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ONE

GRIFF

T he phone's shrill ring cut through the pre-dawn silence like a chainsaw through cedar, dragging Griff Cooper from the first decent sleep he'd managed in weeks. His bear stirred restlessly beneath his skin as he fumbled for the device, squinting at the caller ID through bleary eyes.

Leo Maddox. Sheriff's Department. Three-seventeen AM. Leo, his long-time friend, was once the police captain, became Professor of Applied Supernatural Security, and then became the Sheriff’ two weeks ago.

The man had experienced life changes several times over than any ordinary shifter, not to mention his involvement with founder level magic.

Nothing good ever came from law enforcement calls at this hour, especially not in a town where "unusual circumstances" could mean anything from vampire noise complaints to pixies shoplifting at the hardware store.

"Cooper," he answered, his voice rough with sleep and the lingering taste of exhaustion.

"I need you at the wildlife sanctuary. Now." Leo's voice carried the tight control that meant supernatural complications. "We've got a situation."

Griff sat up, instantly alert. The wildlife sanctuary bordered the forest preserve where he'd taken Tilly hiking just last weekend, where she'd insisted on talking to the trees and somehow convinced a family of rabbits to follow them home. "What kind of situation?"

"The kind that has park rangers calling about 'unnatural disturbances' and every animal with working instincts fleeing for the county line.

" Leo's lion must be prowling close to the surface; his voice carried that dangerous rumble that made smart people step carefully.

"Whatever's happening out there, it started around midnight.

The entire eastern quadrant is... wrong. "

Griff's blood chilled. Seven months had passed since the supernatural community had celebrated what everyone believed was lasting peace.

Seven months since Dr. Elena Vasquez had recovered from her possession and the Mistbound fragments had been transformed into healing matrices.

Seven months of quiet nights and normal problems, of believing his daughter might actually grow up safe in this strange little town where magic and mundane coexisted like old married couples who'd learned to appreciate each other's quirks.

He should have known it was too good to last.

"I'll be there in twenty," Griff said, already rolling out of bed and reaching for the jeans he'd left draped over his chair. "Do I need to bring the emergency kit?"

"Bring everything," Leo said grimly. "And Griff? Be prepared for this to get weird."

The line went dead, leaving Griff staring at his phone in the darkness of his bedroom.

Through the thin walls of their modest two-bedroom house, he could hear Tilly's soft breathing from her room next door.

She'd been restless all night, murmuring in her sleep about shadows and pretty ladies and knitting needles that moved like snakes.

He'd chalked it up to an overactive imagination and too much Halloween candy from the town's recent harvest festival.

Now he wondered if his six-year-old daughter's nightmares might be something far more dangerous than childhood anxiety.

Griff dressed quickly, his movements automatic after years of emergency calls from his handyman business.

Jeans, flannel shirt, work boots that had seen more supernatural crises than any footwear should reasonably encounter.

He grabbed his emergency kit from the hall closet, a duffel bag that contained silver rounds, iron filings, protective charms blessed by various town residents, and enough supernatural insurance policies to make even the most optimistic paranormal investigator nervous.

He was halfway to the front door when a thin, terrified wail cut through the house like a knife through his heart.

"Daddy!"

Griff dropped everything and ran.

He found Tilly sitting bolt upright in her twin bed, her dark curls plastered to her forehead with sweat and her eyes wide with the kind of terror that no child should go through.

Her stuffed wolf, Mr. Gruff, lay forgotten on the floor beside a overturned glass of water that was somehow steaming in the cool October air.

"Hey, baby girl," Griff said softly, settling on the edge of her bed and pulling her into his arms. She was burning up, her small body radiating heat that didn’t have anything to do with fever but with magic that had been manifesting in increasingly dramatic ways since her sixth birthday. "Another bad dream?"

"Not a dream," Tilly whispered against his chest, her voice muffled but certain. "The pretty lady was here. She was standing right there by my window, and she had all these shadows moving around her like they were dancing. They wanted to come inside, but Mr. Gruff growled at them."

Griff's gaze flicked to the window, which was securely locked and showed nothing but the familiar view of their back garden and the forest beyond.

But the air in the room felt charged, like the moments before a thunderstorm, and his bear was pacing restlessly with the instinctive knowledge that something predatory had been far too close to his cub.

"What did this pretty lady look like?" he asked, trying to keep his voice casual even as his protective instincts roared to life.

"Tall. Really tall, like a grown-up, but not like a normal grown-up. Her hair was dark and it moved even when there wasn't any wind. And her eyes..." Tilly shuddered. "Her eyes looked like they were full of stars, but not the nice kind. The scary kind that watch you."

Every alarm bell in Griff's head started clanging.

In a town where the supernatural was everyday reality, parents learned to take their children's "imaginary" encounters seriously.

Especially when those children carried enough magical potential to accidentally short-circuit the town's electrical grid during particularly vivid nightmares.

"Did she say anything to you?" Griff asked.

"She didn't talk with her mouth. She talked inside my head, like when I can hear what Mr. Gruff is thinking, except louder.

She said she's been waiting a really long time, and now all the right people are finally in the same place.

She said she wants to meet me properly, but first she has to deal with Grandma Ruth's knitting needles. "

Ice flooded Griff's veins. Ruth Blackthorne had been knitting protective charms for the supernatural community since before Griff was born.

Her needles were local legend, capable of weaving wards that could turn away everything from hostile fae to rogue vampires.

If something was specifically targeting Ruth's magical defenses. ..

"Tilly, I need you to listen to me very carefully," Griff said, pulling back to look directly into his daughter's eyes.

