Chapter 33: Something in the Forest

Astrid

I woke beneath the rocky shelter, disoriented for a few seconds before I remembered where I was. The fire had burned down to embers, the forest outside quiet after the storm, and Xander lay sprawled awkwardly against the rock a few feet away, one arm thrown over his face.

Reed was already awake, sitting near the entrance, his eyes fixed on the treeline.

"You didn’t sleep?" I asked.

"Enough."

Xander groaned without opening his eyes. "He means no."

I laughed quietly. Whatever tension had lingered from the night before had eased into something calmer.

The rain had stopped, though the ground stayed thick with mud as we left the shelter to search for the academy trail. We hadn’t gone far before I noticed fresh scratches carved into a nearby tree.

The same strange symbol from yesterday.

I stopped. "That’s the same symbol."

Reed examined it closely. "You’re sure?"

"I saw it yesterday."

Xander glanced around, uneasy. "Could it be part of the academy exercise?"

"No," Reed said.

That answer settled cold in my stomach.

Not far past it, we found one of the academy’s official markers knocked over, the wooden post pulled deliberately from the ground rather than fallen naturally in the storm. I crouched beside it and found footprints scattered around the base.

Not wolf prints. Human ones.

Xander’s expression shifted. "Someone’s interfering with the exercise."

"Or someone doesn’t want students going farther," Reed said, looking deeper into the trees.

"Then why leave the marker here at all?" I asked.

Nobody had an answer.

Reed said we should head back immediately, but I noticed a faint trail leading away from the fallen marker, barely visible in the mud.

"Someone went that way," I said, pointing.

"Absolutely not," Xander said immediately.

"You were the one who wanted to know what’s happening."

"I wanted to know from a comfortable distance."

I nearly laughed despite myself. Reed considered the trail for a long moment.

"We follow it for five minutes," he said finally. "No farther."

Xander stared at him. "You realize you’re encouraging her, right?"

"I’m aware."

We moved carefully, and I found myself reading the trail instinctively, broken twigs, disturbed mud, a branch bent recently enough that the wood hadn’t fully dried yet, still faintly green at the break. Whoever had passed through here hadn’t tried very hard to hide their tracks.

That bothered me more than a careful trail would have.

"They’re either careless," I said slowly, "or they want someone to follow."

Reed stopped walking immediately.

Xander’s expression turned serious. "Then we’re done."

We turned back.

Before we’d gone more than a few steps, a branch snapped behind us. All three of us froze.

Xander shifted slightly, ready to fight. Reed stepped in front of me.

"Stay behind us," he said.

"I can—"

"I know." He glanced back at me. "Just stay there."

The distinction mattered. He wasn’t telling me I couldn’t defend myself. He simply wanted to anyway.

Another sound rustled through the underbrush, and I braced myself, until a startled deer burst out of the trees, sending all three of us jumping backward. Xander nearly lunged at it before realizing what it actually was.

I couldn’t help laughing. "You almost fought a deer."

"It moved suspiciously."

"It’s a deer."

"A suspicious deer."

Even Reed laughed, low and brief.

The humor faded quickly when I noticed something on the ground where the deer had come crashing through, a torn piece of black cloth. I picked it up, and a faint metallic smell hit me immediately.

Blood.

"What?" Reed asked, noticing my expression.

I held it out. Xander’s joking expression vanished entirely.

"That’s not academy equipment," he said.

"No," Reed agreed, studying it.

A distant howl echoed through the trees, different from anything I’d heard before, not a student, not anything close to ordinary.

All three of us went silent.

Reed ordered us back, and this time nobody argued. We moved fast through the forest, and I tripped over an exposed root, stumbling forward. Xander caught my arm before I hit the ground.

"Got you," he said.

"Thanks," I said, aware of his hand still around my arm a beat longer than necessary.

He released me a moment later. "Don’t mention it."

We kept moving until we finally heard voices ahead, our missing classmates calling out through the trees, relief flooding their faces the moment they spotted us. Professor Lyra appeared moments later, visibly relieved and furious in equal measure.

"Where have you three been?"

Xander immediately pointed at me. "She got us lost."

My mouth dropped open. "You agreed to follow me!"

"We found something," Reed said, cutting through the argument.

Lyra’s expression shifted instantly. I showed her the bloodied cloth and explained the damaged marker and the strange symbol carved into the trees.

She grew unusually serious, taking the cloth from my hands. "Where exactly did you find this?"

I pointed back toward the forest. Lyra stared in that direction for several long seconds before speaking again.

"You three should not have gone that far."

Something about the way she said it unsettled me more than the words themselves. She didn’t look surprised.

She looked concerned.

"Don’t mention what you found to the other students," she said firmly.

"Why?" Xander asked immediately.

"Because I said so."

I watched her carefully. That answer didn’t satisfy me, and I caught Reed noticing the same gap in her explanation.

As Lyra walked away, Xander said quietly, "She knows something."

"I think so," I said.

Reed looked back toward the forest. "We’ll talk about it later."

The academy announced shortly after that we’d be returning to camp early due to the storm damage and the disrupted schedule. Students complained loudly, the normal chaos of the group settling back around us.

I kept glancing back toward the trees anyway.

I thought about the footprints. The symbol. The bloodied cloth. The howl that hadn’t belonged to anyone I knew.

Then, just before we left the clearing entirely, I noticed something carved into a tree at the edge of the trail, low enough that I almost missed it in the grey morning light.

The same symbol.

But beneath it, three fresh scratches, cut so recently the bark still gleamed pale and raw where the wood had been exposed.

My stomach tightened.

I turned away without a word, my pulse still hammering from everything the morning had already thrown at us.

I didn’t tell the others.

Not yet.