Chapter 25 Marked for the hunt
Chapter 25 Marked for the hunt
The dreams got worse after the third night.
Not the usual kind—these came soaked in blood and fire.
Anya saw her parents again, only their eyes were hollow and their mouths stretched too wide, filled with teeth that didn’t belong to wolves. They spoke in voices she didn’t recognize. Each night, they begged her not to follow. Each night, she did.
She always woke gasping, clawing at the sheets, her skin slick with sweat and her pulse like war drums in her throat.
By morning, she smelled smoke in her cabin.
But there was no fire.
Not yet.
The land was changing. People felt it.
Whispers traveled faster than cars in Raven Hollow. By Friday, three more animals had turned up mutilated in the woods—each one surrounded by scorched soil, as if the earth itself had rejected what had happened.
The townsfolk blamed wild dogs or rabid coyotes.
But the elders on the outskirts? They knew better.
So did Anya.
She left her cabin at sunset.
Not in human form. Not this time.
She shifted at twilight, letting the wolf take over completely. Not as an escape, but as armor.
The sickness in her blood still lingered, but she fought past it, grinding it beneath each step. Her paws dug deep into the earth as she followed the scent that had started it all—the reek of burnt iron and bile.
The skinwalker’s trail wasn’t just a path. It was a wound in the forest. Trees along its route twisted slightly toward it, as if watching—or warning.
She found the first mark carved into bark near the river.
Not claw marks. Not knife.
Symbols.
Old ones.
Ones she didn’t know—but that her wolf did.
Her hackles rose. Her breath steamed in the cooling night. Her heart wanted to turn back, but something else pushed her forward.
The hunter was becoming the hunted.
And she refused to go down running.
She returned to the cabin before dawn, exhausted, but not broken.
The symbols burned in her mind.
By noon, she was tearing apart the boxes in her parents’ old storage shed.
She found the chest beneath a loose floorboard.
She remembered it from when she was a child—locked, off-limits. Her father once told her it held “the old ways.” Back then, she thought that meant family photos or heirlooms.
She now knew better.
She forced the lock.
Inside were hand-written journals, old bundles of sage, a few bones wrapped in leather string, and a single obsidian blade wrapped in aged linen.
The blade pulsed with a quiet heat. Not magic exactly—something older.
Something sacred.
She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.
This wasn’t just a weapon.
It was a promise.
Lana came by that evening with supplies—blessed water, salt, dried sweetgrass. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t need to. She’d seen the blackened trees too. Smelled the rot in the wind.
“You’re gearing up,” Lana said, quietly, watching Anya lay out the blade and the charms on the table. “You going after it again?”
Anya looked up. Her eyes were gold and cold. “It’s not waiting for me to decide. It’s circling.”
“You’re still marked.”
“I know.”
“You’ll be weaker than it wants you to be.”
Anya nodded. “But I’ll be ready.”
That night, she walked back into the woods.
Not alone.
The wolf walked with her, not as a mask or shell, but as part of her now—spirit and flesh bound tighter than ever before.
The scent came to her almost immediately.
Not the skinwalker.
Something it had left behind.
She found it in a clearing near the ridge.
A small totem, made of bone and ash, hanging from a tree by a rope of sinew. It spun lazily in the breeze, creaking with a rhythm that didn’t match the wind.
It pulsed like a heartbeat.
It was watching.
Anya stepped closer. The air turned cold. Her vision flickered.
She saw flashes—her cabin burning. Lana screaming. Her own hands dripping with blood she couldn’t name.
She ripped the totem down and smashed it beneath her boot.
The air snapped, like a spell breaking.
But then the forest fell dead silent.
And the laughter began.
It echoed from the trees. Not a human laugh. Not even a creature’s.
Something that wore laughter like it wore skin—badly.
Anya turned slowly, eyes wide, the obsidian blade clutched in her hand.
She saw nothing.
But her soul felt watched.
She backed away, moving in a circle, never showing her back. The forest shifted—no longer familiar. The shadows looked thicker. The trees… closer.
Then a voice, low and wrong, slipped between the leaves.
“Still bleeding, little wolf?”
Her breath caught.
“Still dreaming of your dead? Still thinking claws can save you?”
Anya bared her teeth. “Come out and find out.”
The voice cackled again. “Soon.”
When she finally got back to the cabin, Lana was gone.
But something else had been left on the porch.
A claw mark, deep and deliberate, carved into the wood.
Four slashes. Then a fifth cutting through them.
Anya stared.
She didn’t need a translator.
It was a countdown.
Back inside, she lit every candle she had.
She spread the journals open, flipping through page after page of her father’s slanted handwriting. Most were notes on patrol routes, rituals, warnings.
But near the end, she found a page titled simply:
“The Hollow Ones”
The word skinwalker wasn’t used. But the signs matched.
“They crave fear more than flesh. Chaos more than blood. They don’t kill to feed. They kill to claim. They were once human, but chose the dark. They can only be truly killed with a blade that hasn’t been touched by mercy.”
She stared down at the obsidian knife.
She had to harden herself.
This wasn’t revenge anymore.
This was war.
Outside, the wind howled.
But the wolves didn’t answer.
They knew what stalked the hills now.
Something even they feared.
Anya stood, pulled on her jacket, and tucked the blade into her belt.
Five claw marks.
Which meant four days left.
She wouldn’t wait for the last.