"If you see that lady again, or if you feel scared or strange or if your magic starts acting up, I want you to call me immediately.

Don't try to handle it yourself, don't try to be brave. Just call me. Can you do that?"

Tilly nodded solemnly, her small face scrunched with the concentration of someone memorizing life-or-death instructions. "Are you going away because of the broken thing in the forest?"

Griff's heart stopped. "What broken thing?"

"The big stone circle that's supposed to keep the mean things out.

It has a crack in it now, like when I dropped your coffee mug but worse.

The trees are crying because they can feel it.

" Tilly's voice took on the eerie certainty that always made the hair on the back of Griff's neck stand up.

"That's why all the animals ran away. They know something's coming. "

Before Griff could ask more questions, his phone buzzed with a text from Leo: Where the hell are you? It's getting worse.

"I have to go help Sheriff Leo with some work stuff," Griff said, kissing the top of Tilly's head and breathing in the familiar scent of strawberry shampoo and childhood innocence.

"Mrs. Henderson will be here in a few minutes to stay with you.

I want you to stick close to her, okay? No wandering off, no exploring, no trying to help any more woodland creatures find their way home. "

"Okay, Daddy." Tilly burrowed back under her covers, clutching Mr. Gruff like a lifeline. "But be careful. The pretty lady doesn't like people who try to fix things. She wants everything to stay broken."

Twenty-five minutes later, Griff was standing at the edge of the Mistwhisper Falls Wildlife Sanctuary, staring at a scene that made his bear want to shift and fight something that wasn't there to fight.

The eastern section of the preserve, nearly three hundred acres of old-growth forest that had stood undisturbed since before the town was founded, looked like something from a fever dream.

Ancient oaks that had weathered centuries of storms were twisted into impossible spirals, their trunks corkscrewing toward the sky.

The undergrowth had erupted into chaotic growth, with ferns reaching shoulder height and vines thick as his forearm strangling everything they could reach.

But it was the silence that made his skin crawl. No bird calls, no rustle of small mammals in the brush, no buzz of insects. Even the wind seemed muted, as if the forest itself was holding its breath.

"Started around midnight," Leo said, appearing beside him with the silent approach that marked him as predator.

The lion shifter looked like he'd been running on pure adrenaline and coffee, his golden-brown hair disheveled and his uniform wrinkled.

"Park rangers tried to investigate and made it maybe fifty yards before their equipment started malfunctioning and they decided discretion was the better part of not becoming supernatural casualties. "

"Any idea what caused it?" Griff asked, though he was beginning to suspect he already knew.

"Follow me," Leo said grimly, leading him deeper into the preserve along what had once been a well-maintained trail and was now an obstacle course of twisted vegetation and ground that seemed to pulse with its own rhythm.

They walked in silence for ten minutes, picking their way carefully through terrain that felt actively hostile.

Griff's bear was on high alert, every instinct screaming warnings about territory that had been claimed by something that definitely wasn't natural.

The air grew thicker with each step, charged with the kind of magical pressure that made mundane humans unconsciously avoid certain areas and sent supernatural residents looking for the nearest exit.

"There," Leo said, pointing ahead to where the trail curved around a massive oak that had to be at least two centuries old.

The tree was growing in a perfect spiral, its trunk twisted like a corkscrew, bark stretching and warping in patterns that defied everything Griff knew about how plants were supposed to work.

But it wasn't the impossible geometry that made his blood run cold.

It was what lay at the base of the tree.

The ground was marked with symbols, burned into the earth itself as if someone had used magical fire to etch sigils directly into the forest floor.

The marks were clearly ancient, weathered by seasons of rain and snow, but they pulsed with a faint silver light that suggested whatever magic had created them was far from dormant.

"Founder-era wardstone," Leo said, crouching beside the largest of the burned symbols. "Dr. Thorne confirmed it this morning. This is one of the original protective barriers the first settlers established around the town's perimeter."

Griff knelt beside him, studying the intricate pattern of interconnected circles and lines that seemed to shift and change when he wasn't looking directly at them.

At the center of the design, a jagged crack split the main sigil nearly in half, the edges of the break glowing with an angry red light that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.

"It's broken," he said, though the understatement felt inadequate given the evidence of magical catastrophe surrounding them.

"As of sometime last night, yeah." Leo straightened, his expression grim. "Question is what broke it, and whether we can fix it before whatever it was designed to keep out decides to come calling."

As if summoned by his words, movement at the edge of Griff's vision made him turn sharply toward the treeline.

For just a moment, he could have sworn he saw figures standing in the shadows between the twisted trees, watching them with the patient stillness of predators waiting for the right moment to strike.

But when he looked directly at the spot, there was nothing there except darkness and the growing certainty that their seven months of peace had just come to a very permanent end.

"Leo," Griff said quietly, not taking his eyes off the forest. "I think we're not alone out here."

The sheriff's hand moved automatically to the weapon at his hip, though they both knew that conventional firearms were useless against the kind of threats that broke founder-era wards. "What do you see?"

"Maybe nothing. Maybe everything." Griff rose slowly, every movement careful and deliberate.

His bear was demanding he shift, demanding he put himself between the potential threat and the rest of his territory, but human logic knew that charging blindly into unknown supernatural danger was a good way to become a cautionary tale.

"But I think we need to get back to town and start making some very urgent phone calls. "

As they retreated along the twisted trail, Griff couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched by eyes that had been waiting far too long for exactly this moment.

Behind them, the broken ward pulsed with malevolent light, and somewhere in the distance, you could hear what sounded almost like laughter echoed through the corrupted forest.

His quiet life was officially over, and whatever was coming for Mistwhisper Falls had already begun its hunt.