Wayward Pines Novels & Stories

I may not be thanking him after tonight, but we shall see. We drove through a forest road, obviously part of the oasis, and then pulled down a long dirt road. A moment later, the bright glow of a bonfire shone ahead beside a huge Victorian mansion, probably the size of six regular houses. "This is gorgeous!" I said. "I'm surprised I haven't seen this before." "We keep pretty private." Cruz smiled proudly. "This is our Compound." My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. "Seriously? You live here?"

Kaya coo, trying to comfort me. Thank you, Kaya. Thank you girl. I thought, rubbing my chest in gratitude. The night is quite chilly, the moon is out, a beautiful half crescent, illuminating the dark night. Reminding me of the crescent dagger, the night my pack was massacre! The most agonizing night of my life. I shudder, with clench fists at the sudden flash of that memory. Feeling slightly cold, I push my hands into the side pockets of my work dress, I feel something rough brush them, I took it out. It is the plant, Pinion pine, a plant consider sacred.

The forest seemed to close in around them as they pressed forward, the mist growing thicker with each passing step. The Hollow Pines, once an eerie but familiar landscape, now felt like a maze, each path indistinguishable from the next, each shadow hiding something more dangerous than the last. Sera could feel the wolves’ presence lingering in the air, like a suffocating cloud—waiting, watching, stalking them through the trees.

“I think we are going to go on Friday.” Friday meant that I had less than two days to slip the firing pin back in place. It also happened to be the day after my birthday. I was not expecting Jax to remember my birthday. Glancing at the whiskey bottle on his nightstand I could see that he was almost halfway through the bottle. Assuming that he continues on the same path that he has been on he should be out like a light before ten. That would give me plenty of time to slip the missing pin back into place, Jax being none the wiser that it was ever missing.

I like the way the noise fills the place, even for just a second, before the silence oozes back in. The bar’s been mine since I was twenty-three and dumb enough to think inheriting a failing business meant people would finally stop asking about my dead parents. The Wayward Pine: home of the “best wings north of the Silverflow” and more ghosts than paying customers. Some nights, I think the ghosts are the better company.

The temperature dropped drastically, the wind that blew felt colder, piercing the skin's surface. The trees swaying in the wind dance a dance of death that is both beautiful and magical, their dance accompanied by the sound of dry leaves, and the leaves singing as the wind blows them. The hoarse singing was muffled, their singing was like a muffled screams. It was like someone who wanted to scream with his neck choking hard, someone who was in a transitional period between life and death. They sang and danced as if it was the end of the world. The last day that humanity can taste before everything is destroyed with nothing left

Jade's POV ​The dawn didn’t bring warmth; it brought a flat, clinical light that turned the frozen landscape into a high-contrast nightmare. The skeletal branches of the pines were etched in charcoal against a sky the color of unpolished zinc. Behind us, the smoke from the lodge was a thin, grey needle stitching the earth to the clouds.

The journey to Silverpine was long, winding through ancient forest roads and snowy ridges that grew colder with each passing mile. The heaters in the SUVs worked overtime, battling the creeping frost that crawled along the edges of the windows. Outside, the world transformed into a realm of silence and snow—majestic pines heavy with frost, icicles hanging like crystal daggers from the branches, and patches of white stretching as far as the eye could see. About halfway through their drive, Marcus veered the lead vehicle toward a lookout point that jutted over a frozen river gorge. A sign marked it as The Howler’s Reach—named for the way the wind sang through the valley below.

The mountain air grew thinner and colder as they crossed the invisible border into the Blackwood Ancestral Lands. Here, the snow wasn't just white; it was a pristine, untouched sheet that seemed to hum with an ancient, restless magic. The pines stood like silent sentinels, their branches heavy with frost, as if bowing to the man who sat in the passenger seat of the SUV.

He was still telling himself that when the GPS lost signal twelve miles outside of town. He wasn't surprised. The town had always existed in its own universe — slightly out of reach, slightly out of time, the kind of place that didn't care whether the rest of the world could find it. He remembered that about it. He remembered more than he wanted to. The way the pines pressed close on both sides of Route 9 like they were leaning in to get a better look at who was coming. The way the sky above the treeline was always a different color here than it was anywhere else — deeper, somehow, more deliberate, like the light had made a decision about what it wanted to be before it arrived.