CHAPTER 2 — Small Town Stares

The door opened like a new chapter. Night air spilled into my house, cold, pine sweet, threaded with damp soil and something sharper beneath it, like iron left out in rain. My porch light carved a small, weak circle into the dark, and beyond it, the forest waited, swallowing moonlight in its throat.

That agonised growl came again. Not loud, worse than loud. It was strangled, as if pain had hands around its neck. It vibrated through my bones, turning my skin to gooseflesh and my stomach to stone.

“Okay,” I whispered, like the word could anchor me. “Okay, Nora. You’re not… you’re not doing anything stupid.”

My body disagreed. My feet moved anyway. I stepped onto the porch, barefoot because I’d forgotten my own common sense in the same place I’d left my last shred of certainty. The boards groaned under me. The sound felt enormous.

I stood very still and listened. Wind sifted through branches. Something small, rabbit, squirrel, scratched through dead leaves. Far off, an owl called once, a single syllable of night.

And then, there. A faint metallic clink, like a chain pulled tight. My heart kicked hard against my ribs.

I backed into the doorway, eyes darting to the side table where I’d dropped my keys, my phone. The sensible part of my brain started listing things the way it did when panic tried to take the wheel: flashlight, shoes, jacket, phone, don’t go alone, call Grace.

But the growl came again, and I heard the wet edge of it. I heard the animal part of it that said help me in a language older than words. Vet instincts aren’t heroic. They’re inconvenient. They turn your fear and your caution into an afterthought.

I grabbed my phone, flicked on the flashlight, and shoved my feet into the nearest shoes, old sneakers dusted with drywall from the day’s unpacking. I didn’t bother with a jacket. I didn’t bother with anything except the small medical kit I kept in my car for emergencies. Gauze, antiseptic, bandage wrap, and scissors.

I stepped off the porch and crossed the yard. Every shadow felt like a mouth. The grass brushed my ankles, damp and cold. The forest was a wall of vertical black, trunks rising like pillars in a cathedral built for wolves and storms. My flashlight beam skated over roots and ferns, over the pale bones of fallen branches.

“Hey,” I called softly, as if whatever was out there might startle. “It’s… it’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

My voice sounded thin. A stranger’s voice. The growl stopped. Silence dropped so suddenly it felt like pressure in my ears.

I took one more step, then another, until the grass gave way to leaf litter and the air changed. Cooler, heavier, saturated with the scent of earth. My beam caught something bright between the trees.

Metal. My breath snagged. It wasn’t a trap I recognised. No jaws, no obvious mechanism but something narrow and pale that flashed and vanished as the beam wobbled. It looked like a length of chain, and beside it. Dark fur? A shape? Shifted once and then went still.

I froze. The forest held its breath with me. And then, from deeper in the trees, another sound, low, warning, not the same agonized growl. This one was steady. Controlled. A presence made audible.

A different animal. A watcher. My skin went cold in a way tea could never fix. Everything inside me screamed to run back to the house, slam the door, call Grace, call anyone. But I couldn’t make my body move for a heartbeat too long, caught between two instincts that hated each other. Help and survive.

The warning sound came again. Closer. I didn’t wait for my pride to argue. I backed up, careful, slow, refusing to turn my back on the darkness. The flashlight beam shook. My fingers felt numb around my phone.

“Okay,” I whispered again, to the trees this time. “Okay. I’m going.”

Leaves crunched behind me. My throat closed. Then something moved across my beam, fast, low, too big to be a deer and too smooth to be a bear. It didn’t lunge. It didn’t chase.

It simply crossed, like a sentence being underlined. I stumbled backward out of the trees and into my yard. My heel caught on a rock and I windmilled my arms, barely catching myself from going down. My lungs burned like I’d run a mile.

I didn’t stop until my porch was under me again, until the door was shut and locked and my back was pressed against it hard enough to feel the imprint of the deadbolt.

In the sudden safety of my house, my body remembered how to shake. I stood there with my flashlight still on, beam aimed uselessly at the living room wall, and let tremours ripple through my arms.

You moved to Moonbrook for peace, I told myself.

Outside, the wind hissed through the trees like laughter. I shut off the light, turned off my phone, and forced myself back to bed with my book open to the same page as before, heroines and gardens and kisses I couldn’t taste. My eyes skimmed words without absorbing them, my mind replaying that flash of metal, that dark shape, that warning sound.

Eventually, exhaustion dragged me under like a tide. I dreamed of blue eyes staring through the dark.

- - -

Morning came bright and almost rude. Sunlight filled the kitchen, turning dust motes into glitter and making the water stain on the ceiling look less like a bruise and more like an old memory. Birds chattered like nothing had ever screamed in the woods.

If I hadn’t felt it in my bones, I might’ve convinced myself it was imagination, night fear, new place, too many romance novels stacked beside my bed.

