Ace paced in short, restless steps, the soft, rhythmic crunch of his boots on the bed of dead leaves the only sound he could control. His breathing had finally slowed from the ragged gasps of his sprint back to the clearing, but his chest still felt tight, constricted. It wasn't from exertion. It was the woods themselves—the way the darkness between the trees felt solid, a pressure leaning in on their small pool of torchlight.
Cedric sat a few feet away, his back pressed firmly against the rough bark of a thick pine. His gun rested across his knees, not held, but ready, his fingers tracing idle patterns on the cool metal. His eyes, however, never left Liam's unconscious form. The boy lay exactly where they'd found him, the borrowed jacket still draped over him, rising and falling with shallow, even breaths.
The silence was a living thing. It wasn't peaceful. It was a held breath.
Ace ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair, the gesture agitated. He stopped pacing and stared at Cedric.
"So… what do we do now?"
Cedric didn't look up from his vigil. His voice was flat, drained of its usual sly energy. "I don't know."
Ace's eyes narrowed. "That's it? That's all you got? 'I don't know'?"
Finally, Cedric glanced up. He gestured with his chin toward Liam. "I mean, we can't exactly drag him out of here. Not quietly. And not fast."
Ace crouched beside Liam again, as if a new inspection might yield a different answer. He pressed two fingers hard against the boy's neck, checking his pulse with a tense urgency, as if expecting the steady rhythm to simply stop.
"Yeah, no," Ace agreed, his voice low. "If one of us is hauling a hundred-and-fifty-pound dead weight and something jumps us, we're dead. Straight up. No time to get a shot off."
"Figures," Cedric muttered, his gaze drifting back to the encircling dark.
Ace exhaled sharply through his nose, a sound of pure frustration, and sat back on his heels. He looked from Liam to Cedric, a spark of desperate hope in his eyes. "Can't you do something? Like—anything? Slap him, shake him harder, hunter voodoo shit? I saw your mom use smelling salts once."
Cedric let out a long, weary sigh, rubbing his palms over his face. "Nope. He's out cold. Could've tripped and hit his head on a root. Could be an adrenaline crash after whatever scared him. Could just be shock. I'm not a miracle worker, and I don't carry smelling salts to high school."
Ace scoffed, the sound harsh in the quiet. "Great. Just great."
He unzipped his backpack with a sharp, angry tug and rummaged inside. He pulled out a second, smaller torchlight—a compact, heavy-duty model. He clicked it on, and a bright, white beam speared the darkness, landing on the ground beside Liam's head. Ace spent a moment adjusting it, wedging it carefully against a stone so the light shone steadily on the boy's face and upper body.
"I just changed the batteries," Ace said, his tone daring Cedric to criticize the gesture. "At least if he wakes up, he won't be in pitch black. Might stop him from screaming his head off immediately."
Cedric raised an eyebrow, the torchlight casting deep shadows under his eyes. "So… we're just gonna sit here? A two-man guard shift for Sleeping Beauty, waiting for him to wake up while whatever-that-thing-is plays hide and seek in the dark with us?"
"You got a better plan?" Ace shot back, standing up and crossing his arms. His silhouette was tense against the trees.
Cedric hesitated, his jaw working. "I'm just saying, man—this is a terrible plan. It's a defensive position with no exit strategy. We're bait."
Ace straightened, irritation flashing hot across his features. "Oh yeah? Well, you're the one who turned the whole hill into a panic marathon with your phone! You scattered them right into the woods!"
Cedric's head snapped up, his own temper flaring. "So now this is my fault? You gave the order!"
Ace took a step closer, his voice dropping to a heated whisper. "If you hadn't blasted that siren like you were directing traffic—"
"You told me to handle the crowd!" Cedric interrupted, his own whisper sharp. He didn't stand, but his grip tightened on the gun across his knees. "And I did. Unless you wanted thirty idiots getting butchered out here because they were too stupid to run from a real threat! Was I supposed to give a PowerPoint presentation?!"
Ace clenched his jaw, the muscle in his cheek jumping. "Yeah, and now one of those idiots is unconscious ten feet from us because he did run! Right into monster territory!"
