Annabel Pendragon waited until her mother's lamp went dark before she climbed out the back window. The torches had gone out hours ago, but she could still smell smoke on her coat from the night the whole town had marched into the trees. She had stood at the edge of the crowd and watched a creature stumble between two pines. One of its eyes caught the torchlight. It was not angry. It was scared. Nobody else in Pinewood Acres saw what she saw, and she had not told them. In her bag she carried a loaf of bread, a jar of honey, and a plan she had read in a book: sweet smells calm frightened animals down. The forest was easy to enter and hard to read. Annabel walked past the burned patch where the torches had dropped sparks, then stopped. The trees went on in every direction, and she did not know which way the creature had run. The sun was already low. If she wandered too long, she would be out here after dark with things that were not shy. She turned in a slow circle and made herself look at the ground instead of the trees. That was when she found it. A narrow track of crushed ferns and torn moss cut away from the burned patch, bent in the direction something heavy had pushed through in a hurry. She followed the trail. Twice she lost it in pine needles and had to crouch until she spotted another snapped stem. Her legs ached. The light turned orange, then gray. She was about to turn back when the trees opened into a small clearing. In the middle of the clearing grew a perfect circle of low mushrooms, ringed by wildflowers that had no business blooming this late in the year. The trampled path ended at the edge of the ring. Whatever she was following had stopped here too. Annabel knelt inside the circle and unpacked her bag. She tore the bread into pieces and spooned honey over each one. The smell rose around her, warm and heavy. At the corner of her eye, tiny lights flickered between the wildflowers — sparks that vanished when she turned her head, and returned when she looked away. She did not chase them. She set the bread in the center of the ring, sat back against a trunk, and waited. The forest behind her was full of sounds she could not name. She had found where the creature had run. Now she had to be still long enough for it to come back.