But when I stepped out onto the porch with my tea, black, sweet enough to make my dentist weep. The forest looked the same as it always had in my life: beautiful, distant, harmless.

That was the problem. Some of the most dangerous things wear beauty like a disguise.

The SUV in my driveway startled me. I hadn’t heard it arrive. Grace stood beside it with her arms crossed, sunglasses perched on her nose like a judge preparing to deliver a sentence. She didn’t knock. She never knocked at family.

“You look like you didn’t sleep,” she said.

I lifted my mug slightly, as if it explained everything. “New house.”

Grace’s gaze slid past me, over my shoulder, toward the treeline. Her mouth tightened, just a small pinch of worry.

“Did you go out last night?” she asked.

I hated that she knew me. Hated and loved it in the same breath. I took a careful sip of tea. “Just onto the porch.”

Grace held my eyes for a long moment, weighing truth the way she weighed produce, by instinct, not politeness. Finally, she nodded once, sharp.

“Good,” she said, though it didn’t sound like she believed me. “Get dressed. We’re going into town.”

“For what?”

“For supplies,” she said, already moving toward the house. “Because you can’t rebuild a life on sugar and denial.”

I almost smiled. Almost. Inside, she set a bag on the counter, hardware store logo on the side and began pulling out things like she’d been planning this since before I was born: a new lock for the back door, a can of bug spray, batteries, and a small first aid kit that put mine to shame.

“Nan…”

Grace didn’t look up. “You’re living alone at the edge of the woods.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “It’s not that far from town.”

“It’s far enough,” she said. Then, quieter, as if she were speaking to something inside herself, “It’s far enough.”

I swallowed questions I didn’t want answers to. An hour later, I followed her into Moonbrook proper, feeling like a new animal in a pen full of old ones. Small towns have a way of looking at you that isn’t quite hostile and isn’t quite welcoming.

The main street was busier in the morning, people heading to work, parents with kids, a few older men lingering outside the diner as if the day couldn’t begin until they’d commented on it.

Grace parked and hooked her arm through mine.

“You don’t have to cling,” I muttered.

“Yes, I do,” she said serenely. “It lets everyone know you’re mine.”

My cheeks warmed. “Nan.”

She patted my hand. “Kidding. Mostly.”

We stopped at the hardware store first. The bell over the door chimed, and the scent of lumber and paint rushed us. The clerk, a young guy with a beard trying too hard, smiled at Grace like she was local royalty.

“Morning, Ms. Holloway.”

“Morning,” Grace said. “We need lumber, nails, and a human being who can carry them.”

His smile widened when he saw me. “You’re Nora, right? Grace’s granddaughter.”

My stomach tightened. Of course he knew. In Moonbrook, news travelled like wind through dry grass. That or Grace couldn't keep her mouth shut.

“Yes,” I said, polite, careful. “Hi.”

He nodded like we’d been friends for years. “Welcome. Heard you’re a vet.”

My shoulders eased a fraction. That part of me, my work was the one thing I trusted. Animals didn’t play games with words.

“I am,” I said. “I’m setting up a little clinic in my garage.”

“That’s great,” he said, and then his eyes flicked briefly toward the forest line visible through the front window. The smile on his face held, but something else moved behind it, unease. “You’ll see some… interesting cases around here.”

Grace’s grip on my arm tightened. I pretended not to notice. We bought what we needed, and the clerk helped load it into Grace’s SUV. As he shut the trunk, his voice dipped lower.

“Just… be careful near the woods,” he said. “There’s been talk.”

“Talk?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

He hesitated, glancing at Grace like she might bite. “People setting traps. Not legal ones.”

Grace’s face went still. “Who?”

He shook his head quickly. “Just, guys who think they’re tougher than they are. You know how it is.”

I didn’t. But I nodded anyway because conflict makes me itch, makes my muscles tighten like I’m about to be struck.

Grace leaned closer to him. “If you hear names, you tell me.”

The clerk swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

As we walked away, I frowned. “Traps for bears?”

Grace’s eyes stayed on the street ahead. “Maybe.”

The way she said it told me it wasn’t bears she was thinking about. We stopped at the bakery next because Grace insisted that “any proper supply run includes something sweet.” The bell jingled again, and warm air wrapped around me like a blanket, vanilla, butter, and cinnamon.

My stomach growled, traitorously pleased. The display case held pastries like little works of art. Glazed danishes, cream filled buns, lavender macarons, the colour of my favourite paint shade. I stared too long.

“You like purple,” Grace murmured, amused.

“I like… everything,” I admitted. Behind us, a small group of men stood near the coffee station, talking too loudly in the way people do when they want their words to be heard.

“Telling you, it ain’t normal,” one said, stirring his cup like he wanted to drown something in it. “Livestock tore up, tracks too big, and those howls at night? That’s not just wolves.”

