Scarlett Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Scarlett left the hollow with the red eyes at her back. She felt them the whole way, two coals burning in the dark between the trees. Her notes could not explain what she had seen. Blood rising from the soil. A wolf that watched instead of hunting. She knew every path in these woods, but she knew no one who understood its older secrets. She needed someone who did. So she headed back toward town. The trail curved through the wounded forest. Dark mud sucked at her boots. Red streaks ran along the path like dried paint. Short trees drooped their red leaves to the ground. She passed a twisted bush, its branches black and heavy with blood-red clusters. Everything here was dying the same slow way. She stopped where a cluster of roses grew beside the trail. Their petals had gone the color of old blood. They drooped on their stems, wilting, and dark drops gathered at their edges. She touched one leaf. It was wet. The roses were bleeding too, same as the trees, same as the ground. She wrote the time in her book and kept moving. Her grandfather's words came back to her. He said the forest talked if you stayed quiet long enough. He stopped coming here ten years before he died. He never said why. Now she thought he had heard something she was only starting to hear. She needed to find whatever he had known, and she would not find it in her own notes. The trees thinned. The ground turned hard. She stepped out onto cracked blacktop choked with brown grass and red leaves. A parking lot, empty and forgotten. She stood still and listened. Nothing moved. Then she saw it. A dark trail ran across the pavement. Not mud this time. Blood, wet and fresh, dragged in a long smear toward the far edge of the lot. Something had been pulled across the ground here. Recently. She followed the smear with her eyes. It ended at a car. An old vehicle, red paint worn to rust, sitting alone where no one had left it in years. The driver door hung open. She crossed the lot slowly, boots loud on the broken blacktop. A handprint marked the window. A full hand, pressed in blood, fingers spread wide. Red ran down the glass in thin lines below it. The print was small. Human. Someone had put their hand there and pushed, hard, from inside. Scarlett remembered the hiker. The one who crossed at odd hours for no reason she could find. She had written his crossings in her book for days. Now she stood at an abandoned car with a bloody handprint and a drag trail leading away from it. This was no longer only the forest bleeding. Someone had been here. Someone had bled. And she was the only one left to find out who.