Isla Vance's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Isla Vance had been walking into Pineland Forest for two hours when she realized something was walking with her. She was twenty-five, alone, and carrying a kitchen knife, a flashlight, and a creased photo of her younger sister. Six hours ago, two strangers had pulled the girl off the trailhead so fast that all Isla managed was a scream of her name. The police were still filling out forms when Isla left the parking lot. She did not know the men who took her sister. She knew only the direction they had run. The sound came from her right. A slow crunch of needles, matched to her own pace. When she stopped, it stopped. When she moved, it moved. Her flashlight caught nothing between the trunks but more trunks. She tightened her grip on the knife and felt how small it was in her hand. She stepped off the path to put a thick pine between her and the sound. Her boot came down on something soft. A small fox lay curled against a root, one ear split clean down the middle, its front paws so dark they looked dipped in ink. It was breathing. It watched her without moving. Whatever was pacing her had not scared it into running. That meant whatever was pacing her was something the fox already knew to freeze for. Isla crouched and swept the flashlight low. Twenty feet ahead, a fallen log lay across the slope. The bark was torn open in four deep gouges, the wood underneath pale and fresh. Something with claws longer than her fingers had dragged itself over that log within the day. She tracked the beam past it and found prints pressed into the wet dirt. Not a bear's. Wider. A wolf's, but wrong-sized, the pads as broad as her palm. She heard breathing then, close, off her left shoulder. She turned the light. Amber eyes caught it and held. The wolf was the size of a pony, silver-gray, pine needles snarled through its coat. It did not run. It lowered its head and stepped forward into the beam. Isla scrambled backward over the gouged log and her hand closed on something hard in the leaf litter — a length of wood, heavy, crowned with a bundle of shed antlers lashed tight with cord. Someone had made it. Someone had left it here. She swung it up two-handed as the wolf came. The antlers caught the wolf across the jaw. It twisted, snapped, tore her sleeve, and bolted into the dark. Isla stayed on her knees, shaking, the club across her thighs. The forest was quiet again. She looked at the weapon in her hands and understood two things at once. Someone was out here making weapons for what lived in these woods. And the men who took her sister had walked in this direction hours ago.