Eve scooted closer to the campfire and shifted so her back was to the tent. She sat in the cooling, quiet night and watched the fire slowly lick the logs into ash. She’d packed several energy drinks for the stakeout but hadn’t opened any yet. It was late enough that even before this whole ghost debacle she’d have been tired. But thanks to the node—or whatever the hell was going on—she felt more awake than she had that morning.
The tingling of energy had subsided into a gentle, swaying sort of warmth, like splotches of sunlight through the leaves of a tree. Eve put another few logs on the fire and stuck her hands in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. Her fingers found a smooth rock she’d picked up from the beach at some point, and she rubbed it while she thought. She’d made some progress in properly translating the Henge Runes, but it wasn’t enough. To fully reverse the vocabulary changes the monks had made would take years, and she didn’t want to spend years with Chelsea’s ghostly despair hovering like a cloud in her apartment, or with the energy levels of a sleepy 80-year-old.
At least there was a pattern, like Murphy the Occult Nerd with the paper had theorized; it was only the ‘magical’ words that had been changed. She could get some sense of whatever it was she’d accidentally done. There was a binding, and the word she guessed was meant to be spirit, and Eve, the ‘I’ throughout the spell, had offered up something of herself to the spirit. Chelsea could only be there because Eve had offered some of her energy to her, which Jon had already guessed.
There was another howl, still distant but closer than before. Eve held her hands out to warm them up and listened beyond the standard loud-ass bug noises of nighttime. A small thing rustled the brush to her left, but it was otherwise quiet until the next howl, coming from a different direction this time. It had started in the north, in the direction of Blackwood, and had moved south, toward the Cliff Henge.
Eve frowned. It was probably not a dog, then. A dog would be stationary, howling from home. She shoved her hands back in her pockets and the frown turned into a scowl. It, unfortunately, probably wasn’t a normal wolf, either, which would have a pack and chorus of howls.
If an actual werewolf showed up, Eve was going to lose her shit. As if she didn’t have enough supernatural bullshit to deal with. And she had been trying so hard to will it into not-being. Apparently, pretending things didn’t exist still was not a valid strategy for dealing with things she didn’t like.
Eve sighed and thought about waking Jon up. But there was no point at the moment; if the howler was a werewolf, they needed it to come to the campsite node and follow them along the bait trail to the cliff henge. If they went out now they’d have no idea where it was or if it was following them, and there would be a much higher chance of danger. They had to wait until it came to them, or the already terrible plan would fall apart.
So Eve listened closely to the howls as they traveled down the coast of Blackwater Lake, and she hoped that it would just continue, making a circuit around the lake and avoiding them completely. As much as she wanted to get Chelsea to detach from her and go away, she didn’t want to come face to face with a mythical, infectious beast.
The howling drew closer and closer to the node, passing between the campsite and the lake. When the howls were slightly to the southeast, they stopped. Eve held her breath for a moment to listen, and when there was nothing but the normal sounds of night she let it out slowly. Maybe it was hunting something, something small and not-human and far away from them. Relaxing a little, Eve shook her head and poked at the fire with a stick. Staring into the glowing, changing embers, she spaced out for a while.
And then something caught her attention, although later she wouldn’t be able to say if it was a sound or a movement, maybe even a scent in the air, or if it was something else. But her head snapped up and she stared, stretching her eyes wider in a futile attempt to see, out at the forest. She saw two tiny spots of light at the edge of the clearing, so small they might have been more fireflies. But then they moved together around the circle of stones and Eve swallowed. As her night vision returned, she could just make out a shape that paced in the space between the node and the trees. It was a wolf, and it was huge.
Eve hadn’t ever seen a wolf before and had assumed it would probably be the size of a dog, maybe a lab or a husky or something. But Eve was startled to learn that in fact, wolves were like, fuck-off big. Bigger than people. Bigger than her, at the very least. And they normally had tails, she was pretty confident, though this one didn’t.
Eve stopped breathing and stared at it, waiting. It paced around the edge of the circle but never came any closer. She scooted back to the tent and unzipped it without turning around. Reaching in, she felt for some part of Jon to shake, and she landed on the foot of his sleeping bag.
“Jon,” she said, somewhere between a whisper and regular speech. “Wake up. It’s here.” Jon mumbled something but sat up quickly.
“What’s here?” he asked, sleep slurring his words.
“The werewolf,” she said more loudly. The wolf had moved to the right of her, and she turned slightly to keep it in view. Jon sucked in a breath and struggled out of his sleeping bag, grabbing his honing steel at the same time.
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“It’s here?” he said. “In the node?” He held the honing steel like a sword in front of him and looked around quickly.
“No.” Eve scooted over to let Jon out of the tent. “It won’t come into the circle.”
“Shit,” Jon said as he saw it.
“I’m kind of doubting our plan at the moment,” Eve said. Jon nodded at her but kept a determined set to his ridiculously chiseled jawline.
“I understand, it’s different when you’re face to face with danger.” He readjusted his grip on the steel. “But I think our plan will work. It must have smelled the treats and come here. That’s probably all it wants. Wolves aren’t generally out to attack humans, isn’t that what your mom said?”
