The rain was biblical. Not the poetic kind—this was a drowning, sky-opening, wrath-of-God kind of rain. It soaked Logan Wren to the bone as he crouched in the mud, staring at a partial boot print just inside the treeline of Black Hollow Forest.
Female. Size six, maybe seven. No signs of drag, no stumbling. She walked in willingly. That was the part that bothered him most.
He took a long drag of his cigarette, the end fizzing against the downpour. He flicked it into the mud and stood.
"Juno," he muttered. "What the hell were you doing out here?"
The girl had been missing four days. Seventeen years old, foster kid, ran with a rough crowd. Last seen near the old service road that ran alongside the Hollow. No phone. No witnesses. Just vanished.
Logan wasn't hired by the cops—he wasn't on their Christmas card list. A friend of a friend owed him a favor. That favor turned into a manila envelope with Juno's file, a photo, and a list of places she was last spotted.
All signs pointed here.
Black Hollow was a dead zone—no cell signal, no street lights, just ancient pine and shadows. Locals avoided it. They spoke of things in hushed tones: old stories about creatures in the woods, people going missing, something about a massacre back in the 1950s.
Logan didn't care about ghost stories. He cared about patterns. And this one was off.
He moved through the forest like a ghost—silent, precise. Years in the Army taught him how to read terrain like a book. His boots barely made a sound over the moss and wet leaves.
That's when he heard it.
A howl.
Not a coyote. Not a wolf, either. It was deeper. Stranger. Almost human—but not quite. It cut through the storm like a blade.
Logan froze.
His hand instinctively went to the pistol at his side—a battered SIG Sauer P226. He crouched low, scanning the dark ahead. Nothing moved.
Then came the stench.
Wet fur. Copper. Something foul, primal, like rotting meat left in the sun.
He didn't get time to react.
Something hit him. Hard.
He flew back, slamming against a tree trunk with bone-cracking force. His vision spun. The wind was knocked out of him. Rain pounded his face.
A shape moved through the trees. Fast. Massive. Eyes like molten silver locked on his from the dark. Logan tried to raise his pistol, but a clawed hand swatted it away like a toy.
Pain. Searing, blinding pain. A slash across his chest tore his jacket open. Blood mixed with rain.
Then the thing lunged—and everything went white.
Logan woke up choking on mud and blood.
His body felt like it had been torn apart and sewn back together by blind, drunk surgeons. Every nerve screamed. He blinked against the downpour, struggling to get his bearings.
He was naked. Lying in a clearing, soaked in blood.
Not all of it his.
He coughed hard, vomited bile and mucus, then rolled onto his back. The sky above him was a dull gray-blue, the storm finally breaking. Clouds parted just enough to let moonlight filter through—and that's when he saw his hands.
They weren't his.
Too large. The knuckles swollen. Nails longer. Rough, animalistic.
He stared, trying to process what he was seeing.
Then the memories hit.
Not full scenes—flashes. Teeth. Claws. Trees rushing past. A scream that didn't sound human. The taste of blood on his tongue.
And a voice. Faint. Ancient.
"You're awake now. You're mine."
Logan screamed. Loud and raw. The kind that ripped from the gut and shook the trees.
No one answered.
He found his way back to the edge of the Hollow near dawn, wrapped in a rain-soaked emergency blanket he'd stashed in his jeep's glovebox. His hands trembled as he lit a cigarette, his breath visible in the cold.
He looked in the rearview mirror.
The eyes that stared back weren't his. Same shape, same color—but there was something inside them now. Something alive. Watching him from behind the glass.
Juno was still out there.
And now, so was he.