1
The Racoon Incident
The thing about making terrible life choices is that they rarely announce themselves as terrible life choices. They show up dressed as minor inconveniences—like a raccoon stealing your last chocolate-covered pretzel at midnight—and before you know it, you're sprinting through a forest that definitely qualifies as "haunted" on Zillow, wondering if this is how you die.
My name is Lizzie Saltz, and if I disappear tonight, please tell my mother I was chasing something noble. Like justice. Or a really good coupon.
Not a snack thief with opposable thumbs and an attitude problem.
"Dammit," I hissed, ducking under a low-hanging branch that seemed determined to scalp me. The forest had gone from "charming woodland" to "murder scene waiting to happen" in approximately forty seconds flat. My purple-streaked hair—which had looked cute in my bathroom mirror six hours ago—now resembled something a bird would reject as nesting material. My leggings had a new tear at the knee, my sneakers were soaked through with something I was choosing to believe was water, and my hoodie had acquired a collection of burrs that would require industrial intervention to remove.
The raccoon—a fat, judgmental-looking creature with my entire tote bag clutched in its grimy little paws—paused on a fallen log and looked back at me. I swear to God, it smirked.
"Listen here, you furry bastard," I panted, planting my hands on my knees. The night air burned in my lungs, cold and sharp and smelling of decay. "That bag has my phone charger. My earphones. My last shred of dignity. I will chase you into the actual underworld if I have to."
The raccoon chittered—laughedat me, the audacity—and disappeared into a thicket of shadows that seemed to swallow it whole.
I straightened up, chest heaving, and took stock of my situation.
Lost in unfamiliar forest.Check.
No phone.Check.
No sense of direction.Check.
Growing certainty that I could hear chanting somewhere in the distance.Check.
A rational person would have turned around. A rational person would have recognized that the faint, rhythmic sounds drifting through the trees were exactly the kind of thing horror movie protagonists ignored right before they got sacrificed to a pagan god. A rational person would have noped right back toward the distant glow of the campground and lived to regret her lost snacks another day.
I have never been accused of being a rational person.
The chanting grew louder as I picked my way through the underbrush, and I could make out individual voices now—low and resonant, weaving together in a language that tickled something primitive at the base of my skull. It wasn't Latin. It wasn't anything I recognized. It soundedold, like the words had been spoken before humans figured out how to write things down.
Also, there was a drumbeat. Or maybe that was my heart trying to escape my chest. Hard to tell.
The trees opened up suddenly, and I found myself at the edge of a clearing that looked like it had been designed by someone whose Pinterest board was exclusively "Cult Aesthetic." Torches flickered at the perimeter, casting dancing shadows across a circle of figures in dark robes. In the center, someone had drawn an elaborate symbol on the ground—swirling lines and sharp angles that glowed with an eerie green luminescence. The air itself felt thick, charged, like the moment before a lightning strike.
I counted at least six figures. Maybe more. They stood in perfect formation around the glowing symbol, their chanting rising and falling in waves that made my teeth ache.
And in the middle of it all, standing beside what looked like a stone altar with a single black candle, was the most terrifyingly beautiful man I had ever seen.
He was tall—taller than anyone had a right to be—with sharp cheekbones and dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that suggested he'd never had a bad hair day in his immortal life. His eyes caught the torchlight and threw it back, gleaming silver like mercury. He wore authority the way other people wore cologne—effortlessly, overwhelmingly, and with the clear expectation that everyone else would notice.
Behind him, another figure shifted. Broader shoulders. Messy black hair. A scowl that I could feel from thirty feet away, like a physical weight pressing against my skin. He held a blade—an actual, gleaming, probably-very-sharp blade—and hewas looking around the clearing with the restless energy of a predator who hadn't eaten in a while.
Cult, I thought, my brain finally catching up to my eyeballs.I've found a cult. In the woods. At midnight.
A rational person would have backed away slowly. A rational person would have retreated into the shadows and never spoken of this again.
I took a step forward, because apparently my self-preservation instincts had clocked out for the evening, and my foot found the one moss-covered root in the entire clearing that was slick enough to send me sprawling.
I hit the ground with a sound that was less "graceful entrance" and more "sack of potatoes dropped from a height." My chin bounced off a rock. My hands scraped against dead leaves. And when I looked up, every single robed figure had turned to stare at me with expressions ranging from shock to murderous intent.
The chanting stopped.
The silence that rushed in to fill the void was deafening.
"Um," I said, scrambling to my feet and trying to salvage some dignity. My hoodie had twisted around my torso. Leaves were stuck in my hair. I could feel a bruise forming on my chin. "Hi? Sorry to interrupt your... thing. I was chasing a raccoon. It stole my bag. Purple tote. Very important. Have you seen it?"
