Chapter Text
When my time comes around
Lay me gently in the cold, dark earth
No grave can hold my body down
I’ll crawl home to her
~ Hozier
~~~~~
The handheld recorder crackles like dry leaves underfoot, a low static threading through the beat-up car’s interior. Wednesday’s voice cuts through the anxious distortion, tone flat and scalpel-sharp, carrying no trace of sympathy for the voice about to follow
“Interview #1. Tuesday, 14:00. Statement taken at Jollies Diner. Subject wishes to remain unnamed. Describe what you saw.”
She had sat across from the trembling hiker under the fluorescent drone of the diner lights. He had stammered as he spoke, finger curled around the linoleum table edge as though it might anchor him in his fear. His coffee had gone cold. An afterthought to his terror.
“I… I don’t even know where to start. It was huge. Enormous. Bigger than any wolf I’ve ever seen. Its fur… it wasn’t just grey. There were… colours. Pink, blue, maybe lavender streaks? It—It vanished into the forest like smoke. Like it wasn’t really there.”
Wednesday had watched the man’s lips shape the words, measured the pulse fluttering in his throat. His terror was pathetic in its transparency. Every stammer, every nervous swallow.
“Did it attack you?”
“No! I mean… I ran, obviously. But it didn’t follow. It just… disappeared.”
“Any other details you can recall?”
“Eyes. They glowed. Huge and… sad? I don’t know. And… the way it moved. Graceful. Like it owned those woods.”
Black journal splayed open, pen poised, recording device humming low. She had meticulously catalogued it all, stone faced. A mask of carefully curated indifference recording each tremor, every falter in his voice, every tangential ramble.
Yet, the words had unsettled her, if only because of their accuracy. Graceful. Sad. Even through the cowardly hiker’s fearful story, the truth remained. Each breath, each pause, became another tangled thread in the tapestry she had begun to weave since Enid had fled. The mystery had begun to come alive, curdling within her.
Hours later, in the stale silence of her stolen car, Wednesday presses the recording device’s button once more. The hiker’s voice repeats, distorted by tinny static, until the looping words blur into nothingness. It is hardly a useful testimony. A poorly articulated, vague recollection of a fleeting moment that does little to convey the magnificence of the beast Wednesday chases. She clings to his story regardless. Roots herself in the world of small, definitive details. Better to cling to tangible scraps than to confront the unpleasant truth that unwinds ahead of her. That this will be no simple hunt.
The road north unspools beneath a sky strangled in mist. It clings to the windshield like gauze to a wound. Vermont bleeds out around her, the horizon swallowed by the thick tree line. Now, one mile from the Canadian border, she follows the thread of blurred trail camera photographs and murmured diner tales. She has little doubt of who her hunt would lead her to. Had known her prey long before the first story had reached her ears.
Enid Sinclair.
The name coils through her chest like smoke, leaving a warm, choking sensation spluttering within her lungs. Her lips tug into the faintest shadow of a smile at the thought. A wholly unwelcome sensation. Culminating in a needy swelling in the hollow cavern of her chest that will do little more than act as distraction. Yet it is there, aching and ravenous. Wednesday is not one for hunger, nor desire. They are fleeting indulgences. Weaknesses. It prowls within her all the same.
Not long ago, in a moment of foreign softness, Wednesday had made a promise. A promise that if Enid lost herself to her wolf, that Wednesday would find her. Protect her from the thing she feared the most: a life of solitude. It had been an easy promise to make. Wednesday does not make idle vows. She is precise, relentless, often cruel—but a liar, she is not. And so, one exceedingly simple car jacking later, she is bound to fulfil her word.
The shroud of mist thickens the silence of the road into an oppressive hush, pressing heavy against her skull until her very thoughts are muffled. Vapour trails from the trees in ghostly fingers that beckon to the car. Under other circumstance, Wednesday might find herself enjoying the journey. Instead, she grits her teeth and continues on. One hand firm on the wheel, the other holding the cracked spine of her journal. Her eyes flit between the road and her chicken-scratch notes. Each whispered account tugs her deeper, a trail of breadcrumbs luring her wickedly into the belly of the wilderness.
Eventually, she veers onto a mud-slick side road. Stones grind beneath the tires in protest, spluttering dust into the quiet. With a practised hand, she manoeuvres the car into the treeline to obscure it from wandering eyes. Her boots crunch against the gravel with the brittle finality of bone as she slips off trail, breaching the hum of the forest.
The air exhales its heady scent. Pine. Damp soil. Wild musk.
Immediately, her first proof. Paw-prints. Each pressed deep into the softened dirt. They are elongated, with subtle arches that give them a bipedal, human-like quality. A shiver of recognition ghosts through her. The scent of animal clings to Wednesdays senses, rich and intoxicating. She knows this creature. She knew this girl.
