HUNTED THINGS

The crack came out of nowhere, a sharp violent sound that split the night in two and rolled through the trees like something hunting for me by echo alone. I turned so fast that my boots slid across the rain-soaked moss and I went down hard, mud splashing across my arms, the cold of the forest floor seeping immediately into my skin as I tried to make sense of the noise and the sudden dread settling over me. I didn’t know what the hell was happening, but every instinct in my body told me that I needed to run, that I needed to get as far from whatever had made that sound as the darkness would allow.

It didn’t matter. I couldn’t get my footing in time. By the time I lifted my head, she was already standing over me. Her silhouette rose out of the shifting shadows, tall and crooked, a figure shaped by the moon rather than carved by anything human. The light fell around her like a pale halo, outlining the hunch of her back, the ridges of her ribs, and the bare curve of her hip, but her face hid inside the deeper pockets of night, as if the woods themselves refused to reveal her fully. For a moment she didn’t move, and in that stillness the entire forest seemed to inhale with her.

Then the ground began to vibrate.

At first it felt like my pulse trying to escape my body through the soil, a frantic pounding that confused my senses, but the vibration grew steadily, deepening into something almost musical, a low humming pressure that climbed the trunks of the trees and settled inside my chest like a second heartbeat. It swelled until it shaped itself into a cadence, and then into something unmistakably like a song.

“Ohemz tèh namicata barish at’x.”

This bitch was actually chanting. Her words seeped into the rhythm beneath us, thickening the air around my face, merging with the forest in a way that made it feel alive and ancient, as if each syllable stirred something awake in the roots below. I crab-walked backward through the mud, my palms slipping on wet leaves, my breath coming out in little panicked bursts that made my vision swim. Tears blurred the world as I tried to put distance between us, but she followed with slow patient steps, the kind of steps taken by something that already knows it has won.

Her foot slammed into my chest. The force knocked the sound out of me and sent stars bursting across my vision, not just in the sky above but swirling through the darkness like sparks kicked up by her touch. The pressure pinned me to the earth. As she bent toward me, the stench of her breath washed hot across my face, something rancid and damp, something that reminded me of rot and soil and a hunger older than any language she could chant.

Her face finally came into view. Teeth bared. Eyes too bright. Skin stretched tight across something that might have once been human.

“You are mine now,” she said.

My eyes flew open.

The ceiling hovered above me in the dim light, a familiar shape that brought no comfort because my pulse was still slamming through my body so hard it felt like it might knock my bones loose. Sweat clung to me in thick sheets and the air in the bedroom felt too warm, too close, too stagnant to belong to the world I had just woken into. For several seconds I couldn’t move. I could only listen to the frantic rhythm of my own breathing and wait for my mind to catch up to the fact that I was safe, or at least as safe as I ever would be again.

“Theo, are you okay?”

Ben’s voice came from beside me. It was soft with sleep, warm in the way only he could be at three in the morning, and when his hand slid across my back it grounded me in a way nothing else ever had. He started rubbing slow circles between my shoulder blades and murmured something tender into the pillow, and the simple kindness of the gesture made my throat tighten. He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve any of it. I had known that getting close to him would eventually pull him into the orbit of whatever hunted me, whatever whispered to me at night and followed me into my dreams, but he had been so sweet and so earnest and so impossibly cute that I had let the danger feel small for a while, small enough to pretend it wasn’t real.

“I’m fine, babe,” I said, even though the lie tasted like earth and fear on my tongue. “Just another nightmare.”

And somewhere deep inside me, beneath the steady pressure of Ben’s hand and the quiet of our bedroom, the forest hummed as though it wanted me to know the night wasn’t finished with me yet.