But I wasn't in the studio anymore. I wasn’t even in the house. Surrounding me were dense trees with moonlight shining through them, creating undulating shadows over the mossy ground. Strangely enough, I couldn’t hear any crickets chirping, nor could I see or hear any signs of life nearby. Usually, the woods were full of little animals scurrying around, but everything was silent, eerily so.
I got to my feet, dressed in the exact same clothing I'd had on back in the studio, just a light T-shirt and sleep shorts. I was barefoot, which honestly was pretty normal for me, but I just couldn’t shake the weird feeling I had as I took a good look around. I felt like I shouldn’t be out here, and that something was incredibly wrong with this situation. It didn’t even feel like a dream. In fact, I was pretty positive I wasn’t dreaming. Everything was too crisp and clear and didn’t have that hazy, dreamlike feel to it.
“Iris!” I froze, and dread crept through me like icy tendrils. “Iris, where are you?”
I couldn’t move, could barely even breathe as Magnolia’s unmistakable voice called out to me.
“Iris?!” She sounded panicked now, but her voice seemed to be moving farther away, as if she was running through the woods, searching for me.
I took off into the trees, screaming her name at the top of my lungs. Everything was so dark, I could barely see three feet in front of me. Several times, I tripped and caught myself on the ground, scraping my palm on fallen branches, but nothing slowed me down.
“Magnolia!” I shouted, my voice breaking as I tried to keep the sobs at bay. It’d been so long since I’d heard my sister’s voice. “I’m here, Mags!”
In the back of my head, I realized how wrong this was. How could my sister really be out in these woods? It’d been ten long years and she was dead and gone, her bones rotting deep in the ground at the town’s cemetery. Except the other part of my brain told me that stranger things had happened. I was living in a house entirely occupied by living, breathing nightmares that haunted me for sport, so the prospect of Magnolia being trapped here wasn’t exactly impossible.
At least that was what I told myself as I shouted her name. Over and over, I called out to her, and a few times, she called back.
“Iris!” My name echoed around me. She sounded closer now—so close that I strained my eyes into the darkness ahead, desperately searching for her blonde mane of hair.
A stick cracked to the left of me, and I stumbled, catching myself on the trunk of a gnarled cypress tree. My feet squelched in the mud, and little bits of Spanish moss were stuck in my tangled hair. I was a mess, but that was the least of my worries.
“Mags, is that you?” I asked the darkness. I waited, but there was no reply. “You don’t have to be afraid, it’s just me…” Tears streamed down my cheeks again as desperation clawed at me. All I wanted was to see her familiar brown eyes, for her to smile at me just one more time and tell me that she was okay, even if I knew it wasn’t true.
I hadn’t let myself think about Magnolia in a long time. Every time I slipped up, it only brought me more pain. She was my best friend for seventeen years, my partner in crime, and my closest companion. We weren’t like normal sisters who argued and fought. From an early age, we’d developed such a strong bond that most people assumed we were twins. As many differences as we had, we were so much alike. I missed her like the stars missed the moon on a cloudy night.
Another branch cracked under the foot of something heavy, and I stilled, listening to the quiet woods, my heart thundering in my chest. Peering through the dark, I finally spied movement. It was very slight, but I saw it clearly. Something incredibly tall and oddly shaped was peeking out from behind a tree. I swallowed thickly and continued to stare at the shadow, knowing in my heart that this wasn’t my sister.
Realization slammed into me, and my whole body was instantly filled with icy cold fear. True fear wasn’t something I’d experienced in a long time. For the most part, I’d managed to bury my terror down deep, and it only surfaced once in a blue moon. Right now, as I realized what a colossal mistake I’d just made, the fear that I felt was stark and very, very real.
Growing up in the deep South, I knew the legends. When we were kids, they were just spooky stories our parents told us to get us to stay away from strangers and to keep us from wandering off into the woods at night. I’d never really believed in any of it, but right now, I was second-guessing every little thing I’d ever been told about the creatures that supposedly stalked through the trees out here.
It was almost taboo to speak it out loud, because doing so would only attract them to you. They went by many different names, depending on which culture was telling the tale, but around here, they called them skinwalkers. Even thinking it in my head felt like I was tempting fate, and it sent a shiver right down the length of my spine.
The shape of the creature became clearer as it stepped closer, so light and silent on its feet that I knew the cracking branch before had been on purpose. It wanted me to know it was here, otherwise it could have easily come up on me without my suspecting a thing. These things were created for stealth and hunting. They stalked their prey long before said prey even knew they were being stalked. Once you heard or saw them, it was already too late for you.
I was about to make a run for it when an image flashed in my mind that I recognized as unnatural. It was in black and white like an old movie, and parts of it were choppy and missing. I stilled again, frozen in place as I watched myself from the vantage point of the creature that stalked me. It was like I was seeing through its eyes as he came closer.
Then the vision switched to one of me standing on the doorstep of my house, staring off into the distance as I held the front door open. Ashley’s car was parked out front, and the wind whipped my hair around my face as I peered out across the property into the tree line.
I realized what I was seeing—it was a memory. The thing I’d seen peeking at me from the trees wasn’t just my imagination. It’d been stalking me for days now from a distance.
“Iris…” My sister’s voice called out to me again, so close now that it sounded like she was standing right in front of me. I flinched and stumbled back a step.
“You’re not my sister!” I spat at the creature. Its shape was clear now as it left the shadows and slowly stepped into the moonlight.
“Iris, please…” the voice said, this time much smaller, as if Mags were about to break down into tears.
I shook my head, shutting my eyes as images flashed in my head of myself as I ran through the rain, as I walked along the railing of the gazebo or as I sat on the edge of the dock, looking down at the water. They were all memories, and they flickered in my head like an old film.
I should have known better than to follow her voice. Part of the lore that surrounded skinwalkers—or wendigos or demons, whatever the fuck this thing was—was that they loved to mimic the voices of people you loved and trusted. They lured you into their woods, promising you safety or answers, only to snatch you up when you finally came too close. I’d fallen for its tricks so easily, and I cursed myself for it.
When it finally appeared, every drop of blood in my body turned to ice. It was larger than I’d originally thought, maybe even larger than Kazimir. His body was shaped like a man, only…his muscled, toned limbs were elongated dramatically and his legs appeared to bend in the wrong direction.
It was definitely ahe, given the fact that between those muscled thighs swung a massive cock that looked heavy and hard enough to use as a baseball bat. My eyes traveled upwards, scanning him in horror, noting the rib bones on one side that poked right through his leathery-looking skin. He was the color of the shadows, with a slight sheen of silver that the moonlight highlighted. Attached to his massive hands were long sharp claws that looked like they were made for shredding through bone.
That wasn’t what had me shaking where I stood, too petrified to move a single muscle. It was the fact that his face was nothing more than an elongated skull, like a deer or an elk, only the bone was a deep onyx color, with empty eye sockets and a mouth full of long sharp teeth. Massive antlers rose from his head, creating the illusion that he stood over eleven feet tall, when in reality, the top of his head was at most eight feet, but still, he was too large and too powerful to run from. With those long limbs, he could catch me in seconds if I tried to run.
“What's your name?” I asked for a lack of better options. I felt like a fucking idiot, trying to have a conversation with this thing, but if Cilas, Cyn, and Kaz had taught me anything, it was that I should never assume the impossible wasn’t possible. My voice was shaky, but I asked again, “You do have a name, right? Let’s see…” I tapped my chin and tilted my head, pretending I wasn’t ready to piss myself. “Is it George?” I shook my head immediately. “No, definitely not George. What about Michael? Or Liam?