The ASHWOOD Blood

The road to Hollow Pine stopped believing in itself about six miles past the last gas station, narrowing from two lanes to one and then, for a stretch Wren was fairly sure her GPS had invented out of spite, to something that was more suggestion than pavement. She drove it anyway, both hands on the wheel, watching the trees close in overhead until the late afternoon light came down through the canopy in coins instead of sheets.

Her grandmother had lived out here for forty years. Wren had visited exactly four times in her life, and never past the age of eight, and she had no memory of the drive at all — only of arriving, of the smell of woodsmoke and cedar, of a woman with Wren's own gray eyes crouching down to look at her like she was something precious and slightly alarming at the same time.

The cabin, when it finally appeared, looked smaller than memory had made it and somehow more solid, like it had grown into the hillside rather than been built on top of it. Dark timber, a steep roof shedding the season's first fallen leaves, a porch that sagged in the middle the way old porches do when they've held up a lot of years and a lot of weather. Wren parked, cut the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the quiet.

It wasn't really quiet. That was the first thing she noticed once she stopped expecting city noise to fill the gaps. There was wind, and somewhere underneath the wind, water — a creek she couldn't see. Birds arguing over something in the branches. And under all of it, so faint she told herself she'd imagined it, something that might have been breathing that wasn't her own.

She got out of the car anyway. Whatever else Wren Calloway was — tired, underslept, freshly unemployed from a vet clinic that hadn't survived its own landlord's greed, and now the reluctant owner of a house six hours from anyone she knew — she wasn't a woman who let an empty forest spook her out of her own inheritance.

The key her grandmother's lawyer had mailed her fit the lock on the first try, which felt like it should have meant something. Inside smelled like dust and dried herbs and, underneath that, the ghost of her grandmother's soap — lavender, cheap, familiar in a way that made Wren's throat go tight before she'd even set down her bag.

"Okay," she said out loud, to no one. "Okay, Gran. Let's see what you left me."

• • •

The unpacking took an hour and told her almost nothing. Margaret Calloway — no, Wren corrected herself, catching the name on the property deed, Margaret Ashwood Calloway, a middle name Wren had never once heard used — had lived plainly. A narrow bed. A woodstove blacked with use. Shelves of paperback mysteries with cracked spines, and one locked cabinet in the corner of the bedroom that the lawyer's letter hadn't mentioned and the estate inventory hadn't listed, which was exactly the kind of detail that made the back of Wren's neck prickle with something that wasn't quite curiosity and wasn't quite dread.

She didn't have a key for it. She told herself that was a problem for tomorrow.

By the time she'd gotten a fire going and eaten a sad dinner of crackers and the one apple that had survived the drive, the light outside had gone the deep blue of early dark, the kind that comes fast under trees. Wren stepped out onto the sagging porch with a mug of tea she didn't really want, mostly for an excuse to breathe air that didn't smell like a stranger's dust.

That was when she saw it.

Not clearly — nothing about it was clear. A shape at the very edge of where the porch light gave out and the tree line took over, low and long and still in a way that no dog she'd ever treated held still. Wren's training kicked in before her fear did; she catalogued size, posture, the faint pale gleam of eyes catching what little light there was, and some detached clinical part of her brain said, that is not a dog, that is considerably too large to be a dog, before the rest of her caught up and her pulse did something complicated in her throat.

She didn't move. Some old animal instinct she didn't know she had told her that moving was the wrong call.

For three full seconds — she counted them later, lying awake, trying to make the number smaller than it had felt — the shape watched her, and she watched it back. Then it turned, unhurried, almost deliberate, and dissolved into the dark between the trees like it had never been there at all.

Wren went inside. She locked a door that she was fairly sure hadn't been locked in a decade, and lay in her grandmother's bed listening to her own heartbeat, and did not sleep for a long time.

She told herself, several times, that it had been a very large coyote.

She did not, even once, believe it.

Morning made everything smaller and more ordinary, the way mornings tended to, and by the time Wren had made coffee in a percolator she'd had to relearn how to use, the shape in the trees had been demoted in her mind from omen to anecdote.

Something to mention, lightly, to whoever ran the local hardware store. A joke about big-city girls jumping at forest noises. Something she'd laugh about later, once she'd settled into the strange rhythm of this place and remembered that not every unexplained movement in the woods meant something.

At least, that was what she told herself.

The coffee, unfortunately, did nothing to improve her mood.

It tasted like someone had boiled a handful of old pennies and then strained the result through a sock.

Wren took one sip, stared at the mug, and decided she had officially reached the limit of things she was willing to tolerate before breakfast.

Hollow Pine turned out to be four blocks of Main Street, a gas station th