All it took was one do-gooder hiker to look at the wrong time, and they’d see a black bear take a tumble. Animal rescue and news stations would be crawling all over the forest. People in these parts loved their bears, even if they had no idea most of them were far more than just bears.
Loch had almost ended up in a zoo once. That was a close call.
From his precarious perch, he’d hoped he’d get a good view of the town. Unfortunately, all he saw was branches.
He climbed down, found another tree, and tried again. It was damn difficult to pick the right tree from the ground. Once the branches interlocked into the canopy, it was near impossible to tell how tall a single tree reached.
On his third tree, he carried himself above the canopy.
He felt exposed. At any moment, someone with binoculars or spectacularly natural vision would spot him.
He once ran in front of a nature photographer as a joke about six years ago. Even now, he sometimes finds his bear form on magazine covers and in conservation commercials. Apparently, his image rakes in donations.
Once he reached the highest perch on yet another tree, he looked into the wind.
He hadn’t realized it was so late in the day. The sun was only four fingers above the horizon. He barely had any time left before he needed to find a place to stay for the night.
A real bed would’ve been nice, he thought to himself.
Even as a bear, sleeping in the woods wasn’t great. A bed of pine needles wasn’t as dreamy as it sounded.
He trained his gaze downward, looking for the telltale gaps in the trees that signified towns. None of the buildings were more than two or three stories in these parts. No one, not even the corporations that occasionally tried to leech off the local populations, wanted to ruin the natural look of the mountains. There’d never been a skyscraper here, and there never would be.
He couldn’t find the gaps. He was too far north to see Silver Spruce, but he didn’t see anything else either. How far north had he gone?
It had been a hot minute since he’d roamed outside of the Silver Spruce territory, but was he really so out of touch he couldn’t find a whole town? Loch knew it was small, but was it a town for faeries and sprites? How had he missed it?
He shimmied down the tree and shifted back into his human form.
After redressing in the clothes from his pack, he made his way back to the road. Without anything else to go on, he continued along the road as he had before.
Once he saw the sign for Copper Falls, he knew he’d gone too far. There wasn’t anything in Copper Falls besides an empty quarry, a dried-up waterfall, and a bunch of abandoned buildings.
“Fuck,” he spat.
He turned around and jogged back in the opposite direction. Copper Falls was six miles past Golden Oak.
He measured his strides as he ran. The calculations wouldn’t be exact, but at least he’d be in the ballpark of where he was supposed to be. Once he reached the opening of the Northridge Trail, he knew something wasn’t right.
To be extra sure, he walked half a mile south down the road.
He didn’t see anything, but that wasn’t a surprise. There wasn’t anything between Silver Spruce and Golden Oak.
The road he’d been walking should’ve taken him right into Golden Oak, but it hadn’t. He checked the map again. He checked the road signs again. He even checked the screws on the road signs to see if they’d been tampered with.
They hadn’t.
Golden Oak was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR—HOLLY
Holly was already awake, sitting at the window, as she always was when the sun rose that morning. She hadn’t slept that night. Most nights, she could get in a few hours, but last night sleep had refused to come to her.
The Maiden wouldn’t speak to her, either.
Holly figured it was some kind of test, but who could say for sure?
Something felt different about the Maiden’s absence this time. Holly hadn’t realized it every other time the Maiden went silent on her. She’d grown accustomed to sharing her head. It felt a little like leaning against someone. There wasn’t weight, but there was pressure. It didn’t hurt, but it felt like something.
Now, that pressure was gone.
Weeks ago, when everything was quickly spiraling so far out of her control, Holly had wished for that voice to disappear. She had wanted everything to disappear, especially herself.
Her thoughts had changed now that she’d spent the last few days speaking to no one accept the man hell-bent on destroying everything she loved. She’d give anything to talk to the Maiden. The Maiden had started to feel like a friend in recent days.
Though, that could be a testament to how isolated Holly had started to feel. The fact that she felt isolated long before being brought to Golden Oak was ridiculous in and of itself. She had four loving boyfriends. Dealing with the mental—and often physical—acrobatics of that shouldn’t leave her with enough time to feel isolated, yet she did.
No matter how much Loch, Johnny, Garret, and Keller cared for her, they couldn’t understand what she was going through. She knew they did everything they could for her, in their own way.
She felt terrible and selfish for thinking that, but even with all of the support they gave, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t need more support. She simply needed a different kind of support. She needed to sit down in front of someone, have them smile, take her hand, and say hey, I know what you’re feeling. This is what I did to get through it.
What she wouldn’t do for someone like that.
