Page 35

I look well and truly debauched. Red hair, dark, wet, and sticking up weird. Freckles against a face still a little too flushed. Eyes a little wild. Thirty-five years old and officially losing my mind over an ancient cryptid I named after a rock I found.

“You’re going to work today, and you’re gonna act normal,” I point at my reflection. “You’re gonna sign reports, answer radios, check trail conditions, and absolutely not think about the fact that you just jerked off to a guy who has antlers in his other form.”

The man in the mirror looks unconvinced.

I’m unconvinced, too, but bills and responsibilities are useful things when your internal life turns into a circus fire.

I dress in my uniform, get coffee going, throw the towel from the bathroom into the wash, and deliberately do not think about the fact that if this bond is half as mutual as I think it is, then he probably felt every second of what happened in the shower. The thought catches in my brain, and I immediately shove it into a locked drawer in the back of my head.

Work happens regardless of my new sexual awakening. I still have a trail to check, a radio to carry, and people to keep from walking themselves into stupid situations.

I head out, work the day, answer questions from tourists who somehow made it to a state park without understanding how weather works, and spend an hour with Parker knee-deep in brush because some idiot thought carving initials into trail signs counted as romance. Parker talks the whole time, mostly about nothing, and I’m grateful for it because it lets me hide inside responses that don’t require me to think too hard.

“You going out tonight?” he asks as we load tools back into the truck, sweat cooling between my shoulder blades as it dries.

“Maybe.”

He gives me a sideways look. “You say that in a tone that suggests either moonlit hiking or murder.”

“Those aren’t my only two hobbies.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

I snort and shut the tailgate harder than necessary. “I just need some air.”

He raises both hands in surrender. “Alright, Ranger. Don’t let the boogeyman get you.”

The joke lands square in the center of my chest and stays there, because I kinda want the boogeyman to get me. I force out a laugh that sounds passably normal and climb into the driver’s seat before he can look too closely.

By the time I get back to the cabin, the sun is lowering behind the ridge and the spring evening has cooled into that perfect hour where the whole place smells damp and alive.

I park, kill the engine, and sit there with my hands on the steering wheel, staring out at the treeline. I told him I would come. I didn’t specify when, but the promise is still there. The rational part of me wants to eat dinner, shower again, and stay inside with the door locked because meeting Onyx while awake is different from meeting him in a dream.

I get out of the truck and stand at the bottom of the steps for a second, keys in one hand and my bag in the other, staring at the porch. I’m standing on my own property, thinking about a cryptid date. I should feel ridiculous. Instead, I feel nervous.

That’s almost more irritating than the shower incident. I’m not nineteen. I’m not heading to a first dinner with someone I met on an app. I’m a grown man with dirt under his nails and a state-issued radio clipped to his belt.

The person I’m going to meet in the woods wears antlers in one form and can apparently step into my dreams in another. The nerves still show up anyway, hot and skittish under my skin.

I go inside, dump my work bag on the chair by the door, and change into what has become my evening hiking uniform. A faded charcoal thermal, an old green flannel overshirt, dark cargo pants, thick socks, and boots that know every contour of these trails as well as I do. Then, I pack my radio, water, first-aid kit, knife, headlamp, and a protein bar. Fear and attraction apparently don’t make me stupid enough to ignore blood sugar.

I stand by the door, hand on my pack strap, listening to the cabin settle around me.

“You can still not do this,” I tell myself before I open the door and step outside.

The forest smells like wet cedar, pine resin, fern, and spring soil loosened by thaw. No Labrador tea at first, and my stomach twists with an anxious little drop. I lock the cabin behind me, pause on the porch, and look at the space where the bundles and stone have been.

“I’m doin’ this, then,” I mutter, then I head for the trail.

I can’t explain it, but I know exactly where I’m heading. There’s a bend in the north trail where the trees open around an old boulder split by lightning years before I was born. The ground there flattens into a natural little bowl, soft with moss, and you can hear the creek if you stand still long enough.

When I come around the last curve, he steps out from between two pines, and I forget how to breathe. Onyx in human form is somehow more shocking in waking life than he was in a dream.

Maybe it’s because dream logic lets impossible things slide right past your brain without resistance. Maybe it’s because out here, in the real forest with dirt under my boots and the cool bite of dusk on my face, a man that beautiful standing in my woods feels just as surreal as antlers.

God, he’s taller than I remember, which seems unfair considering dreams exaggerate things. He’s bare-chested again, long black hair falling loose over his shoulders and down his back. His skin is pale in the dim light, but the dark marks along his arms, chest, throat, and ribs make him look carved from old forest shadow.

In the dream, I thought they looked like growth rings. In waking life, they’re even more striking, raised slightly in some places, smooth in others, following the shape of him in a way no tattoo artist could plan.