Page 2 of The Souls of Lost Lake

“Jasmine!”

The call faded as the forest swallowed the sound waves. An echo, and nothing else, of a man’s voice, followed by a woman’s, and then another man’s. The search party.

Jasmine.

Or was it in her mind, in her head? One of the moments when life became surreal and she questioned what was and what wasn’t?

Arwen could hear her breath in her ears. Her heartbeat thrummed like a rhythmic pounding of hands on a cajón.

The night air, crisp for it being early summer, infiltrated her senses and put them on edge. She was alive. This was real. She was alive. This was real. Or so her mind tried to convince herself while her heart fought against it.

Anothersnap!as her foot crunched on a dry stick, this time sending a chip into a nearby tree trunk.

Arwen could smell something metallic. Ironlike. She’d smelled it before when she had helped her cousin butcher a deer during hunting season. It was the smell of death but with life still pulsating through the vessels, attempting to accomplish what the body had already decided against.

Her own headlamp swept the darkness in front of her. God help her if the scent lingering in the air was from a child. Six-year-old Jasmine Riviera had gone missing. The search party was refusing to give up, even though it was well past midnight. Somehow, Arwen had found herself separated from the searchers. Deviating from the search grid. Instinct—or maybe something else—taking her into the deeper places yet to be mapped. The deeper places of her mind.

Lost Lake’s back in there somewhere. It’s Ava Coons’s place. The place where she wanders.

Arwen could hear the campfire storyteller’s scratchy voice as he entertained with tales of the forest. Her hiking boot slipped offa rock buried beneath wet leaves. Arwen took another step, this time the voice growing louder in her mind, and the shouting for Jasmine elusive and far away.

“Ava Coons still haunts it—if you can find it. But anyone who gets near it disappears. Poof! Like a vanishing act. No one ever sees them again. Man went missing in 1967. Some hunters found his body in ’93. Bones. That’s all that was left. People say a soul loses their senses in these woods. They become turned around and they hear things. Drives them mad until ... well, until all that’s left of them are bones.”

They were meant to scare, the stories, told around campfires during the summer. With s’mores. With hot cocoa. Exaggerated tales of the murderess Ava Coons and all the gory elements that came after them.

Arwen paused, realizing her breathing was coming so fast and so hard that her chest heaved as if she’d been sprinting. She palmed the rough bark of a tree, leaning against it.Feelingit. She shouldn’tfeelit. Not in a dream. Not in a vision. But her senses were sparked, as always, disguising reality.

Her headlamp flickered.

No. No, no no.

It went out.

The forest became a silent coffin, closing in around Arwen. Be it the memories of stories, the truth of the disorienting nature of the forest, or something else—something altogether different—Arwen didn’t know. She didn’t understand.

A child’s giggle filtered through the pitch-black night and floated away across the leaves.

“Jasmine!” Arwen’s voice was loud. An interruption in the unforgiving stillness.

Little girl missing. Only six. They’d been searching for hours now.

Hours.

Could she hear the ticking of a clock?

Arwen closed her eyes, and when she opened them, it was there. In front of her. A lake pooling out of the darkness, fog floatingabove its lily pads. Several yards from shore was a dilapidated cabin. Its roof was half sunken, revealing a gaping hole. The front doorframe was empty, an open, doorless smile into unknown ruins.

The tree she leaned against grew cold beneath her touch. Arwen snatched her hand back, looking down at her palm. She could see its whiteness against the blue-black of the forest floor.

“Wren?” The voice was whisper-like. It drifted toward her just as another set of girlish giggles chimed behind her.

Arwen squinted into the darkness toward the lake, so strangely illuminated. Toward the cabin, so oddly juxtaposed with the serenity of the scene.

“Wren?” The voice came from the cabin.

Arwen could hear herself breathing.

“Wren?”