a voice, but a frequency, a vibration that seemed to calm the very air around the phone.
“Mark?” I murmur, leaning so close to the laptop my breath fogs the screen.
I hear a gasp on the other end, but it’s not one of pain. It’s a sharp, inhaled breath of pure, unadulterated awe. “Big,” Mark whispers, the word carrying a sudden, inexplicable clarity. “So... big. The trees... they’re moving.”
“Don’t be afraid,” I say, hot tears spilling over onto my cheeks. “He’s there to help you. He’s the one I told you about. Close your eyes, Mark. Just let him carry you.”
The line doesn’t go dead, but the wind seems to drop out of the audio, replaced by a steady, rhythmic thud.
It’s the sound of a massive heart beating near the microphone, or perhaps just the sound of the mountain itself taking a breath.
Rowan has reached him. The choice has been made.
I stay on the line for another ten minutes, listening to the silence of a man no longer alone in the dark, until the battery on Mark’s phone finally gives out.
I sit in the dark lobby, the silence now deafening.
I had called the professionals, and they were still an hour away.
I used the hotline for a rescue, and in doing so, I turned the joke into something that would leave a permanent mark on all of us.
I look out at the storm, my hands shaking as I pick up my phone and send a text into the void: Be safe. I’m waiting.
The joke is dead, and in its place is a truth so heavy I’m not sure the lodge can hold it.
I watch the snow pile against the glass, the Bigfoot Hotline logo reflecting in the dark.
I don’t care about the numbers anymore. I only care about the man who is currently becoming a hero in the dark, and the price we’ll both have to pay when the sun finally comes up.