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The corner of my mouth twitches.

Prue watches us both over her glasses. Then she taps her calendar. “Project briefing is at eleven, upstairs at town hall. The festival committee is expecting you both, and they want to meet our new officer.”

“I’ve got the north boundary to walk⁠—”

“They asked for you by name, Holt.” Prue smiles sweetly. “I told them you’d be delighted.”

There’s no good way to argue with that, and she knows it.

I avoid town hall meetings the way deer avoid highways. They run long, and nothing that matters to the forest ever gets decided in a room with folding chairs.

Today, I need to be somewhere else. Every evening before dark, I walk up to the north interior to make sure nothing has been disturbed and the…

I cut off the thought before it shows on my face. Wren matches my stride on the town hall stairs. She notices everything. I won’t give her anything else to pick up on.

The upstairs meeting room is long and narrow, with a large screen at the front and rows of folding chairs. Late-morning light streams through tall windows. Someone has set out a coffee urn and a plate of bat-shaped cookies.

The door opens behind us, and the stairs groan under someone heavier than me.

“Ashford.” Brody ducks through the doorway, his wings folded flat against his back. He’s an eight-foot, stone-gray gargoyle, the only person in Screaming Woods who makes me look average. “They dragged you out of the woods? I’ll alert the press.”

Brody wasn’t here the night of the punch. He turned up years later, and how a motocross rider ends up as eight feet of stone is a story he’s never told me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Festival committee. They needed someone tall to hang the lanterns.” He grabs a bat cookie and bites its head off. “You still owe me forty bucks from poker.”

“You cheated.”

“I won. Losing to me is expensive.” He grins, showing all his teeth. “You coming Thursday, or are you going to brood in a tree again?”

Before I can answer, Prue taps the microphone at the front, and Brody drops into a folding chair built for someone half his size.

I know everyone in this room. The council chair, the librarian, the baker from Conjure and Crumb, the woman who runs the bed and breakfast, two festival volunteers with matching tote bags.

They trust me with their forest, and most of them know about the memo. They keep glancing from me to Wren and back again, waiting to see if the grumpy ranger will play nice with his new partner. It’ll be all over town by dinner either way.

There’s one stranger, sitting in the front row in a navy suit, tapping at a laptop plugged into the screen.

“Everyone, this is our tourism consultant from the county,” Prue says. “And this is Officer Wren Nicholls, our new wildlife officer. She started yesterday and has already hit the ground running.”

The room claps. Wren offers everyone a big smile and a little wave, but her knuckles are white on her agenda, and she looks like she’d rather be anywhere else. I have the strangest urge to step in front of her.

The suit clicks to his first slide: VISITORS COME FOR THE MONSTERS. LET’S GIVE THEM A REASON TO STAY.

“The average day-tripper spends ninety minutes in town and leaves,” he says. “The overlook is the hero moment. Families post it, their friends book, and the numbers do the rest.”

He clicks again, and a map of the preserve fills the screen. A bright red line runs up the north trailhead and hooks inward toward a gold star.

INTERIOR OVERLOOK. PROPOSED.

“I’ll send James up the north trail for interior shots,” the consultant says.

That star sits a stone’s throw from a place I’ve never shown anyone. The satellite photo shows one bald knob on that ridge. Of course the man with the laptop picked it. What lives there is small, slow, rare, and won’t survive a crowd.

The baker leans back in his chair. “No offense, Holt, but you don’t like strangers in your forest. Are you on board with this?”

Every head turns.