"And you think I planned that?!" Cedric's voice rose a fraction before he clamped down on it. He shook his head, a bitter, frustrated motion. "I can't control stupidity, Ace. I can't predict which one of them is going to make the single worst decision of their life."
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The accusation hung in the air between them, toxic and useless. The woods around them felt heavier somehow, the silence now charged with their anger, as if even the trees were leaning in to listen to the fracture.
Ace looked away first, dragging a hand down his face. The fight drained out of him, leaving only exhaustion and the cold fear that had started it. "…Alright. Fine," he muttered, the words rough. "I shouldn't have said that. It was a shitty thing to say."
Cedric exhaled, a long, slow release. His shoulders slumped, the defensive rigidity leaving his posture. "Yeah. Same. We're both tired. And we're both stuck."
Ace gave a single, stiff nod. He turned back to his open backpack, digging through it with less aggression now. His hand emerged clutching a slightly smashed Snickers bar. He tore the wrapper open with his teeth and took a large bite, chewing mechanically.
Cedric stared at him, his expression utterly deadpan in the uneven light. "Seriously? You're eating now?"
Ace shrugged mid-chew, a bit of chocolate at the corner of his mouth. "Stress calories. Body's burning fuel just being this tense." He broke off a respectable piece and held it out toward Cedric, his gesture an olive branch wrapped in caramel and peanuts.
Cedric didn't say anything. He just looked at the offered chocolate, then at Ace's tired, resolved face. After a beat, he reached out, took the piece from Ace's hand, and tore his own wrapper open. The sound of the foil was absurdly loud, a tiny rebellion against the consuming quiet.
They ate in silence.
No jokes. No trash talk. No plans.
Just two hunters, sitting beside an unconscious kid in a dome of weak, trembling light, deep in woods that didn't want them there, waiting for a thing in the dark to make its move.
The silence after the wrapper's crinkle was absolute. They ate in slow, deliberate bites, the sweetness of the chocolate a bizarre contrast to the taste of fear in the back of their throats. The torchlight, anchored by the stone, painted their faces in stark relief—Ace's sharp angles, Cedric's watchful exhaustion. It created a small, fragile theater in the endless dark, but beyond its yellow cone, the blackness was a solid wall. No insect hummed. No breeze stirred the pine needles. It was the quiet of a vacuum, of a place where life had been deliberately emptied out.
It was too quiet. The kind of quiet that didn't just exist; it listened. It pressed against their eardrums, making the crunch of a peanut, the swallow of saliva, sound like a betrayal.
Cedric chewed slowly, his eyes never resting, constantly scanning the tree line where the light surrendered to shadow. He swallowed, the sound loud in his own head, and spoke without looking at Ace, his voice a low, careful rasp.
"Dude," he said. "I know you're thinking about it too."
Ace froze mid-bite, a chunk of nougat between his teeth. He didn't move for a second, then finished chewing slowly. He kept his gaze forward, on the same impenetrable darkness Cedric watched.
"…Thinking about what?" Ace asked, his voice deliberately neutral.
Cedric swallowed again, his Adam's apple bobbing. His jaw tightened, the casual pretense gone. "What if—" He hesitated, the words feeling dangerous, like speaking them might be an invitation. He shook his head slightly, as if to dislodge the thought. "What if this thing we're sitting here waiting for… what if it's not just some animal? What if it's a—"
He paused again, gathering the name like it was a live wire.
Then, quietly, almost a whisper:
"A wendigo."
Ace stopped chewing entirely.
For a long moment, he didn't answer. He didn't move. He just stared into the woods, his expression unreadable, but the torchlight in his hand, the one he still held, gave him away. It trembled. Just a faint, almost imperceptible shake, but in the absolute stillness, it was a quake.
"…Nah," Ace finally said, the word coming out too fast, too flat. "It can't be."
Cedric finally turned his head, his eyes searching Ace's profile. "And how do you know that? How can you be sure?"
Ace exhaled through his nose, a short, frustrated sound. "Because this forest isn't big enough. It's not remote enough."
"What?" Cedric's frown deepened.
