Chapter 124 Lost
Rowan's POV
The first twenty minutes of the scavenger hunt is enough to spread us thin.
The students naturally pair off—some sprinting along to collect the low-hanging fruit, others ambling, drawing out every stopping moment along the way. The blue flags represent our “course,” but the spirit of competition has everyone testing limits, stepping just a little beyond the boundaries of the marked trail in pursuit of something special.
I'm trying to make a record of everything. camera up at all times, taking shots of students working, of the forest itself, of the historical markers we are meant to be discovering.
Morrison beckons me over to take a picture of some kind of territorial boundary stone. I squat down next to him, I take the shot, telling him how to make a note of the particular indentations for his paperwork.
Behind us, other students scatter. Voices call out discoveries. The sound of people, the rustling underbrush as we all push further into the wood.
The light starts to fade. Not like drama just gradually as the day following naturally gets darker while the sun moves around.
But something about it feels wrong.
Too early for this much shadow. “Is it getting dark?” Patterson asks from nearby.
“Just the canopy,” another says. “These are huge trees!”
Everyone buys it. Goes back to hunting. I end with Morrison and go over to assist to confirm another site. Then Patterson wants pictures of a moss formation.
The forest is brimming with academic aspiration. Students comparing notes. Arguing about what is significant enough. That competitive energy that was fueling everyone so much, focusing on everyone Keeping their eyes on the prize.
I catch sight of various groups around me as I weave among them. July and Freddy looking at something by a fallen log. Aiden is hidden crouching by a dirt-stained statue. A group of students bickering about how to identify trees.
Each one focused on their own job.
Everybody was so busy.
—---
Malia is with July and Freddy, jotting down notes on a rare fern they’ve come across. Her stomach had been turning ever since they went inside the woods. That sick feeling from earlier is intensifying.
The air is oppressive. Heavy. as if it were pressing on her skin from all sides.
"You okay?" July asks quietly.
"Fine." The lie comes naturally. “Just—the woods seem off.”
Before July can say anything, Lydia comes.
“Malia!” Her voice is bright. Friendly. Completely fake. “Come look at this. I think I stumbled across something really significant for the documentation.”
Malia tenses up. "I'm good, thanks."
"Oh come on. I know we're not friends, but can we all just do this for our grades?" Lydia gestures into the woods, not along the beaten path. "It’s just over there. Some type of ancient marker. You’d better see it."
"I said I’m good. "
Lydia shrugs. “Suit yourself. But Professor Helthkins is probably going to wonder why you didn’t look into a major discovery.”
She begins to walk away, not back toward the group, but in the direction she’d indicated. Further into uncharted land.
And something in Malia, something she can’t name pulls.
Not Lydia’s words. Something else. Something from the preserve itself, from the soil under her feet, from the ancient power Michaels had warned them about.
It feels like a hook in her chest. Tugging. Insistent.
"I'm just going to look," Malia says to July. "Two minutes."
"Want me to come?" July's already moving.
"No it's okay you keep on documenting. I'll just be a moment."
She follows the pull. Not Lydia—she's long vanished into the shadows—but the feeling itself. Like the forest is calling her out by name.
The bush gets thicker. Darker. She presses on by some unknown force of will. Behind her, July and Freddy head back to their fern. Absorbed in their work. Not watching her leave.
Around her, other students pursue their own investigations of the area. Scattered. Distracted. not a single person is paying any attention on one person who just happens to be wandering a tiny bit off path.
The forest closes in on her. Thicker canopy, deeper shadows.
No blue flags here. She's gone into the dark by mistake, and she's walked out of the light that she didn't realize was talking to her anyway.
Her stomach lurches. Sick. Wrong.
The power in her — the thing that slammed Victoria into a wall, the thing that glows under her skin — it responds to something in this place.
Amplifying. Growing. They consume the territorial magic in the same way that territorial magic consumes them with emotion.
She tries to stop. To turn around but she can't.
The urge is too strong. The hook embedded in her chest is tightening, pulling her down further.
Her vision blurs. The trees tremble in and out of focus.
Then pain.
Sharp. Sudden. As if someone’s driving a spike through her sternum. Malia gasps and hunches over. She rests a hand on her chest.
The power is surging. Not a bit at a time. Violent.
Her wolf—quieted for weeks, restrained, buried is breaking out.
Trying to force change. Trying to break out. Answering the preserve's primal magic with the primal wilds. Change. Run. Retreat.
Her hybrid body would never be able to survive m forced shift. Never did. Due to her mixed genetics, transforming is a slow, measured event.
This is not controlled, it is not measured.
It's brutal.
Her eyes glitter gold. I'm so surprised to see full gold eyes especially since it wasso bright and so impossible for hybrids to have them.
