Some people run away for freedom.
I ran for silence.
For the kind of quiet that didn't carry voices through walls. For a town where no one would look at me like I was already broken. I wanted to live in a place where grief wasn't a mirror everyone forced me to stare into.
Ashwood promised obscurity. A tiny town tucked between forest and fog, where cell reception was patchy and the nights were too dark to see your own shadow. It sounded perfect. Hidden. Forgotten. Dead things didn't chase you in dead places.
I thought if I disappeared into the trees, the past wouldn't follow.
I was wrong.
---
The house I rented was old—creaking floors, a crooked porch, wallpaper that peeled like shedding skin. The attic door clicked by itself sometimes. One window wouldn't close all the way, and the lights flickered if I breathed too hard. But it was mine. No one had lived in it for years, the landlord said. I didn't ask why.
I unpacked slowly that first night, too exhausted to cry. My phone buzzed only once. A single text from my mother:
We miss you. Come home.
I didn't answer.
---
The memory of home was not warm. It was ash and shattered porcelain.
My mother used to paint when I was little. Vivid things—bright flowers, starry skies. Then my father died, and her art turned dark. Faces with no eyes. Mouths open in screams. She started talking to things that weren't there. Sometimes she forgot to eat. Sometimes she forgot I existed.
I became the caretaker. The cook. The girl who cleaned up broken picture frames and wiped away blood from wrists she claimed had scraped against "a nail."
Then there was Theo.
He was the only good thing in that place. My older brother by two years. Protector. Best friend. The reason I didn't shatter completely. He used to climb into my bed when the fighting got too loud and read me poetry. Not the nice kind. The sharp kind. The kind that bled truths.
He told me the world was broken but we didn't have to be.
Until the night he died.
They said it was an accident. A car crash. But I knew. I felt something else the moment I got the call. The air around me went cold. The shadows seemed to breathe.
His eyes had been wide open in the coffin. That wasn't normal, was it?
He had a mark on his throat.
Like a bite.
I tried to tell them. The doctors. My mom. The pastor. No one listened. They thought grief made me paranoid. They said I was fragile. Hysterical.
Maybe I was.
But I saw that mark. I remember the strange man at Theo's funeral, standing in the back, smiling.
He wasn't family.
He didn't belong.
And he didn't blink the entire time.
---
I left home three months after Theo died. Sold what little I owned. Took a bus as far as I could afford. Ashwood was on the map like a footnote. One blinking streetlight, a crumbling church, and a forest so dense it looked like it could swallow the sky.
It felt right. Like a story no one wanted to read anymore.
But it never occurred to me that hiding might put me right where they wanted me.
---
I spent my first full day in Ashwood trying to stay upright. The market on Main Street was open. I bought candles. Local honey. A handmade bracelet from an old woman who touched my wrist and said, "The blood sings too loud in you, child."
I laughed it off.
But her eyes lingered.
Back home, I would've dismissed it as small-town weirdness. But here, it felt like something ancient had just sniffed me out.
That night, I burned one of the candles. Lavender and thyme. I curled into bed with a book I couldn't focus on and tried to silence the memory of Theo's face in the coffin. His wide eyes. That bite.
I remembered how he used to tuck me in and tell me there were no monsters.
He lied.
---
It started small.
A scrape on the window.
Whispers in the hallway.
Lights flickering without reason.
Then I began to dream. Always the same—running through the woods, branches clawing at my skin, something chasing me. Fangs. Crimson eyes. Hands that reached for my throat.
I'd wake up gasping, my heart hammering against my ribs like it wanted out. My sheets damp with sweat. My fingers clenched like I'd been fighting something in my sleep.
Some mornings, I'd find dirt under my nails.
One night, I woke up at the edge of the woods behind the house. Barefoot. Shivering. My feet were muddy. There were scratches on my arms.
I didn't remember leaving my bed.
---
I started journaling. Writing helped keep me grounded. I scribbled in the margins of my notebooks, on receipts, in the corners of library books when no one was looking.
Day 4: I heard a voice last night. My name. Twice. It was behind me. No one was there.
Day 6: The handprints came back. This time on the mirror in the hallway. They were too high for me to reach.
Day 9: Someone left flowers on my doorstep. Black dahlias. Who does that?
Day 11: I had a dream about Theo. He said, "They're coming."
Day 14: Something licked my ankle in my sleep. I woke up screaming.
Day 17: There's something moving in the attic.
---
The Hollow Café became my sanctuary. I brought my laptop there, pretending to write job applications. The barista, Eva, never asked questions. She just brought me tea and let me be. Her kindness felt borrowed, like she was offering warmth that didn't belong to her.
"You look haunted," she said once.
"I am."
She nodded, like that made perfect sense. "They always come here eventually."
I wanted to ask her what she meant. But fear held my mouth shut.
---
One rainy afternoon, I wandered into the Ashwood town records office. It was nearly empty. Dusty file cabinets and yellowing paper lined the walls. It smelled like mildew and secrets.
I asked for information on unexplained deaths.
The woman behind the counter didn't even blink. She slid a folder across the desk like she'd been waiting.
Inside were photos. Reports. People who had vanished. Most young. Most women. Some bore familiar marks.
Like Theo's.
Like mine.
My hands shook as I turned the pages. Some of the faces looked like mine. Pale. Wide-eyed. Terrified.
One had my birthday.
I stumbled out into the rain, heart pounding, and for the first time since arriving, I understood—Ashwood was not just a place to run to.
It was a place people disappeared from.
And I had walked right into its mouth.
---
That night, I found a letter slipped under my door.
No return address. No name.
Just a single line:
"They have chosen you."
My stomach turned to ice.
I didn't sleep. I didn't breathe right. I sat in bed holding a kitchen knife and waiting for dawn. Every creak in the floorboards sounded like footsteps. Every shadow looked like it might move.
The woods pulsed outside my window.
I could feel him again.
Crimson eyes. Cold skin. The weight of his gaze, like iron. Like possession.
And something else.
Hunger.
Not just for my body.
For me.
Whatever made me different—whatever sang in my blood—he could hear it.
So could the other one.
The wolf.
I hadn't seen him yet, but I knew he was close.
Sometimes I heard howling, far too close to town.
Sometimes I saw pawprints by my porch. Big ones. Deep ones.
One night, a claw dragged across my bedroom wall. Not a scratch—a mark. A warning.
---
They were circling.
Watching.
Waiting for me to break.
And all I could think was: Why me?
But I knew.
It started with Theo. Whatever took him—whatever left that mark—had found the same taste in me. And it would not stop.
Not until I was claimed.
Not until I chose.
Or bled.
Whichever came first.