"For a wendigo," Ace explained, his voice taking on a rote, lecturing quality, as if reciting from one of his father's old journals could ward off the idea. "You don't just find one. It's made. It needs utter isolation. A person has to be lost long enough for the cold to sink into their bones. Long enough to starve. Long enough for their mind to break completely. Long enough that eating another person isn't a choice anymore… it's the only memory left." He gestured around them with the torch, the beam slicing across the trunks. "This place? It's a suburban woodlot. You walk in a straight line for an hour, hell, less, and you're back on a paved road with streetlights. There's no 'long enough' here."
Cedric's frown didn't ease. He looked unconvinced. "Yeah, but what if it didn't start here? What if it… migrated? Something chased it out of its real territory up north, and it ended up here, hungry and pissed off?"
Ace stiffened, his shoulders going rigid. The theory had teeth.
Cedric continued, his voice dropping even lower, leaning into the terrible logic. "I mean… think about it. Anthony went missing, and there wasn't a single trace left behind. The cops found nothing. No blood. No torn clothes. No signs of a struggle in the house. That's not sloppy. That's… efficient. A perfect predator. One that doesn't leave scraps because it takes everything."
He glanced down at Liam's unconscious body, pale in the artificial light. "And it's patient. It didn't charge the crowd. It waited. It picked one."
Ace's jaw clenched. He could feel the cold logic of it seeping in, warring with his desire for it to be anything else. A wendigo wasn't just a monster; it was a catastrophe. A force of nature wrapped in frozen, intelligent hate.
"No," he said, firmer this time, as much to himself as to Cedric. "Just—no. If this was a wendigo, we wouldn't be sitting here having a debate about it. We wouldn't have had time to eat a candy bar."
Cedric raised an eyebrow, a silent challenge. "Oh yeah?"
Ace met his gaze then, and the fear in his own eyes was raw and unmistakable. "Yeah. We'd already be dead. Or worse, we'd be running, and we'd know we couldn't run fast enough. This…" He gestured at the waiting quiet. "This feels like a predator. A wendigo is a famine. It's winter that walks. This isn't that."
Cedric didn't respond right away. He looked down at the dirt between his boots, then back into the woods, his eyes narrow. The silence pressed in on them, heavier now for having given the fear a name.
"…Yeah," Cedric said quietly, the fight gone out of his voice. He sounded almost disappointed, as if a definitive answer, even a terrible one, would be better than the unknown. "I guess you're right."
Another pause, thicker than the last.
Then Cedric spoke again, slower, his words measured. He wasn't arguing anymore. He was reporting.
"But can you feel it?"
Ace didn't pretend. He gave a single, shallow nod, his eyes fixed on a point in the darkness. "Yeah."
Cedric swallowed. "It's watching us. Right now. It never stopped."
Ace lifted the handheld torch, its beam joining the steady one on the ground. He pointed it, not sweeping, but holding it steady on a particular cluster of trees about twenty yards out, where the shadows were knotted and deep.
"From there," Ace said, his voice detached, analytical. "Or near there. It hasn't moved much since I got back. Just slight shifts. It's smart enough to stay outside the light. It's learning our perimeter."
He sighed, a sound of profound weariness. "I'd love to just fire a few blind shots into that patch of dark and pray one hits something vital… but ammo's too damn expensive these days. And it'd just tell it we're desperate."
Cedric let out a short, breathy sound that was almost a laugh. It held no humor. "Yeah. Economy's absolute garbage. Can't even afford to scare off a monster properly."
Ace smirked despite himself, a brittle crack in the tension. "Budget hunting. It's the future."
They both chuckled softly—dry, tired sounds that died the instant they left their lips, swallowed whole by the hungry quiet of the woods.
The silence returned.
It felt different now. Named. Understood. It wasn't just absence of sound; it was a presence, patient and intelligent, holding its position just beyond the edge of the light.
Watching.
Waiting for one of them to make a mistake.
The shared, brittle moment of humor evaporated, leaving the silence even more profound. It was a silence that had weight, texture—like the dense, muffling quiet at the bottom of a well. It was the silence of a predator holding perfectly still. Ace and Cedric had both felt it solidify. They weren't just waiting for Liam to wake up; they were holding a vigil at the edge of something's territory, their little island of light a glaring provocation in the consuming dark.