Her fangs puncture the flesh of her gums not gradually, but all at once and blood fills her mouth. Blood is in her mouth. She yelps, half human, half animal.
The power in her arms buzzes visibly. Golden light lighting up her veins like electricity.
"No—" she gasps. "Not here. Not—"
But her wolf isn’t listening. Can't hear. Too numb from whatever this place is doing to her.
The territorial magic that heightens emotions—it's heightening everything. Her wolf, her power. Her hybrid instincts.
Achieving the impossible. Making her transform when she shouldn’t be able to. She stumbles forward, vision swimming. The forest is tilting sideways. Her bones are starting to move. She feels them move beneath her skin -- wrong, painful, forced.
She lets out a scream from her throat. Primal. Terrified.
But the sound is devoured by the forest. The territorial magic muffles it. Holds it. There is no one to hear it.
The change tearing through her body and she's alone with it.ripping through her body.
Stumbling. Crying. Trying desperately to stop something that won't be stopped.
Her foot catches on a root, she pitches forward.
Too disoriented to catch herself. Too overwhelmed by pain and power and forced transformation.
She goes down.
Rolling. Tumbling. Down an incline she didn’t see in the dimness. Branches tearing at her clothes. Rocks scraping skin.
Her head hits something solid. Stone.
The impact is a dull sickening crack that reverberates inside her head.
Then nothing. Darkness, silence.
Malia crumples at the bottom of the slope, motionless. Blood seeps from the gash on her temple where skull met stone.
Her eyes still faintly glowing gold stare unseeing at the darkening canopy above. The transformation stops mid-shift. Her body caught between forms. Neither fully human nor fully wolf.
Just broken, just still. Just alone in forest shadows that keep deepening. The preserve's magic hums around her unconscious form.Satisfied.
Or hungry for more.
—----
“—and if you look at the growth pattern,” Patterson is explaining enthusiastically, “you can tell this moss is at least fifty years old, which means—”
I'm photographing the moss. Nodding at appropriate intervals. But my attention is fragmenting. That knot in my stomach – the one that’s been there since we walked into the preserve – is getting larger.
Something isn’t right. I raise my eyes from my camera. Scan the students in sight.
I watch Morrison and Matthew compare notes. A cluster by the fallen log. Freddy perched on a rock, scarfing trail mix and writing like a man possessed.
The light is surely darker now. Plainly so. Students are beginning to comment on it.
“Maybe we should start heading back,” someone says. “It’s getting difficult to see.”
I look at my phone. We have been out for forty-five minutes. Still within our 90-minute time frame, but the forest is darkening and giving us the sense that the time is later than it really is.
Where’s Malia? I scan again. Searching for that green sweater. That dark hair but I didn't see her.
She's probably with July. She's fine.
I turn back to Patterson's moss, take a few more photos. But the anxiety grows.
Ten more minutes pass. More findings documented, more students getting their necessary supplies.
The darkness deepens further. Unnatural now, everybody’s seeing it. Getting nervous.
“Maybe we should head back,” someone says.
“Just a few more minutes,” another pleads. "I'm so close to ten findings."
I distance myself from a huddle, and wind through the crowd to the place where I last caught sight of July and Freddy.
They stayed, sitting on a log. Going over their notes. But no Malia.
“Hey,” I say as I approach them. “Where’s Malia?”
July looks up. Confused. “What?”
“Malia. Where is she?”
"She's—" July looks around. The confusion explodes into something else. Concern. “She was just here. She went to look at something Lydia mentioned. ”
I got chills. “When?”
July checks her phone. “Ten minutes ago? Fifteen?”
Too long. Way too long.
Freddy looks up now, still chewing trail mix. “She went that way.” He gestured vaguely toward thicker tree. Away from well-trodden paths. "Said she'd be right back."
"Did anyone accompany her?"
"No, she said—" July pales as she realizes. "She said it would just be a minute."
I was running towards the direction, down the woods the way Freddy indicated. But it was dark and nothing else. The trees seem to be darkening. No green sweater, no auburn hair, no nothing.
"MALIA!" I call out. Loud. Urgent.
No answer.
"MALIA!"
The students stop.
"What’s wrong?" Patterson asks.
“Malia’s missing.” The words have the taste of ash in my mouth.
It’s so dark in the forest now that it’s almost twilight. But it can’t be my phone says it is only 2:47 p.m.
There’s something a little off about this preserve. Has been off since we came here. And Malia’s already been gone for at least fifteen minutes.
In an unmarked territory, in darkening forest. Away from everyone.
I look at July. At Freddy. At the other confused and concerned students starting to converge.
At Aiden, who is standing near the statue and whose face has gone white with dread realization.
And I ask the question I already know has an awful answer:
"Where is Malia?"