be careful if I were you,” a voice behind her said.
Wendy whirled around. There stood the guy who had talked to her when she was getting her bag out of her truck. She had almost forgotten about him.
“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded far off and distant.
She still couldn’t make out his face. The light continued to fade and she couldn’t see his features clearly.
They seemed to shift and change the more she tried to focus on them. Black eyes. White teeth. An unnaturally wide grin. His features twisted and morphed.
“You never know what you might find in dark places,” he continued, ignoring her question as he moved closer to her.
The shadows of the trees behind him started to sway and converge. Wendy took a step back, but he pursued. The black shapes behind him became towering figures, bowing down in the darkness.
“If you insist on poking around, Wendy…” His hand lashed out and snatched her wrist. His sharp fingers dug into her skin.
Wendy cried out in pain and tried to twist her arm free of him. He pulled her roughly toward him, and his face came into focus.
Peter’s face. But wrong, very wrong, with pale skin and inky pits for eyes.
“You won’t like what you find,” he breathed. It smelled like rotten leaves and wet dirt.
The shadows behind him gathered, piling up high then forming long, sharp fingers. He laughed and it shook Wendy’s bones. She tried to struggle but he held tight. The shadows lashed out and crashed down over her.
* * *
Wendy thrashed and jerked herself upright. She was home, in her own bed and drenched in sweat. Her clothes stuck to her skin and her hair was matted to her forehead. Shuddering gasps wracked Wendy’s body as she gripped her sheets. It was just a dream, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut as she tried to steady herself. But it felt so real.
Wendy gulped a deep breath, but when she looked down, a strangled shout caught in her throat.
She scrambled back so quickly, she slammed the back of her head against the headboard.
Everything was covered in red.
At first, Wendy thought the ink was blood, but after the initial terror cut through her, she realized that she still held the red marker she had fallen asleep with.
They were drawings of the tree, over and over again, in haphazard lines that crossed and dragged over everything—her nightshirt, her legs, and all over her sheets. Pages of her bullet journal were also covered in red, ruined and ripped from the notebook. Gnarled branches and tangled roots buried her carefully written notes.
Clutched in her other hand was the acorn.
Wendy threw the marker and clutched the acorn tight to her chest as she tried to steady her rapid breathing. Had she done all of this in her sleep?
Wendy squeezed her eyes shut.
What was happening to her?
Surrounded by torn pages and red ink, she felt trapped. The shadows, the drawings, the murmurings—everything was creeping in.
Wendy dropped the acorn into her bedside drawer. She leapt out of bed and yanked the fitted sheet free. Some of the red had bled through and stained the mattress. She bundled everything up into a heap and ran into the bathroom, where she shoved it to the bottom of her hamper and out of sight, along with her ruined nightshirt.
She couldn’t have her parents seeing what she’d done. Wendy was the only one who did laundry around the house. This was the perfect place to hide it until she could sneak it out into the trash.
As she shoved the bundle of sheets and torn pages under her dirty clothes, Wendy caught a glimpse of her hands. They were smeared with red. Some had even gotten under her fingernails.
At the sink, Wendy turned the hot water faucet on full blast. With shaky hands, she scrubbed furiously at her hands with soap and a facecloth.
That tree. It had been so familiar to her when she had seen it in her drawings. There was something there, some sort of connection she couldn’t place, but after seeing it with her own eyes, she couldn’t deny it anymore. She knew that tree. She had seen that tree in person. Been next to it.
To call what she’d experienced a dream just wasn’t true. It was more than a dream. She could smell the earth and feel the cold of the snow. The forest looked just as it had that winter when Wendy and her brothers had gone missing in the