Then—
Liam Carter's fingers twitched.
It was a small, spasmodic jerk of his right hand, the one resting on his stomach. In the stark, unwavering beam of the stationed torchlight, the movement was as shocking as a gunshot.
Ace and Cedric snapped their heads toward him in perfect, synchronized unison, their own breath catching.
Liam's chest hitched. He sucked in a sharp, ragged gasp, the sound of someone breaking the surface after being underwater too long. His eyelids fluttered, then flew open.
For a split second, there was only confusion in his wide, glassy eyes, reflecting the torch beam. Then, as full sensation and memory crashed back in—the dark, the cold ground, the disorientation, the primal fear that had chased him into unconsciousness—his body reacted before his mind could.
He screamed.
It was a raw, animal sound of pure, unprocessed terror. It ripped out of his throat, loud enough to shred the sacred quiet of the forest, a sonic beacon in the night. Somewhere above, a flock of roosting birds erupted from the trees in a clatter of panicked wings. Deeper in the woods, something heavy crashed through underbrush, startled into motion.
"SHIT—"
Cedric was a blur of motion. He lunged forward, not with grace, but with desperate urgency, his palm slapping over Liam's mouth, muffling the second scream before it could fully form. He used his own body weight to pin the boy's shoulders back to the ground.
"SHUT THE FUCK UP," Cedric hissed, his face inches from Liam's, his voice a venomous mix of panic and fury. His eyes were wild. "Do you have a death wish?! Do you want to ring the dinner bell for whatever's out there?!"
Beneath him, Liam struggled, his muffled cries pushing against Cedric's palm, his eyes rolling white with a fresh wave of terror at being restrained. Ace was already on his feet, the torch beam in his hand swinging in frantic arcs, searching the tree line for any sign of movement, any reaction to the devastating noise.
"Cedric," Ace whispered sharply, the command barely audible, "easy—don't break his jaw!"
Cedric, his own heart hammering against his ribs, held firm for one more second, feeling the fight drain from Liam as shock set in again. Then, slowly, carefully, he peeled his hand away, ready to clamp back down.
Liam sucked in a huge, shuddering breath, the air whistling past his teeth. His chest heaved. His eyes darted everywhere—from the strange, grim face above him to the other boy with the torch, to the gun now visible on the ground, to the endless, pressing darkness beyond their pathetic circle of light.
"W-where am I?" he blurted out, his voice high and thin. "What time is it? Why is it so dark? Where are the police? I heard sirens!"
Ace crouched in front of him, moving into Liam's line of sight, blocking the view of the terrifying woods. He kept his voice low, calm, and steady, the way you'd talk to a spooked animal.
"You're in the woods behind Briar Hill. It's almost midnight. And there are no police."
Liam blinked rapidly, processing the words but rejecting their meaning. "That's— that's bullshit. I heard them. Right before I… before I ran."
Cedric, still kneeling beside him, snorted, a harsh, exhausted sound. "Yeah. About that… my bad. It was a recording. On my phone. Fake sirens."
Liam's head swiveled toward Cedric, his brow furrowed in dawning, horrified understanding. "…Wait."
His eyes, now focusing properly, narrowed. Recognition flickered, cutting through the panic. "You're— you're Cedric, right? From Mr. Haskin's history class?"
Cedric grimaced, wiping his hand on his pants. "Unfortunately. Yeah."
Liam's breathing slowed slightly—but only from confusion momentarily overriding fear. His gaze swept over their gear, the serious set of their faces, the undeniable reality of their situation. A new, ugly suspicion bloomed.
"So what is this?" Liam demanded, his voice gaining a brittle edge. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, shrugging off Cedric's jacket. "Some kinda fucked-up prank? You two dragged me out here and scared the shit outta me? Is this payback for something? Is someone filming this?" He tried to peer around them, looking for hidden cameras.
Ace shook his head slowly, his expression grave. "No. This isn't a prank."
"Then what?" Liam snapped, the fear turning to anger, a safer emotion. "What the hell happened? Why am I on the ground? Why are you here with a… a gun?" His eyes locked on the weapon.
