Page 52 of Bear Naked Truth
27
AUTUMN
Echo Woods wasn’t a place people wandered into lightly.
Even locals—the shifters, witches, half-beings, and all the in-betweens of Celestial Pines—knew better than to stroll under its canopy without reason. The trees weren’t just old here. They wereaware. The kind of ancient that bent time if you blinked too long and whispered things into your bones if you let them.
Autumn Sinclair had been avoiding the woods since she arrived.
She knew how they worked. Felt the pull in her chest every time she got too close to the tree line, like the forest could smell her uncertainty and was just waiting for her to step wrong.
But now she had a reason.
The Hollow Man wasn’t going to reveal anything else from the attic. She’d felt it in the tightening in the air, the unease in the bones of Briar Hollow. He’d said all he was willing to saythere.
She needed to goto him.
To where he died.
To where the blood hit the earth and stayed.
So she walked.
Dorian didn’t ask questions when she left that morning, only offered her a packed thermos of Nerissa’s focus tea and a kiss on her cheek that lingered. She hadn’t told him where she was going. Not yet.
The path into the woods curved like a question mark—uncertain, shifting. Roots tangled beneath her boots, and branches overhead creaked like old warnings. The deeper she went, the colder the air grew, even with the sun hanging stubbornly overhead.
She paused at the old break in the trees where the path split.
Left to the old Warden watch post. Right to the place Rowan once called “the memory hollow.”
She went right.
It took her an hour to find it. And when she did, she knew without a doubt it wastheplace.
A clearing, half-eaten by moss and time. The remains of an altar, stones now crumbling, twisted with vines. A circle faintly burned into the earth, the outline blackened but still breathing with a kind of quiet ache.
She stepped into the center of the clearing, heart thrumming against her ribs like a warning she didn’t want to heed.
The circle on the ground was faint but still pulsing, an echo of a ritual unfinished. She could feel it in the dirt beneath her boots. Hollowed out. Waiting.
“I know what you lost,” she said softly, voice barely more than a breath.
Nothing answered.
She closed her eyes, grounded her breath.
“I read the journal,” she continued, stronger now. “I know what he did. What hetookfrom you.”
The wind stirred.
Then came a whisper.
“He promised forever.”
It was a voice full of soil and sorrow, carrying centuries on its breath. Not cruel.
Just tired.
