My hair was flopping in my face and I angrily combed my fingers through it. Attempting to get it out of my eyes to no avail. The stuff never did what I told it to do and I'd long ago given up on it. Most often when I was a kid running wild in the woods, I'd had Seanmháthair hack it off for me. Something she did with an old pair of dangerous looking metal scissors I thought could probably take off a finger if you really wanted them to.

These days, I hacked it off myself with the same pair of scissors.

Only with everything going on I hadn't really thought to do it lately and the dark, unruly tangles were more tangled than normal.

A stray thought of going into my kitchen area and pulling out Seanmháthair's scissors crossed my mind, but I let it slip and ditched my phone on my bed as I rolled off the mattress. What was consuming my thought processes was Kaine's admonition I rest or go do whatever it was I did in the woods.

I didn't really care to rest anymore, not with the dreams I'd been having recently. But the woods…

The woods were calling me.

I'd been basically town bound for weeks, and that was all Vogels's fault.

My teeth ground together and a growl escaped my throat. Just thinking of the man raising my hackles.

Since my stint in a cell, I'd been avoiding the woods. Had been avoiding doing anything that might have a chance of seeming suspicious. Had been avoiding being alone and out of sight, where I wouldn't have an alibi for my whereabouts.

Which meant picking up extra shifts at Jan's. "Hanging out" with people who hadn't seen me since we'd graduated last fall. Shopping…

Gods…

I hated every minute of it. Hated every missed opportunity to be where I actually belonged.

But there was no way in hell I was letting Vogel get anything on me. Not again.

I'd been about to chew through the jailhouse walls when Malcore had finally got me out. I did not do well with being in doors.

I was not a domesticated animal. I did not like to be caged.

And I'd much rather get myself killed than go back in a cell. It'd only taken me a day behind bars to figure that out.

"Shit." I shoved at my hair again, saying the word, then prowled into my closet and went digging for something passively clean to wear.

As Kaine had put it, it was Monday. The Ritualist would be going back into reclusion until at least Friday. There would be no killing today. There would be no bodies to find. There would be no reason to give myself an alibi because there would be no crime committed today. I'd been forcibly called off of work.

I was going to the woods.

That was the end of my mental train. Woods. Me. Going.

I didn't even have a clear picture of what I was going to do when I got there or exactly where it was I was even going, but I didn't care. I pulled on a pair of cargo pants, thoughtlessly slid a jackknife I found on my floor into a hip pocket, threw a balky hoodie on over my binder, and was out the door before I could process.

Hood up, hands jammed in pockets, not caring who saw me stalk out of town.

A guy had to clear his head sometimes. Had to say fuck it and go.

"Fuck it," I ground the words out, veering off the stretch of cracked blacktop that marked the end of Cutter's Bend and the beginning of the woods.

There was no real divider between the two. No slow tapering off of civilization that gradually became forest. There was just a sharp cut. One step there were buildings, the next there were trees. Almost endless trees.

Cutter's Bend had started out as a logging town. Now it was just a little drop of human habitations stuck in amongst the trees, the nearest neighboring town about twenty odd miles away. Loggers didn't come here anymore. The last cutting that'd been done in Cutter's Bend had ended in the early nineties. The town thrived now on a tiny bit of tourism at the height of fall, and on door making.

The logging might have dried up, but the old woodworking factory was still ticking, making one thing. Doors. Lots of doors. Most of the town worked the factory and that was just fine. Most of Cutter's Bend was just fine.

Or had been until the Ritualist had shown up out of the woodwork. Like a hideous termite that'd just been hiding in the seemingly mundane life of Cutter's Bend. Waiting for… something to make him come out.

What that something was I was still trying to determine.

Motivation… What's your motivation.

I shook my head to clear the disgruntled thought away. The tree shadows were enclosing me and right now I didn't want to wrack my brain over whys. Or how comes. I wanted to get lost. To forget. To get the woods's scents to drown out the dreams and the memories both.

That was easier said than done, though.

Partly I was still hot with what I'd been dreaming when Kaine's call had pulled me out of sleep. My body felt flushed and my mind heavy. Why I wasn't sure. But the dream had been hot, I knew that. I couldn't determine what had been going on around me, but it had been hot. Cloying. And there'd been something watching me.

I could feel it. Every time I could feel the unknown thing watching me in the dream. Stalking me, as if it were the predator and I the prey. But I could never see it. Not at first. The last few nights the one image that had become clear was the dragon.

Every day the Ritualist's handiwork haunted my thoughts. And every night a dragon hunted me.

I wanted to get away from all of it.

Only the woods did nothing to sooth my nerves or muffle the creeping feeling of being watched.

I could feel it on my skin. Feel it like a tangible thing. And it didn't take me long to separate waking sensation from dream.

There was something watching me.

I'd spent too much time in the woods, learning to trust instincts most humans grew to ignore to mistake the surety of the warning going on in my head.

Shit, fuck.

Shoulders hunched, I slid along the trunks of trees and whispered my way through thick underbrush with hardly a stir of the branches. Hoping whatever it was would leave.

Would get the message I wasn't prey.

I rarely brought weapons into the forest with me. I hated guns and only on occasion carried a bow. Carried one only when I expected to need it. For hunting.

I wasn't hunting now and hadn't thought to bring anything with me.

Most often I didn't need to.

Bobcat, lynx, cougar, coyote, black bear, extirpated gray wolf… There were a few of all of them around, but they seldom bothered me. I knew how to stay out of their way, and for the most part they stayed out of mine.

For the most part…

There was always an exception, though. And after twenty minutes of trying to shake a tail I couldn't see, I felt indignation mix with reasonable disquiet.

Something was hunting me.

Something was silently dogging my every step, watching me try to throw off its pursuit as I weaved through the tangled undergrowth.

And I was tired of being hunted.

I was tired of being chased and haunted by shadows I couldn't see.

Shadows and dragons plagued me through my dreams, and a morbidly gruesome killer taunted me in my waking. Being physically and purposefully hunted in my woods pushed me to an edge I didn't know I'd been approaching.

There was a quiet snapping somewhere inside me, a click as something feral and deadly fell into place.

The thought the hunter could be a thing more dangerous than a bear or a bobcat never crossed my mind.

The thought the predator could be a thing beyond even the Ritualist never clouded my imagination.

My vision blurred over and suddenly I wasn't thinking at all. The wolf amulet I wore around my neck was hot on my skin and a burn spread down through me.