Cedric exchanged a heavy glance with Ace. A silent conversation passed between them. He won't believe us. We have to try.
"Alright," Cedric said, his voice flat, all pretense gone. "Truth, then. Fast version."
Ace gave a single, grim nod of confirmation.
"There's something out here," Ace said, holding Liam's gaze. He didn't gesture. He didn't need to. The darkness around them was illustration enough. "Something that took Anthony Hayes from that house two nights ago. Something that's been in these woods tonight, watching all of us. Watching you when you ran."
Liam stared at him, his mouth slightly open. For a few seconds, he just processed the words. Then his face contorted into a mask of disbelief.
"…You're serious?" The question was laced with scorn.
Ace didn't blink. "Yes."
Cedric added, his tone mercilessly matter-of-fact, "And it's still here. Right now. Probably closer after that scream. It's waiting for one of us to fuck up and step out of the light."
For a second, Liam just stared at them. Then he laughed. It was a short, nervous, disbelieving puff of air.
"Oh— wow," he said, shaking his head as if clearing water from his ears. "Okay. Yeah. I get it now." He pushed himself fully to his feet, brushing dirt from his ruined jeans. "You guys are actually insane. Like, clinically. You need help. Professional, medicated help."
He took a wobbly step away from them, toward the gap in the trees where the hill path lay.
Ace stood as well, subtly shifting his weight to block the most direct route, not touching Liam, just making his presence an obstacle. "Liam," Ace said, the calm in his voice straining at the edges. "Don't. Don't walk off alone."
Liam scoffed, the sound rich with derision. "Why? So the imaginary monster gets me? You gonna tell me a ghost story to keep me here?"
Cedric's voice hardened, losing its flatness for something colder. "Because if you scream again, or run blindly, or do something stupid—you're not just risking your own neck. You're painting a target on it and leading whatever's out there right back to us."
"—then what?" Liam snapped, turning on Cedric, his own fear manifesting as aggression. "You'll shoot me to save yourselves?"
Neither of them answered.
The silence that followed was more eloquent than any threat. It was the silence of two people who were armed, who were scared, and who had just acknowledged a predator in the dark. It was the silence of a terrible, unthinkable calculation being made.
Liam swallowed hard, the bravado leaching from his face. The reality of their grim seriousness, the gun on the ground, the way they held themselves—it was seeping in, colder than the night air.
"…Yeah," Liam muttered, taking another step back. "That's what I thought."
He sidestepped Ace, his movements jerky with defiant fear. "Enjoy your little horror roleplay. I'm going home."
Ace didn't grab his arm. Cedric didn't rise to stop him. They just watched, two statues in the torchlight, as Liam's silhouette moved beyond their protective circle. The darkness seemed to welcome him, softening his edges, then swallowing his form whole, until he was just a faint, receding sound of footsteps on leaves.
As Liam walked, the forest transformed. The trees, which had been a wall of black, now seemed to lean in, their branches like bony fingers. Every rustle of his own jacket was amplified. Every snap of a twig under his foot echoed like a bone breaking. The comforting glow from Ace's torch faded completely, leaving him in a darkness so complete it felt like a physical substance.
They're idiots, he told himself, the thought a desperate mantra. Both of them. Losers with a weird fetish. They dragged me out here, scared me unconscious, and now they're trying to—
He stopped.
A cold that had nothing to do with the temperature slid down his spine. It was a primal sensation, deep in the lizard part of his brain. A pressure. An awareness.
The feeling of being watched. Not from behind, where the boys were.
From above.
Liam's breath hitched in his throat, the sound tiny in the vast quiet. Slowly, against every screaming instinct that told him to run, he tilted his head back, his eyes scanning the tangled canopy.
And froze.
High above him, perched on a thick, gnarled branch of a dead oak, were two points of smoldering light.
Glowing golden eyes.
Unblinking.
Perfectly motionless.
They held no animal cunning, no simple hunger. They held a chilling, intelligent focus. A starved, patient attention fixed directly on him.
Liam's mouth fell open. A sound tried to form—a whimper, a prayer, a scream—but his lungs were blocks of ice.
In the absolute silence of the watching wood, the entity leaned forward, just a fraction.
And the forest listened.