Seven Years Ago

After everything Avery had been through, she wasn't about to die from some damn lightning bolt. Which meant she needed to get off this wet granite. Fast.

Thunder rumbled a warning from the valley as she sprinted across the bald face of the mountain. Her feet squelched in her boots, the dangling tatters of her hiking pants slapping against her calf.

"Naomi!" she screamed without stopping. All Avery saw in the bouncing light of her headlamp was rain and darkness and granite stretching in every direction. She searched within her body for any sign of an imminent lightning strike, but felt no tingling, no static. The metallic taste in her mouth was from biting her tongue minutes before.

Squinting, she glimpsed the cusp of the forest and a flash of red. Naomi's rain shell. Avery was too out of breath to call out to her, not that she wanted Naomi to wait. Waiting had been a fool's game since they entered the forest.

Her worn pair of Columbia hikers—a gift from her father for her twentieth—finally lost traction on the slick granite. Avery careened forward and swore as rock tore through her palms. A violent shiver gripped her spine, her fear tossing her around like a rag doll.

Avery spit out a mouthful of blood and looked up as lightning split the sky. The rain hovered for a moment, as if the stone's throw between Naomi and herself were effervescent.

The night fell dark again, but the image was burned into Avery's retinas like she'd been staring at the sun. Naomi standing still, body drenched, dark hair plastered against her face. Behind her, a monstrous, willowy thing. Slenderman or a Dark Watcher or a Wendigo—the shape of some thin childhood evil. It had only ever appeared to them as a shadow, a shock of black against the night. Darker than nothingness.

It had found them. No... it had been with them the whole time they were running. How na?ve she had been to think it had ever left.

"Run." Avery's voice escaped her in a strangled yowl as she lay sprawled on the rock. The wind picked up in a whoosh, spraying rain against her face. She blinked the water away, her headlamp light bouncing off rock and High Sierra shrub until she found Naomi's red jacket again. The shadow behind her was gone.

But that was what this darkness did. It was cancer, leaving and returning hungrier, manifesting elsewhere, wounding deeply. Avery could feel it inside her now—the dread, the inevitability of the end. She knew Naomi felt it too.

Naomi's shoulders wilted when she finally met Avery's eyes, her body language too raw and familiar. Paige's posture had been the same. And Janet's.

Janet. Avery would die before she forgave herself for Janet. It wouldn't be long now, even after surviving this long and deep into the wilderness. She blamed herself for so much, but not for falling. Especially if it meant she was now bait and Naomi would escape one more time.

The blade at Naomi's side flashed when lightning struck again. Avery's hunting knife. She'd given it to Naomi last week. Or was it yesterday? She didn't know anymore how long she'd spent in this godforsaken place. How much time it had stolen from her.

The rain quieted, the bone-deep hush sudden and unsettling.

"You'll get out," Naomi cried.

Several things happened at once. A rumble within the heart of the mountain, somewhere beneath millions of years of rock and sediment. A ringing in Avery's ear that made the world spin. Her vision sharpened as the shadow reemerged, rising from the ground and curling around Naomi's feet.

Avery couldn't see much with her dim headlamp, but she knew Naomi was smiling. Naomi smiled when shit was about to take a turn for the worst. Avery had learned this about her only recently; they used to be nothing more than casual hiking partners. But trauma tended to peel away layers between those who shared it, and now Naomi meant everything. She was all Avery had left.

And yet Avery didn't fight. She took the coward's way out, like she always did, and shut her eyes.