Another snorted. “You been watching those stupid videos again. Shape shifters. Please.”

A third man older, thicker, the kind of man who looked like he’d never apologised in his life, leaned forward. “My granddad used to say there are things in those woods that walk like men when it suits ‘em. And if you don’t take the shot when you get the chance, you’ll regret it.”

My fingers tightened around the bakery ticket Grace had handed me. My pulse quickened without my permission. I thought of that flash of chain, that warning sound, the dark shape cutting across my beam.

I told myself it was a coincidence.

“Shot?” The second man echoed, interested now. The older man’s mouth curled. “Silver’s the trick. Everybody knows that.”

Grace’s hand landed on my back, warm and firm, guiding me forward.

“We’re not listening to this,” she muttered under her breath. “Eyes on the pastries.”

My tongue felt thick. “They’re talking about… werewolves?”

Grace didn’t react the way I expected. No laughter, no dismissal. Just a quiet, hard tension in her shoulders.

“They’re talking,” she said simply. “That’s what small men do when they’re afraid. They turn fear into a hobby.”

My mouth went dry. “Is any of it.”

Grace’s gaze snapped to mine, sharp as a cracked whip. “Nora. You didn’t come here to chase ghost stories, did you?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Good,” she said, softer now. “Because the woods don’t need you poking at them.”

The cashier called my number. Grace bought me a box of lavender macarons and a slice of lemon cake because she said I looked like someone who needed “sweetness as medicine.”

The men at the coffee station laughed too loudly again, and one of them said something about “setting up a little club” like they were planning a fishing trip instead of something uglier.

I left the bakery with sugar in my hands and unease in my chest.

Back home, I worked until my arms ached. I cleared out the garage, swept out cobwebs, and set up my folding table as an exam surface. It wasn’t much, just a start but when I laid out my instruments and supplies, something inside me steadied.

Grace hovered in the doorway for a while, watching me with that expression she wore when she wanted to say something but didn’t know how.

“What?” I asked finally, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist.

She sighed. “You’re stubborn.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s not a compliment.”

“I’ll take it anyway.”

Grace’s lips twitched. “If you hear things at night. Howls, fighting, anything, you stay inside.”

I tried for humour. “You think I’m going to wrestle a bear with gauze?”

Grace didn’t smile. My stomach sank. “Nan…”

She walked closer and took my hand. Her fingers were cool and dry, but her grip was strong.

“This town has its own rules,” she said quietly. “Not all of them are written down. Some things live alongside us. We live alongside them. It works when people mind their business.”

I stared at her. “Please don't tell me you’re talking about werewolves.”

Grace held my gaze. “I’m talking about the fact that not everything that bites is a monster. And not everything that smiles is safe.”

Kyle’s face flickered through my mind, his charming grin, his hand on my shoulder that looked affectionate until it tightened.

My throat tightened. Grace squeezed once, like she understood without me saying it. Then she released me and straightened. “Now. I’m going home. You lock your doors. And you call me if you so much as hear a twig snap funny.”

“I will,” I promised, and I meant it. After she left, I spent the afternoon putting a fresh coat of paint on the living room wall, soft lilac, because I needed something gentle in my line of sight. I opened windows to let the smell of paint and pine mix, like a new life learning the taste of old earth.

I made tea. I ate two macarons and then three more because self control had not followed me to Moonbrook.

When dusk fell, the forest darkened like ink spilled across the horizon. I forced myself to focus on practical things: unpacking books, organizing canned food, setting up the small lamp by my bed. I made a list of clients I needed to network with. Farmers, pet owners and anyone who might trust a new vet.

I told myself I was building something. Then the first howl rose. It was farther away tonight, a long note that trembled through the trees. Another answered. My heart thudded, but I kept breathing. Wolves, I told myself. Normal wolves.

A third howl, closer, sliced the air. And beneath it, like a secret slipping out through clenched teeth, came that sound again. The agonized growl. Only this time, it wasn’t just pain. It was desperation.

I stood in my kitchen with a dish towel in my hands, frozen mid wipe. My pulse roared in my ears. My skin prickled.

The growl cut off abruptly, replaced by a harsh, rattling sound. Chain. My stomach turned. The image from last night, metal flashing in my beam, came back with brutal clarity. It was not a trap for bears. Or a random piece of junk. A restraint. Something was out there. Something alive. Something that needed my help.

I set the towel down carefully, like a ritual. Then I walked to the entryway and grabbed my medical kit with hands that barely shook.

“Don’t,” I whispered to myself, but the word had no authority.

I turned on my porch light. Beyond its glow, the forest waited vast, indifferent, and listening.

I unlocked the door. And this time, I stepped off the porch with intention, not impulse, phone in my pocket, flashlight in my hand, the taste of fear sharp on my tongue. Because whatever was chained out there had screamed in a voice, my bones understood.

And I had never been good at abandoning the wounded.