“Caroline is a folklorist specializing in historically ‘women’s’ crafts, not a zoologist!” Eve’s voice rose to a nearly frantic pitch by the end, and she took a deep breath through her nose to keep from freaking out. “She’s never seen a werewolf before, or studied their behavior.”
“We have to catch it tonight,” Jon said. He looked at Eve, and she glanced at him before looking back at the wolf.
“Why?” she said. “We already know it’s not the killer!”
“We don’t know that, we think that. We need evidence.”
Eve deflated and looked at Jon. “I guess,” she said. “If I get bitten, I’m going to eat you.”
Jon smiled and grabbed his duffle bag. “We’ll leave the tent here and pick it up in the morning, then.” He turned to the east, to head towards their bait trail, then stopped and looked back at Eve. “We can do this. Chelsea’s depending on us.” He led the way to the edge of the clearing. The wolf watched them for a few seconds and started walking slowly around the circle toward them. Thankfully, they’d set up closer to the east than the middle, so they made it to the first bait spot before the wolf had made it to the east side of the node. Once there, they started moving as fast as they could through the thick trees. They’d gone this way twice, at least, so it wasn’t completely new. Still, once they were under the cover of the forest, it was so dark as to be almost impassible outside of Jon’s headlamp’s small circle of illumination. They each tripped a few times as they walked until they gave in and held hands. The sensation of the ley line rose to a frenzy of tingles and sparks that almost stung.
She listened behind them for wolf noises, but the sound of her and Jon crashing through brush and branches drowned out everything but her heartbeat in her ears. It was only when they passed the spot where the third piece of bait should have been that she realized something was wrong. She stopped, pulling Jon back.
“Where’s the bait?” she whispered. Jon gripped her hand and passed the headlamp over the spot they’d left it—a conspicuous log with a hollow on the underside—where there was nothing but the crumbs of a pumpkin-flavored dog biscuit.
“Oh fuck,” he said.
“Oh fuck,” Eve agreed. Now that they were still, she could hear the sounds of something walking around them. Jon turned his head to the sound and they caught a flash of eyes and the wolf’s rear end circling away from the headlamp.
Eve opened the treat bag and grabbed what was left in her hand and chucked it at the wolf. There was a snarl, and then the sound of crunching. When Jon turned towards it, the wolf backed away and growled at them with several biscuits in its mouth.
Eve moved close to Jon. “If it already ate all the treats on this path, I don’t think we’ll be able to make it to the henge.”
“I hate to say it, but I think you’re right.” Jon swallowed, and let go of her hand to pull a stray treat from his pocket.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Eve asked, her voice perhaps a little frantic. The wolf was still munching on the biscuits, but it would be done soon, and they weren’t close to either of their planned safe spots. “What did my dad say again? Silver, or wolfsbane? Wolfsbane doesn’t grow in the wild here, there’s no way.” She was muttering more to herself than to Jon, but he joined in.
“Hallowed ground,” he said. “It won’t be able to enter hallowed ground.”
“That’d be great if we were near some,” Eve replied. “You were in seminary. Don’t you know how to consecrate things?”
She could feel Jon shaking his head beside her. “I mean, yeah I know the words, but I’m not an ordained priest, let alone a bishop. And they’re the ones that can make a place ‘hallowed’.”
“Fuck the rules!”
Jon hesitated and turned to keep his headlamp trained on the wolf. They caught flashes of light gray fur and massive paws. “I already don’t believe I can, so I don’t think it would work. But theoretically, any place can be holy if enough people believe it. Maybe if we both believe…?” he trailed off.
Eve would have rolled her eyes if she wasn’t too busy watching the wolf stop eating and edge forward. She shoved her hands in her pockets, hoping that perhaps a big silver stick might appear if she checked one more time. She wasn’t Catholic so she already didn’t believe in hallowed ground. What did she believe in?
The wolf was making little darting movements closer to them, and Jon tossed his treat at it, aiming slightly above so it would go back into the trees. Eve felt something in her pocket, something crinkly and soft and smelling of cat when she pulled it and the smooth rock out. She stared at the little cat toy, shaped like a hot dog with a smiling face. It was filled with catnip, and Harvey must have stashed it in her sweatshirt pocket while it was on her floor.
She took a breath and smacked Jon lightly. “You got a knife?”
“Yeah, are you gonna stab the werewolf?” he said as he handed a surprisingly large knife over. “That seems like a bad plan, but I’ll do my best to help.”
“No, that would be stupid,” she said as she dug the tip of the knife into the cat toy and cut a line through to the catnip inside. Was she really about to do this? She squeezed the toy and ran her thumb over the rock. But her other options were “get eaten” or “stab werewolf,” so, unfortunately, she was doing this.
Eve didn’t believe in much beyond what she could see, but what the hell. She could believe in herself, right? She sprinkled the dried leaves onto the ground around them, turning in a circle as she did so. “I’m dedicating this spot to all cats in the name of Harvey, the best cat in the world. This spot is for cats and cat lovers only! May catnip and warm sunshine be plentiful here!” She sprinkled out the last of the catnip as the wolf snarled and stopped crunching.
“No dogs allowed!” Eve shouted, throwing the empty toy at the wolf as it lunged at her.