He’d survived. I almost hadn’t, since the small talk was friendly and lethal to a dark soul like me.
It had taken time to unpack everything I’d bought. Crystal skulls. Books on the occult. Framed art that depicted gruesome battle scenes. Black cashmere throws.
After I was done, it made the house look odd. Mismatched. Wrong. Which immediately made me feel more comfortable.
So now there was no excuse not to write. Not to open my laptop. Not to do my job.
For an author, there’s not much more confronting than an empty page.
I used to find it exciting, that emptiness. That opportunity to fill up the page, fill up a world with stories that were uniquely mine. To somehow exorcise my demons by creating others.
Now? It made me want to rip my own face off just so my blood would cause my laptop to malfunction and give me a stay of execution.
Maybe it was the morning whisky that did it.
Or was the lack of morning coffee.
Unfamiliar surroundings.
The slippery, mossy ground.
My terrible coordination.
Fucking Emily’s spirit haunting me for being such a bitch to everyone she’d once held dear.
To be fair, I hadn’t met everyone she held dear, but being rude to the bookstore owner, after judging her book collection, told me I was well on my way.
All of those things could’ve been the reason, or none of them. The reason wasn’t important.
It didn’t matter what it was that made my foot stay directly upright while the rest of my body tumbled to the ground, it just mattered that it happened.
There was a low pop that accompanied a thud of my body hitting the ground. I guessed it might’ve been something important in my ankle, since what followed was absolute agony.
I didn’t cry out.
What was the point?
I knew I didn’t have any immediate neighbors. This wasn’t a hiking or hunting track. There were only ghosts and small mammals around.
What was the saying? If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it really make a sound?
If a bestselling, slightly depressed yet brilliant horror author falls in the woods with no one there to hear her, did she really even exist?
The ground was hard.
I guessed it might’ve been the cold snap to the air, hardening the ground, making it more accommodating for pain and injury. That’s why I liked winter, it promoted death and suffering. That’s why I came to Washington on the eve of this beautifully frigid season, wasn’t it? So snow could ice my little cabin like a cake, eventually locking me inside and forcing me to write the book or go Jack Torrance in The Shining? Either one would be productive.
There was no option three of falling in the middle of the woods without a laptop or, at the very least, an axe.
I didn’t even have my phone.
Me, the woman who considered the device all but surgically attached. The constant stream of likes, death threats, pictures of what other people wanted to manipulate the world into thinking of them.
I had decided it was a distraction. That I’d only spend the entire hike taking pictures of the experience, instead of experiencing it. Not that it would’ve helped if it did—the service was spotty in the woods, as if there were actually corners of the world where you couldn’t get service. Wasn’t the sky polluted with satellites? Then again, they were all used to spy on Americans, Russians, and the control room officer’s wife who he suspected of having an affair.
So this particular spot in the woods, with no satellite images and no cell service, was a great place to be murdered or fall and break an ankle and eventually die from exposure.
What a cheerful thought.
I had already considered my fate sealed when he arrived.
He, being the dark, blurry, yet somehow overtly masculine figure that was little more than a shadow. It might’ve been his aftershave that punctuated my certainty it was a man crunching through the forest to where I was lying.
It was sharp. Musky. With hints of tobacco.
He didn’t say anything.
Then again, I didn’t either, so what could I expect?
I definitely didn’t expect him to bend down and try to gather me into his arms. Why I didn’t expect this was beyond me. I was a woman, looking rather desperate if I were to hazard a guess, lying in the middle of the woods, obviously unable to walk. Picking up said woman was probably second nature to most decent men.
It would also be second nature to the not so decent men.
I was easy pickings.
“Wait!” I yelled, waving my hands to try to fend him off. It was a laughable fight, considering the state I was in and because the movement itself sent spears of pain hurtling from my ankle upward.
Enough pain to make me see black for a good handful of seconds.
Which was enough time for me to be scooped up by the blurry, manlike shape in front of me.
But I remained on the ground, filthy, in pain and definitely vulnerable.
“What’s your name?” I demanded, my voice croaky from all the screaming for help I’d given up on hours ago.
Blinking through grit, my eyes found some more focus. The low light didn’t tell me much. Was it the eve of the night on the same day I came out on my ill-fated hike? Or was it a whole twenty-four hours?
Surely not.
I couldn’t have survived the night out here.
But maybe I didn’t survive.
Maybe this was the afterlife. The world that awaited me for all my sins. Perceived and real.
He was large.
This real man.
Or real demon.
Whatever.
If he was a man, he was kind of a shitty man, standing there, staring at me, curled into myself, half-alive or fully dead, not checking my vitals or giving me the expensive leather jacket I managed to note even in this state.
On the other hand, if he was a demon, he was doing great.
“Why do you need to know my name?” he asked, after contemplating me for longer than was polite in such an uneven social interaction.
I struggled to try and push myself up.
But that didn’t work.
It might’ve worked, had I tried it as soon as I fell down. I hadn’t broken any bones in my upper body, as far as I knew. I had something much deeper inside of me broken that stopped me from getting up. From limping toward the vague direction of my cabin, warmth and survival.
“Because, you’re either here to save me or put me out of my misery,” I said, capturing the reason for asking him his name. “And if it’s the latter, then I would like to know the name of the person that is going to kill me.”
A pause. “But you don’t know the name of the person who would save you.”
I shrugged. Or tried to. My bones and muscles were locked into the ground below me. “If you’re going to save me, I’ll learn your name later.”
He waited.
Again, no checking on my status, no asking me questions, no warmth that I knew he was carrying around with him in the form of a dead animal’s skin. Even if his voice told me underneath all that, he was as cold as I was.
“That all?” he asked.
I blinked again, figuring some kind of hypothermia must’ve been causing my inability to focus. Or maybe it was dehydration. Stress. Oncoming death. Take your pick.
“Yeah, that’s all.”
He nodded, the gesture was purposeful, carving through the blurriness of my vision.