New Address, Old Ghosts

Chapter Two

The cabin the magazine had rented for her sat at the end of a gravel spur half a mile past the last streetlight, close enough to town to feel like a decision and far enough to feel like a statement. Elena parked, killed the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the tick of cooling metal and the much larger silence underneath it — a silence with texture, with layers, entirely unlike the flat white noise of the city apartment she'd left behind three days ago with a duffel bag and a list of excuses she hadn't had to use on anyone, because there'd been no one left to give them to.

The cabin was smaller than the photos online had promised — one bedroom, a wood stove, a porch that sagged gently on one side like it was leaning in to listen to something. But the windows faced the tree line, uninterrupted, and that was the only feature that had actually mattered to her when she'd scrolled through the listing at two in the morning, unable to sleep, needing to feel like she was already halfway gone.

She spent the first hour unpacking in the particular, ritualized way she always did in new places: camera equipment first, laid out like surgical instruments across the kitchen table, lenses checked one by one for scratches picked up in transit, batteries slotted into the charger in a neat descending row. Clothes second, hung with considerably less ceremony, half of them still creased from the suitcase. Personal things last, because there weren't many of them anymore, and the ones that remained she handled like artifacts rather than possessions. A framed photo of her parents on a dig site in Peru, her mother squinting into sun that had bleached the whole image slightly gold. A chipped mug from a coffee shop in Prague that had closed years ago. The engagement ring she still hadn't decided what to do with, currently living at the bottom of a toiletry bag like something she was trying to lose without admitting she was trying.

By the time she'd gotten the wood stove lit — badly, on the third attempt, with more smoke than she'd have liked, the whole cabin briefly hazy enough that she'd had to prop the door open and stand on the sagging porch coughing — the light outside had gone the deep blue of early evening, and her stomach reminded her she hadn't eaten anything substantial since a gas station sandwich six hours and one strange forest ranger ago.

The general store was easy enough to find; Thornwood Hollow's entire commercial district amounted to four buildings and a single stoplight that blinked yellow in both directions, a concession to a traffic pattern that clearly hadn't existed in years, if it ever had. A bell over the door announced her, old-fashioned and a little startling in the quiet, the kind of sound that belonged in a story rather than a functioning retail establishment.

"You're new." The woman behind the counter said it like a diagnosis, not unkindly, already sizing Elena up with the frank curiosity of someone who didn't get a lot of new material to work with and intended to make the most of what had wandered in. She was maybe thirty, dark hair pulled back in a knot that had mostly given up on itself, wearing an apron over a Thornwood Hollow Volunteer Fire Department T-shirt that had seen better decades. "Please tell me you're not here for the hiking trail. We've had three lost hikers this year already and it's only June."

"Photographer," Elena said. "Magazine. I'm here about the wolves."

Something shifted in the woman's expression — quick, assessing, gone almost before it arrived, like a fish surfacing and vanishing back under still water. "Ah. You're *that* new."

"Is that bad?"

"Depends who you ask." She stuck out a hand over a display of local honey, jars stacked in a small golden pyramid. "Priya Malhotra. I own this place, more or less, in the sense that owning a store in a town of four hundred people means you also own everyone's business, whether you want it or not."

Elena laughed, surprised into it, and shook her hand — a firm grip, warm, the handshake of someone who'd decided the introduction was already a success. "Elena Voss."

"I know. Small town, remember. You've been here two hours and I already heard from Hazel at the diner that you nearly hit a deer at the split rock, and from Tomas that your rental's making a noise he doesn't like." Priya said all this with the easy rhythm of someone reciting gossip as a form of hospitality, the way another person might offer a welcome basket. "Welcome to Thornwood Hollow. We overshare and undercook the meatloaf, usually in that order."

"Good to know." Elena wandered the narrow aisles, gathering the beginnings of a pantry — coffee, bread, a questionable amount of instant noodles, a bag of apples that looked like they'd actually grown somewhere nearby rather than traveled two thousand miles in a refrigerated truck — while Priya trailed a few steps behind with the unhurried attentiveness of someone who had nothing better to do tonight and had decided Elena was, for the moment, the most interesting thing in it.

"So." Priya leaned against the end of an aisle, arms crossed, settling in like she was about to enjoy herself. "You met Rowan Ashford yet? Tall, broody, treats every conversation like it's costing him money he doesn't have?"

Elena kept her face carefully neutral, examining a can of soup with more interest than it deserved. "Ran into him on the road in, actually. Split rock."

"Mm." Priya's eyebrows did something complicated, rising and settling with visible effort at nonchalance. "The Ashfords don't really — mingle. Rowan especially. Nice enough, if you catch him in the right mood, which is maybe four days a year, and you never know which four in advance. Family keeps mostly to themselves out past the ridge, always has."

"Big family?"

"Big enough. His dad's sort of the — I don't know, patriarch isn't the right word, but it's close. Owns a lot of land out that way, has for generations, going back further than anyone in town can actually explain when you ask them directly, which is its own kind of funny if you think about it too long. There's a sister too, Mara, she comes into town more, actually likes people, unlike her brother. Rowan's the one who joined the Forest Service, which everyone thought was funny, honestly, given how much time that family already spends in the woods without any government agency telling them to."

Priya said this lightly, the way you'd relay any piece of small-town color over a stack of canned soup, and yet something about the phrasing snagged in Elena's mind and stayed there, caught on some internal hook she couldn't yet name.

*How much time that family already spends in the woods.*

"You said it depends who you ask," Elena said, keeping her tone as light as Priya's had been. "Whether it's bad, that I'm here for the wolves."

Priya's expression did the quick-shift thing again, there and gone, a cloud crossing a sun that was trying very hard to stay bright. "Just — people around here have complicated feelings about outsiders poking around the forest. Old stories. Superstition, mostly, the kind that gets passed down because nobody wants to be the generation that let it die out." She smiled, and it was warm again, easy, the moment closed like a door someone had remembered to shut. "Ignore me. I've lived here my whole life, I've got about six generations of Hollow nonsense rattling around in my head, most of it useless. You want the good coffee or the bad coffee? We only sell one of them, I just like offering people the illusion of choice."

Elena laughed and let the subject go, though she noted it — filed it, the way she filed everything, in the part of her mind that had built a career out of noticing what people didn't quite say, the negative space around a story that was often more honest than the story itself.

She left twenty minutes later with a paper bag of groceries and Priya's phone number scrawled on the receipt, under the words *call if you get lost, or bored, or both — I mean it, Hollow nights get long.* Walking back to her car under a sky gone fully dark and thick with more stars than she'd seen in years, unobscured by any city glow, Elena glanced once toward the black wall of trees at the edge of the lot, some reflex she didn't examine too closely.

For just a second, she thought she saw something pale move between the trunks, low to the ground, and gone before her eyes could confirm it. A trick of the dark, the kind her mind was prone to manufacture after a long drive and stranger conversation. A deer, probably, the same one she'd nearly hit that afternoon, out wandering the same territory it always wandered, unconcerned with the small dramas of the humans passing through.

She got in the car anyway, and had her hand on the ignition when she heard it — faint, carried on the wind off the ridge, unmistakable even at that distance.

A howl. Long, low, and then, impossibly, a second voice joining it a beat later, harmonizing in a way that made the hair rise on the back of her neck — because wolves didn't harmonize like that, not with that rhythm, not with something that sounded, for one disorienting instant, almost like a word.

She sat frozen behind the wheel until the sound died away completely, and then she drove home faster than the split rock road, or Rowan Ashford, would have approved of.