I turned. The twins were standing on the threshold, hesitant, their dirty toes curling against the edge of the wooden floorboards. They looked so small, framed by the massive, unforgiving forest behind them.
“Who brought you here?” I asked, my voice dropping to a desperate plea. “Emma. Ella. Please. Tell me the truth. Did your mother bring you here? Is she… is she out in the woods?”
Emma looked at the stale bread in her hand, then up at me. “Mommy told us to hide. She said the bad man was coming back to the cabin. But we ran the wrong way. We got lost in the dark. And then… then the lady by the trees showed us the path.”
“The lady by the trees,” I repeated, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.
“She looked like her,” Ella said, pointing a finger at the photograph in my hand. “But she was sad. She didn’t have her shoes on. She told us to wait on the porch. She said Ethan would fix it.”
My lungs felt tight, as if the air in the cottage had suddenly turned to liquid. This was a cruel joke. It had to be. Olivia was gone. I had sat by her hospital bed for fourteen weeks while the cancer ate her away pound by pound. I had held her hand until it went cold. I had watched the flatline on the monitor. I had buried her in a cemetery two hundred miles away from here. She wasn’t in these woods. She wasn’t guiding lost children to my doorstep.
But how did they know my name?
How did they know about the hidden trail? The path behind the house didn’t lead to any main roads. It led deeper into the wilderness, toward an old, abandoned logging ridge that had been blocked off since the nineteen-eighties. Olivia had discovered it by accident during our first summer here. It was our secret.
Suddenly, a sharp crack echoed from the woods.
It sounded like a heavy boot snapping a thick branch. Not an animal. Animals don’t walk with that kind of deliberate, heavy rhythm.
The twins instantly gasped, both of them dropping their pieces of bread at the same time. Ella scrambled forward and grabbed the leg of my jeans, her fingers digging in with surprising strength. Emma hid behind her sister, her eyes wide with a feral, primal terror that no seven-year-old child should ever know.
“He’s here,” Emma whimpered. “He found us.”
The survival instinct that had been dormant inside me for three years finally kicked in, overriding the grief and the confusion. I didn’t know who was out there, but I knew what fear looked like. These girls weren’t lying about being hunted.
“Inside,” I commanded, my voice dropping an octave into a firm, authoritative tone. “Go into the back bedroom. Under the bed. Do not make a sound until I come get you. Do you understand?”
They didn’t hesitate. They sprinted down the narrow hallway like two shadows, their bare feet making no sound against the rugs.
I waited until I heard the bedroom door click shut. Then, I walked back out onto the porch.
The mountain air had turned bitter cold. The sun had completely dipped below the ridge, leaving the world in a bruised, purple twilight. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my flashlight, clicking it on. The beam of light cut through the gathering fog, illuminating the edge of the woods and the mouth of Olivia’s trail.
“Who’s out there?” I shouted into the dark. “I have a gun! Get off my property!”
It was a lie—my hunting rifle was locked securely in a safe back in my city apartment—but the forest didn’t need to know that.
For a long moment, there was nothing but the sound of the wind through the pines and the frantic beating of my own heart.
Then, a figure stepped out from the shadow of a massive oak tree, right at the entrance of the trail.
The flashlight beam caught him directly in the face. He was a large man, wearing a dirty denim jacket and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His face was covered in a rough, unkempt beard, and his eyes were bloodshot, blinking against the bright light. He didn’t look like a ghost. He looked like a living, breathing nightmare.
In his right hand, he was carrying a heavy iron tire iron.
“Evening,” the man said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. He didn’t seem bothered by my threat of a gun. He took two steps closer to the porch, his eyes scanning the windows of the cottage. “I’m looking for my girls. They wandered off from our campsite down the ridge.”
“There are no kids here,” I said, keeping my voice steady, though my knees felt like water. “You’re trespassing. Turn around and walk back the way you came, or the next thing I call is the state police.”
The man smiled, a slow, yellowed grin that made my stomach turn. He tapped the iron bar against his thigh. “Now, see, I know you’re lying, mister. I tracked their footprints right up to your driveway. They’re my daughters. A man’s got a right to his own blood.”
“They’re terrified of you,” I said, abandoning the lie. “What did you do to them?”
The man’s smile vanished. His face hardened into something ugly and dangerous. “That ain’t none of your business. This is family business. Now, you step aside, let me get my girls, and I’ll be out of your hair. You don’t want to get mixed up in something that don’t concern you.”
He took another step toward the porch stairs.
“I said, stay back!” I yelled, lifting the heavy flashlight as if it were a weapon.
But before the man could reach the first step, a strange sound drifted down from the hidden trail behind him.
It was a soft, metallic chiming.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
It sounded exactly like the copper wind chime hanging right next to me on the porch—except the chime on my porch wasn’t moving. The air around us had suddenly gone completely still, the wind dying down to absolute nothingness.
The man stopped, his boots skidding slightly on the gravel. He frowned, turning his head toward the pitch-black mouth of the trail. “What the hell is that?”
