A heart.

It was cold and she was alone; she wasn’t safe, she was in danger, and terribly exposed.

“Fuck. What am I even doing here?”

She fumbled her phone out of her pocket and pressed it into life. The light from the screen display dazzled her, lighting up the bare trees and undergrowth in a painful fizzle of artificial glow. She blinked rapidly, alarmed at how little she could see, and turned the phone out into the night. No figures lurched into sight, but she was suddenly very aware of how large the woods were, and how tiny her light.

There was a crump of noise off to her left, like something heavy moving rapidly through the undergrowth, and Heather put her back to it and began to run, as best she could in the dark, the light from her phone weaving back and forth to summon an endless crowd of chaotic shadows. The noise behind her increased as whatever it was came after her, and Heather heard herself make a small noise of terror. She was in a nightmare, the earliest nightmare, the one where you were running from something terrible but your legs were hopelessly slow. Against her will she thought of the stories Michael Reave had told her, and Pamela Whittaker’s paintings. The woods are dangerous. The woods are where the wolf waits.

She stormed up a slope, crashing into and through small bushes. Twigs and thorns caught at her skin and clothes, pulling her back as though the very woods were against her. Reaching the top of the slope, where she hoped to be able to figure out where she was, she stumbled, going to her knees in the mud. There was a smell, a combination of the wild, dark earth and another scent that seemed older, and stranger. She scrambled back to her feet, and there was a new sound very close—panting, quick and hot.

The barghest. Black Shuck. The hound that haunts the lonely places.

All thoughts of finding a path driven from her mind, Heather threw herself back down the small hill, careening forward with her arms held up to ward off the blow she was sure must be coming. Now, she was certain that several things were after her—creatures that ran on four legs, that could smell her fear—and they were on all sides, chasing her down. Drink from the river, she thought wildly, drink from the river and become a wolf.

The ground dropped away below her and before she could react Heather sprawled headlong into the wet and busy earth. All the air knocked out from her, she could do nothing but lay there for a long moment, the mud seeping into her jeans. She’d fallen partly into a bush, and the leaves were pricking her through her coat, as though she lay in broken glass. The noises had stopped, but as she picked herself up and looked around, the sense that she was being watched had increased tenfold. Eyes in the forest, watching.