Chapter 20: Shadows of Silverlake
The photo sat on my desk like it was alive.
Me. Ten years old. Frozen behind closet slats. Eyes wide. Silent. Helpless.
And scribbled in blood-red ink across the back:
“You weren’t the only one.”
The words gnawed at my brain like claws scraping across bone.
For years, I’d believed I was alone—that I was the only one who survived the Silverlake massacre. The only one who saw the blood, heard the screams, and lived to tell the story.
But someone else had lived too.
Avery.
Whoever she was, wherever she was—she remembered. And worse... she remembered me.
\---
I didn’t sleep that night.
Didn’t blink.
I tore through every document, every shredded report, every grainy photo that Jackson had dumped into my training records like it was all just background noise. School files. Public service logs. Hospital scans.
By morning, I had an entire wall covered in pins and string.
I didn’t care that I looked like I belonged in a conspiracy movie.
I didn’t care that my hair was a mess and I’d been living off caffeine and rage.
This wasn’t about strategy anymore.
This was personal.
\---
“You’re spiraling.”
Elena’s voice rang out from the doorway just as the sun broke over the horizon.
I didn’t turn. “I’m working.”
“You’re pacing.”
“Pacing is a form of focus.”
“It’s also the first step to needing a straitjacket.”
She stepped inside, holding a bag of breakfast tacos and a soda the size of my head.
“I brought bribes,” she said, holding up the bag. “Greasy carbs and carbonation. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”
I took the food but didn’t eat.
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re seriously not going to eat this? Rox, there’s bacon in there. You love bacon.”
“I’ll eat when I find her.”
“Her?” Elena blinked. “What’s going on?”
I handed her the photo.
The moment she saw it, her face shifted. Joking gone. Guard up.
“Elena, someone sent this to me. And they wrote this—‘You weren’t the only one.’ That means there’s another survivor. From Silverlake.”
She stared at it in silence. Then: “And they’re alive?”
“I think so. They knew how to reach me. They knew how to find this image. That means they have access—hunter or wolf, I don’t know. But they’ve been watching.”
Elena whistled. “That’s… messed up.”
I nodded. “I need to find her. I need to find Avery Rhodes.”
\---
Elena called Ethan in.
He showed up twenty minutes later, eyes groggy, shirt half-buttoned, holding a protein bar and muttering something about “early mornings being an abomination.”
“This better be good,” he said.
“It is,” Elena told him. “Roxanne’s got a new mission. And it’s time for Raccoon Squad to mobilize.”
“Raccoon Squad?” I repeated.
“She hasn’t slept in two days,” Ethan muttered.
“She’s got that haunted, vengeful energy,” Elena said proudly. “The kind you only get after serious trauma and too many Red Bulls.”
I ignored them both.
“Help me cross-reference every survivor record from Silverlake,” I said. “I want relocation files, medical transfers, even unofficial logs. If someone scrubbed Avery out of the system, I want to know where they sent her and who signed off on it.”
Ethan sat down at the laptop and started typing.
“Alright. You want hacker wolf mode? You got it.”
\---
Hours passed.
The sun rose, fell, and rose again.
And finally—finally—Ethan spun the laptop around.
“There. She wasn’t listed under Rhodes after the attack. They changed her name.”
“To what?”
“A. R. Whitlock. Moved through a state psychiatric ward outside Baton Rouge for about two years. Then—boom. Gone. No exit papers. No transfer orders. Just... gone.”
“She was nine,” I whispered. “They institutionalized her.”
“She probably couldn’t tell fact from memory,” Elena said softly. “You were lucky. You had someone who believed you.”
“No,” I said. “I had someone who used me.”
That shut the room up.
Ethan cleared his throat. “There’s one address listed from the ward—an emergency contact. Old, but it’s something.”
He slid a note across the table. “It’s a trailer on the outskirts of Bayou Sauvage. Completely off-grid. Locals say there’s a recluse out there who doesn’t talk to anyone but feeds the wolves.”
I grabbed my jacket.
“I’m going.”
Ethan stood too. “You’re not going alone.”
Elena grabbed her crossbow. “Dibs on the front seat.”
\---
The drive took two hours.
The roads narrowed into gravel. Then dirt. Then barely even a road.
The trees grew so thick they blocked out the sun.
The only sound was the crunch of tires and the occasional howl from deep in the swamp.
“I don’t like this,” Ethan muttered, hand resting near his blade.
“It’s Louisiana,” Elena said. “There are like fifty ghosts per tree out here.”
We pulled up to a clearing with a rusted trailer half-swallowed by vines and wildflowers.
Smoke curled lazily from a chimney.
A lantern flickered on the porch.
And a girl stood in the doorway, staring at us.
She looked… ordinary.
Brown curls. Bare feet. A ratty T-shirt and cargo pants.
But her eyes…
Her eyes were haunted.
\---
“You’re not from here,” she said.
I stepped forward. “You’re Avery Rhodes.”
Her gaze darkened. “That’s not my name.”
“Maybe not anymore,” I said. “But it was. You were at Silverlake. Fifteen years ago. You remember.”
She looked past me. At Elena. At Ethan. At the car.
Then back at me.
“I remember everything.”
My throat tightened.
“Why didn’t you come forward?”
“Because the moment I spoke up, they put me in a cage,” she said. “Told me I was crazy. Told me monsters weren’t real. But I saw them. Just like you did.”
“You sent me the photo?”
She nodded. “I wanted to see if you were still alive. If you remembered.”
“I never forgot.”
She smiled sadly. “Then maybe it’s time we finish what they started.”
\---
We stayed for an hour.
She told me what she saw—every gruesome detail. Every claw. Every scream.
We filled in each other’s gaps.
Our memories overlapped like puzzle pieces.
And one name kept coming up.
Ryder.
He was there.
He wasn’t just an observer.
He was the one giving orders.
\---
On the drive back, I sat in silence, staring at the trees blurring past the window.
“They lied to us,” I whispered.
“They still are,” Elena said from the front seat.
Ethan added quietly, “We’re getting close now. Too close.”
I nodded slowly.
“They’re going to try to stop us.”
A few moments later, my phone buzzed.
A blocked number.
One message.
“Avery isn’t the only one we let live. Watch your back, Luna.”