Page 14 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

I don’t want to care. I tell myself this as I climb the ridge toward the high timber. I don’t want to care about her marketing, or her ink-smudged thumbs, or the way she looks when she’s exhausted. She is a Cassidy. She is a steward of the arrangement. That is all she is.

But the lie doesn’t stick. It slides off me like rain on a waxed coat. I do care. And as the wind picks up, carrying the scent of snow and cedar, I realize that the hotline is no longer the biggest threat to my peace.

She is.

I disappear into the shadows of the North Ridge, the dark swallowing me whole. Tomorrow, the red dots will return, along with the tourists and their cameras. Tomorrow, Wren Cassidy will be behind that desk, fighting a war she doesn’t understand.

I will be watching. I have always been watching. But for the first time in a hundred years, I am not just watching the forest. I am watching her.

And that is the most dangerous thing of all.

8

WREN

EVERYTHING IS A SNAKE UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE

My father’s heavy, old hiking boots are a betrayal of everything I value about modern civilization, and the left one has a lace that comes undone every three hundred yards regardless of how many times I knot it. I’m currently six hundred yards up the North Ridge trail, which means I’ve stopped twice to address the lace and approximately forty times to question my life choices.

I hate hiking. And when I say hate, I don’t mean that I prefer the treadmill or a casual stroll. I mean I find the entire concept of moving vertically through a landscape that actively wants to trip, bite, or scratch you to be a personal insult. Nature is fine from a distance—preferably through a triple-paned window with a glass of wine—but out here, it’s just a series of logistical hurdles made of dirt.

The trail camera is another half-mile up, strapped to an ancient hemlock that marks the boundary of what my father used to call the Deep Quiet. I call it the place where cell service goes to die. I’m out here because one of our high-paying ‘investigators’ complained that the sensors on camera four were glitching, and in the world of high-stakes cryptid marketing, a dark screen is a lost lead.

A branch catches the shoulder of my flannel shirt, jerking me back a step. I mutter a word that would make Marge reach for the dish soap. My calves are screaming, the dull, rhythmic ache reminding me I spent the last four years in an art history library where the steepest incline was the ramp to the restricted archives. I am not built for the Cascades. I am built for climate-controlled galleries and soft lighting.

I stop to catch my breath, leaning my damp forehead against a moss-covered trunk. The thick, wet air carries the scent of rotting pine needles and something sharp, like ozone. It’s quiet out here, but not a peaceful quiet. The silence here feels crowded, like the forest is holding its breath while it watches me struggle with my own cardiovascular system.

I pull my water bottle from the side pocket of my pack, the plastic crinkling loudly in the stillness. I take a sip, then another, trying to ignore the fact that the dampness of my socks is starting to feel like a permanent state of being. This is a chore. A cold, muddy, vertical chore that I’m doing because the Cassidy Lodge bank account is currently a series of red numbers screaming for help.

I start moving again, boots squelching in a patch of gray mud. Every rustle in the undergrowth makes my neck prickle. I know, intellectually, that there are no bears this close to the trail during the day. I know that cougars are solitary and generally disinterested in grumpy lodge owners. But my brain doesn’t care about silly facts like that when I’m in the woods. Out here, my brain operates on a very simple, very primal binary: is it a stick, or is it a snake?

I round a sharp bend where the trail narrows between two massive granite boulders. The ground is littered with debris from last night’s wind. I’m looking at my feet, carefully navigating a slick patch of shale, when a long, dark, undulating shape catches the corner of my eye. It’s coiled near the base of a fern, positioned exactly where my next step is supposed to land.

“Gah!” The sound that leaves my throat is not human. It is a high-pitched, undignified screech that echoes off the rocks.

I launch myself backward, boots skidding on the shale. Arms windmilling, I perform a desperate, uncoordinated dance of survival that ends with me flat on my ass in a patch of damp clover. My heart is a frantic bird hitting the inside of my ribs. I scramble back, hands scraping against the dirt, waiting for the hiss, the strike.

The snake doesn’t move. It stays perfectly still, its dark, weathered skin catching the filtered sunlight. I squint at it through the haze of my own adrenaline. Not a snake, at all. It’s a length of old, frayed climbing rope, half-buried in the duff and stained dark by years of rain. Some hiker probably dropped it a decade ago.

I sit there in the mud, my breath coming in jagged, shaky hitches. The terror recedes, replaced by a hot, prickling wave of embarrassment that nobody is even around to see. I let out a sharp, breathless laugh that sounds a little too much like a sob. I am an adult woman with a degree. I am the mastermind behind a viral marketing phenomenon. And I was just defeated by a piece of nylon cordage.

“Nice work, Wren,” I whisper to the empty trees. “Real survivalist energy there.”

I wipe my hands on my jeans, leaving dark, muddy streaks across my thighs. The laughter helps break the tension that’s been coiling in my gut since I left the lodge. I stand up, brushing the clover off my seat, and pointedly step over the rope. I don’t look back at it. I have a job to do, and I’m already twenty minutes behind my internal schedule.

The trail levels out as I approach the hemlock grove. The light here is different, dimmer as it filters through a canopy so thick it feels like a cathedral ceiling. This is where I mounted camera four, tucked into a notch in the bark where it has a clear view of the game trail leading down to the creek. It’s the sweet spot. We’ve caught three shadow sightings here in the last week, all of which I’ve carefully cropped and filtered for the hotline’s Instagram.

I slow my pace as the tree comes into view. I’m about fifty yards away when I see a flash of movement. It isn’t a guest. The CRU guys wear enough neon and Gore-Tex to be seen from orbit. This is a dark, muted shape, moving with a fluid, heavy grace that doesn’t belong to a tourist.

Stopping, I sink low behind a fallen log. My heart starts that bird-thumping thing again, but this time it isn’t the rope-snake adrenaline. It’s a cold, sharp curiosity. I watch through a gap in the rotting wood and stifle a gasp.

Rowan.

He’s standing by the hemlock, his back to me. Somehow, he’s more massive here in the forest than he was in my cramped office. He’s wearing a flannel shirt that looks like it was tailored for a giant, and his shoulders seem to span the entire width of the trail. He isn’t moving like a man out for a stroll. He’s focused.

I watch as he reaches up. He doesn’t have to stand on his toes; he just extends an arm, his hand easily reaching the height where I had to use a step-stool to mount the camera.

I hold my breath as he grips the camera housing. He turns it. It’s a slow, deliberate movement, rotating the lens away from the game trail and toward the uninteresting trunk of a nearby cedar.