The fire was dying.
Nobody had put more wood on it. At some point in the last hour they'd all just quietly stopped doing that and nobody mentioned it. The light it was throwing out barely made it to the trees anymore. Just a small warm circle and then nothing. Just dark.
11:58pm.
Indigo knew because she'd checked her phone four times in the last ten minutes. No signal. Just the time, sitting there on the screen like a countdown.
Nobody was really talking anymore. They'd run out of things to say about an hour ago and what was left was just the six of them sitting there pretending they weren't watching the treeline. Nico was doing something with a stick. Addison was very still in the way she got sometimes, looking at nothing, or looking at something nobody else could see. Elizabeth had her knees pulled up to her chest. She'd been like that for a while.
Jett was pressed against Indigo's side. She could feel him breathing.
11:59.
"He's probably not even coming," Nico said.
Nobody answered.
"I'm just saying. Maybe it's different every night. Maybe tonight's a night off."
"Nico," Jett said.
"What."
"Stop talking."
Nico stopped talking.
The forest was dead quiet. No wind. No birds. Nothing moving out there at all as far as any of them could tell. It was the kind of quiet that had weight to it. Indigo had never noticed before that silence could feel like pressure but it did. It sat on her chest and pushed.
Midnight.
Nothing happened.
The first minute felt like ten. Indigo was aware of her own breathing in a way that was starting to annoy her — in, out, in, out, like she'd forgotten how to do it automatically. She kept her eyes on the trees. They all did.
The second minute.
Elizabeth laughed. Small and uncomfortable. "Okay so this is—"
The treeline shifted.
That's the only word for it. It just — shifted. Like a shape that had been there the whole time had decided to stop hiding. He came out of the trees slowly. No rushing, no dramatic entrance. Just stepped forward until they could see him properly and then stopped.
The Woodsman.
Dark jacket. Pale trim on the hood. The mask. Those two dark gaps where eyes should be.
Just standing there at the edge of the light looking at them.
Elizabeth let out a breath. "Okay. Okay there he is. Hi."
Nobody else said anything.
He didn't move. Didn't wave. Didn't do anything except stand there being looked at and looking back. Indigo had the same feeling she'd had on the path last night — the one she kept arguing herself out of — that something about the stillness of him was wrong. Not actor wrong. Just wrong.
She didn't say anything.
"Ten out of ten for creepy," Nico said quietly. "Genuinely well done."
Then the Woodsman moved.
Not toward them. He went left, slow, along the edge of the treeline. Indigo tracked him and then she saw what he was walking toward and her stomach dropped before her brain had fully caught up with why.
The equipment rack. The one Nico had pulled the bow from as a joke yesterday.
He picked it up. The bow. Just reached out and lifted it off the rack like it was his. Pulled an arrow from the quiver beside it. And then he turned back around and faced them and raised it.
"Okay—" Elizabeth started laughing again, the nervous kind, too high, "—okay that's actually a really good bit, that's—"
"Elizabeth." Indigo's voice came out strange.
"No but it's fake, right, the arrows are obviously—"
" Elizabeth. "
"—rubber or something they're not going to give some random—"
He drew the bow back. All the way. The firelight caught the string pulled taut and the angle of his arm and the absolute stillness of him behind it.
Nico stood up. Put his hand out. "Alright, okay, that's enough now—"
The bow swung left.
The release sound was nothing. Barely anything. A small clean snap that seemed too small for what it did.
Elizabeth made a noise.
Indigo didn't have a word for the noise. She'd never heard anything like it before. High and sharp and just — confused, almost. Like her body couldn't understand what had just happened to it.
She was still standing.
The arrow was in her. Left side of her stomach, buried deep, half the shaft still sticking out of her jacket. She was looking down at it.
She stood like that for three seconds. Just looking.
Then she dropped to her knees.
Her hands went to the shaft but she didn't pull it. Just — held around it. Shaking.
" Take it out, " she said. Her voice was completely different. " Please. Please take it out. Someone take it out. "
Nobody moved. Indigo knows they should have. She knows that. But there's knowing something and there's being able to make your body do it and in those seconds those were two completely different things.
" Please, " Elizabeth said, and she was crying now, properly crying, tears running down her face, " please it hurts so much please someone— "
Jett moved. One step toward her.
The Woodsman was already crossing the clearing.
Walking. Not running. Just walking over like he had all the time in the world, bow loose in one hand, coming toward Elizabeth like she was just something that needed finishing. Jett stopped moving. Indigo watched him stop and couldn't make herself understand why and then she saw his face and understood. He was terrified. They all were.
The Woodsman crouched down in front of Elizabeth.
She looked up at him. Still crying. Still holding around the shaft with both hands. She said something to him. Indigo couldn't hear it.
He wrapped his hand around the arrow.
And pulled it out.
The sound Elizabeth made lasted less than a second and then she was quiet and then she went down sideways into the dirt and didn't move and the clearing was just — silent. The embers ticked. The forest carried on. Elizabeth didn't.
The Woodsman stood up. Looked at the arrow. Turned it over once. Then reached back and nocked it again.
Indigo ran.
She didn't think about it. Her legs just went. She was through the gap between the tents and into the dark before she'd made any kind of decision about it. The forest took her immediately — branches, roots, total dark — and she just kept moving because stopping felt like dying.
Behind her she heard the others going in different directions. Footsteps scattering. Someone made a sound she didn't have a name for. And then it was just her, crashing through the undergrowth, torch somehow in her hand, the beam swinging everywhere and showing her nothing useful.
She ran until she physically couldn't anymore.
Pressed herself against a tree. Clicked the torch off. Stood in the dark breathing.
She waited. Listening for footsteps that weren't hers.
Nothing came.
After a long time she turned the torch back on and started moving.
She found Jett on the main trail. He was standing there with his torch on just turning in a slow circle and when her light hit him he went completely rigid before he saw her face.
He came to her fast and held on hard.
She let him. Just for a second. Face against his shoulder, eyes closed, just breathing.
"You hurt?" he said.
"No. You?"
"No."
She pulled back. "We need the others."
Anastasia had gone uphill. She came back down when she saw their torches, moving fast, face pale, jaw tight. She looked like someone who had decided something and wasn't going to cry about it.
Nico was sitting on a log off the trail with his head in his hands. He looked up when they found him and Indigo saw exactly how close to the edge he was. He stood without saying anything and that scared her more than if he'd said something.
Addison came from ahead of them on the trail, walking toward them, and she was — steady. Which Indigo noticed and then immediately felt guilty for noticing because people deal with things differently and that didn't mean anything.
Five of them. On the trail. In the dark.
The sixth one was back in the clearing.
Nico opened his mouth.
Addison shook her head. Not yet.
They moved.
The old house was just there suddenly, back behind a rusted gate, grey wood and black windows and weeds growing up through the path. One of the private properties. The ones with the fine.Nobody said anything about the fine.
They pushed through the gate and stopped in front of it. Five of them standing in a line in the dark with their torches and their breathing and the forest behind them full of god knows what.
Indigo looked at them. Jett. Anastasia. Nico. Addison.
They all looked wrong. Not injured. Just — different to how they'd looked an hour ago around the fire laughing at Elizabeth's story about her job. Like something had been taken out of their faces.
She supposed it had.
Nico took a breath to speak.