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Shelby knows that there are monsters in the woods. Wendigos, nuckelavees, werewolves, fairies—you name it. 

She could name them all, trace their habits in the margins of her notebooks. Teeth that gleamed like knives, hooves that struck sparks on stone, voices that lured travelers into bramble and bone. Oakhurst had whispered of them for two hundred years, and Shelby had followed the echoes here.

Well, not intentionally. 

But the town seemed to have this allure to it. Sometimes she wondered if she had come of her own will at all, or if the woods had called her by name.

The rundown houses, wood blackened with ash. Cobble disintegrating, moss spidering over the stone as if Mother Nature was reclaiming it. It was a hush place, the only sounds were the creaks from the woods—though Shelby sometimes thought they sounded more like voices, low and stretched, as if the trees themselves were whispering to her. She told herself she didn’t listen. She lied.

Her hair ran like ink down her back, bloodly red like a harvest moon. Her corset, a deep chartreuse color, plucked at her flesh. No doubt the worried skin was raw, under the cinching laces that were pulled cruel, a cage of fabric and whalebone pressing her lungs into silence. She adjusted her glasses, the lenses catching the red moonlight and painting the world in blood.

Clutching to her notebook, the girl stepped past the gates(if you could call them that). A cold chill ran up her spine as she glanced around the town once more. Nothing changed. 

Slowly she wandered closer to the center, a collapsed structure, with something inside if she could just get close enough to look…

“Hello?”

A voice interrupted the fragile quiet of the dusk.

Shelby jumped, turning to meet purple eyes.

He looked about her age, maybe younger if she was being honest, dressed in a white shirt and a dark green vest, trousers road-dusted but otherwise too neat for the ruin around them. The violet of his eyes caught the moonlight strangely—like bruises, like candle flame behind glass.

“You see it too, don’t you?” he asked, voice low, almost conspiratorial. “The way the town… watches.”

Shelby’s grip on her notebook loosened. Most people laughed when she said things like that, or worse, gave her that pitying look. But here—here was someone who didn’t need convincing.

“Of course I see it,” she whispered, almost giddy. “It’s louder at night.”

His grin flickered sharp, and in that moment, Shelby decided: he wasn’t a stranger, not really. He was proof she wasn’t alone.

He reached into his vest pocket and drew out a bulb of garlic, its papery skin crinkling as he held it up between them.

“For protection,” he said, completely serious. “Can’t be too careful. My mother always swore by it.”

Shelby blinked, then laughed—a short, startled sound she almost didn’t recognize as hers. “Garlic. You actually carry it.”

“You don’t?” he countered, tilting his head.

She hugged her notebook tighter, suddenly self-conscious. “I’ve got notes. Sketches. Theories. But garlic?”

“You’ll want it,” he said, pressing it into her palm like an oath. “Oakhurst doesn’t look like the kind of place that makes jokes about vampires.”

Shelby closed her fingers around it, feeling its brittle weight. The woods seemed quieter for a moment, as though listening in. She smiled—sharp, unguarded, almost conspiratorial.