1. Cricket

Sweetgum and mountain ash bowed and tussled, their branches creaking and groaning beneath gale-force winds. Rain fell in heavy sheets, obscuring the deer trail, and the only light came in intermittent bursts as lightning cracked overhead.

An exceptionally bright flash revealed the snaggled, clawed ends of a branch, and Cricket ducked low, narrowly avoiding having her eyes gauged out. She stumbled over a root, pinwheeling her arms to stay upright.

“Oak and ivy!” Her hoof came down on a mud slick, and Cricket skidded forward, barely grasping the thin trunk of a sapling cottonwood to stop her fall. She raised her free hand, shielding her eyes from the rain and squinting through the dark. She had to keep moving; had to get to the camp and out of this storm. Had to get walls and a door between her and whatever it was that stalked her through the woods. Her ears swiveled, seeking the sound of snapping twigs and thudding footfalls over the howl of the wind and pouring rain.

Nothing.

Nothing but the rain and the wind and the thudding of her heart in her ears.

She pushed off the cottonwood and darted across the clearing. Lightning cracked, illuminating the woods in an all-too-brief flash of white light—not so brief that she missed the looming shadow in the trees.

“Fuck.” Her ears snapped back. Adrenaline surged through her legs, sending her bolting across the tiny hollow. She ducked under branches and leaped over boulders and roots, running on sheer instinct alone.

Gods, she had to be close. Please, let her be close. She’d been running for hours, ever since that argument with her parents. As the crows flew, the camp was only eighteen miles away, an easy distance for a faun in good weather. And the trail well-known: up the ridge to Bald Knob, north for a ways, then down into Shavers Fork Valley before summiting Barton Knob and descending into Elkwater. Two hours on well-traversed deer trails frequented by their border patrol.

But in the rain? And with a monster snapping at her heels?

Gods, please, please let me be close.

She launched herself at a boulder blocking the path, grabbing onto slick, moss-covered roots dripping down the granite side. The flat hammered points of her fingercaps pinched the roots, her hooves scrabbling against stone as she hauled herself up.

Thunder rolled, a deep, visceral rumble Cricket felt in her gut, and a series of staccato lightning flashes followed, strobing across the sky and casting long, dreadful shadows over the stone. Jagged, bent shadows like fingers, or claws, or …

Antlers?

She jerked her head around, her grip on the roots failing at the sight of a beast looming at the edge of the hollow. Coarse stone scraped her arms as she fell, landing hard on her ankle. Pain barked up her leg, and she bit her tongue to keep from crying out.

Taller than an elder faun, the beast’s shoulders filled the space between the trees. Lightning illuminated a bone-white brow half hidden in the branches crowning its skull, giving the illusion of eight-point antlers.

Cricket bleated, fear pressing her back against the boulder. She couldn’t look away. Logic told her to run, to bolt, to use the adrenaline burning in her veins to escape, but she was caught by the same prey instinct that kept her family hiding in the woods. Frozen beneath the direct glare of a predator. Unable to act. Unable to move.

“Please,” she whimpered. Granite dug into her back, and her hair whipped in the wind, lashing against her cheeks and brow. Thunder rolled and rumbled, joining the trembling in her limbs, and only when the accompanying lightning sizzled away did she realize it wasn’t thunder she heard but a low, warning growl.

She should have listened to her mother. She should have stayed home and tried to reason with her parents when they had all calmed down, but no – she had to do what she always did and act rashly, and now she was going to be mauled to death by the same monster that had been terrorizing the people of Green Bank.

So many people had left, so many homes and properties snatched up by some company out of Georgia, and with every sale, the faun were pushed into smaller and smaller areas, forced out of the woods they had made their home over the last fifteen years. Seeing the county assessor tromping through her woods was the last straw. With his clipboard and surveyors’ maps, his presence and the little strips of neon pink he tied to branches could only mean one thing: the little sliver of the Monongahela her family called their home had been sold, and Cricket had had enough.

Enough packing up her den, enough rolling the reed mats and disassembling the thatch roof. Was it too much to ask to live somewhere and put down roots? To live somewhere long enough that she knew every trail and hollow in the wood with her eyes closed?

She’d begged them to consider living in a house with a foundation and walls, to become part of something instead of staring in through the windows. Instead of being forced out, she wanted them to elbow their way in, and they refused time and time again until Cricket had had enough.

Her cousin had left. Ten years ago, they had wandered into the woods and found all the things Cricket wanted for herself: a home, a place where they could live and breathe and grow. A wife. A life.

And now she’d have none of that because, like a doe-eyed dumbass, she’d run out into a storm and gotten herself chased by the very monster that had started all of their problems.

“Oh, Gods,” she blubbered.

“No Gods,” a voice rasped, brought to her ears by a sharp gust of wind. Musk and the faint scent of wintergreen tickled her nose as branches snapped, trees groaning and bending in the storm. “Not in this world.”

“Please,” Cricket begged again, eyes stinging from the rain and unshed tears. “I don’t want to die.”

“Then run.”

Lightning flashed, half-blinding Cricket and freeing her from the predator’s spellbinding gaze. She launched to the side, hissing at the pain in her injured leg as she darted through the trees. A cruel snapping of teeth clashed at her back, the monster giving chase.

This was stupid, this was so stupid. Every faun knew you never ran from a predator once sighted. It only delayed the inevitable. Still, Cricket ducked under branches and leaped over roots, tripping over her own hooves and splashing across flooded streams. She didn’t risk looking back, didn’t want to see how close the monster may be, or worse, find that it had vanished altogether, returned to stalking her silently and unseen. So she ran through the pain in her leg, scrabbled upright when she fell, and let thin, whip-like branches snap at her back.

Rocks and stones scraped her knees; her denim jacket snagged on twigs and thorns. She shrugged it off, wriggling free from brambles and lurching forward. The metallic tang of blood rose over the aether of the storm, and Cricket mentally cursed the trail she was no doubt leaving behind. She should stop and find a place to hide. Wait out the storm and the monster, but to stop now meant certain death.

The rain halted abruptly, the wind died down, and another roll of thunder rumbled ominously overhead. Silence followed, the woods utterly still and calm. Only her rasping breaths and stunted hoof beats punctuated the night.

The dim glow of electric light sparkled through the trees—a house or a gas station.

Humans. Help.

Cricket risked a glance back, missing the upturned root. Her hoof caught, and she tipped off balance, landing hard on her shoulder and rolling down a hill. The lights whirled and spun, trees twisting as lightning strobed across the sky.

Her head jolted against a fallen trunk, and the last thing Cricket heard before the darkness closed in was a single, mournful howl.