Gloved fingers trace the edge of the prints. Size. Stride. Direction. It is spelt out for her. Nothing escapes her careful notice, her razor focus. And yet, beneath the steel-edged discipline, there is a flutter she dare not name. Care, perhaps? Obsession? Something hungry licking at the edge of reason and plucking at her tightly wound restraint. A longing that feels perilously close to weakness.
Her mind betrays her. Fickle, traitorous thing that it is. She imagine Enid as she must be now, all feral grace and impossible colour. Always beyond her reach. Wednesdays chest constricts unpleasantly. Fear and yearning snarl together, indistinguishable, like the rotten creatures they are. It is intolerable, how absence can ache more sharply than presence.
The forest shifts. A rustle of branches, the snapping of twigs. Wednesday stills, every muscle drawn taught. She is struck, suddenly, by the intimate knowledge that this is Enid’s domain now. The chase is no longer abstract. Her promise no longer words alone. It has a heartbeat, a name, a history pressed flush against her own.
She rises from the prints cautiously, mud sticky against the leather of her gloves. Her neck cranes in the direction of the trail. Ahead, the path winds deeper, twisting through shadowed trunks. Somewhere, Enid waits. Or runs. Of this she is sure. Wednesday’s pulse thrums sharp against her bones. She despises its urgency. Its insufferable fluttering. There is no doubt in her mind that she will follow this trail. That is her weakness, her inevitability. Her pathetic, desperate need to protect the other girl.
Suffocating, biting air gnaws at her boots, tugging at the hem of her coat. With each step, she presses deeper into the pulse of the forest. The damp underbrush. The scent of resin. The faint iron tang of something untamed and wild. Every rustle of leaves and cracking of branches makes her body impossibly taut. Muscles coiled in anticipation. Her mind reassures her of its predator instincts. The forest inhales as she does. Dappled fog twists into imitations of shapes, loose amalgamations of silhouettes, teasing her mind with possibilities. Somewhere in that haze, her wolf beckons.
Wednesday presses on, boots crackling against the detritus of the forest floor. Her gaze sweeps the undergrowth, sharp and analytical, cataloguing each minute shift of the environment. Something stirs ahead. Deliberate. Strong. Wednesday pauses, the world narrowing around her. Whatever thread through the trees is something alive. Not phantom. Real. Willing her chest to rise and fall with measured rhythm, Wednesday’s fingers itch for the familiar weight of her journal against her palm. Misses the comforting harness of pen and paper recording each anomaly.
Her steps carry her into a small clearing. The pale light splutters through the canopy, catching on branches like broken glass. Her throat tightens as she exhales a singled word, softer than she intends.
“Enid,” she calls.
The forest swallows the name whole.
The flicker of movement bounds deeper into the fog-laden woods. A lure. Wednesday follows without hesitation. Her steps are deliberate, her breaths metronomic, body thrumming like a wire on the verge of snapping. Anticipation prickles her skin, the bitter thrill of the chase sinking into her marrow.
Branches tear at her coat in petty defiance. Mud sucks at her boots as though the earth itself wishes to hold her back. Her palms itch. Fingers brush bark, moss, the ragged textures of stone and rot. She catalogues it all. Each sensation. Her mind a ledger where the forest cannot hide from her scrutiny.
But beneath it, a secondary rhythm. Her heartbeat. Quickening. Insistent. The pull of something she cannot yet names. Each thud betrays her. It is not just the pursuit that drives her, but a connection tugging her forward. A red thread between hunter and prey, girl and wolf, herself and Enid.
And then, silence.
It envelops her like a shroud, thick and suffocating. The forest stills itself to watch. Wednesday freezes mid-stride, every nerve alight and crackling. Somewhere ahead, movement, at the cusp of her periphery. A pulse, faint and insistent.
She longs to step forward. To call out into the fog. To reach out, to do something. To do anything. The names is on her tongue once more, treacherous and raw. But she hold still, perfectly poised. Her body, traitor that it is, quivers to move. Chase. Claim. Protect. Yet every rational thought whispers deadly counterpoint. Wait. Watch.
The forest answers before Wednesday can decide.
A hulking mass crashes through the brush, snarling, heaving. A massive silhouette surges into views and it becomes all too apparent this is not the phantom Wednesday hunts. Not a wolf, but a snarling, battered bear. Its fur clumped with blood. Its movements are sluggish, already wounded from a previous tussle.
Disappoint scorches hotter than fear. The encounter feels insulting. She dispatches the beast cleanly, almost disdainfully.
And then, the silence closes back in. Heavier than before. The air is damp against her cheeks. Her pulse refuses to settle, pounding to loud and much too close to longing. Enid is not here. Not any more. But she is close. Wednesday feels her, like a phantom limb. A call without a voice.
Wednesday presses her lips into the thinnest line, tasting iron and grief. She knows the truth even as she refuses to name it. Enid Sinclair is out there, somewhere lost in the unseen spaces of the forest, always just ahead, always slipping away. But Wednesday will not let her disappear. Will not let the forest claim her. So, as inevitable as the dusk chases the dawn, Wednesday will follow.
Always.