The forest looked like something out of a drug trip, pines shadowing the ground so darkly that a normal person might as well have been walking blind. Moonlight glistened on top of the angled branches, but none of it ever reached the ground. Light and dark, there was no gradient, no area between.

But Rowan August wasn’t a normal person. He was a shifter, a person who could turn into an animal at will. His other half was an alpha wolf, fearsome, strong, and valiant in the face of all challenges that might come its way.

He also wasn’t in the middle of a drug trip, because he had never done a single one in his entire life. He hadn’t even ever done weed, and everyone these days had done weed at least once to try it out. He didn’t drink on a regular basis, didn’t even smoke regular cigarettes, and he treated coffee more as a pleasure than a necessity.

So, it might have been considered a little odd that he had just finished transferring a supply of needles to a very suspicious-looking man, located all the way across the state from the city where he lived and worked. That state was Virginia, and that city was Portsmouth, an insignificant speck along the waterfront of the not-well-known Elizabeth River. It wasn’t a place where anyone would have suspected to find a thriving drug trade, but the city’s roots went deeper than just fishing and riverboats.

Rowan didn’t know for certain that the needles were meant to be used with drugs, but he would have been a fool to assume otherwise. Legalities weren’t his area of expertise but he thought that you might need a license to sell and/or transport medical equipment.

He had looked at what he was carrying, to make sure there were no unpleasant surprises. The needles were packaged cleanly and properly, probably coming right off the factory belt. The label on them was from some sort of official hospital supply company. They were the real deal. Apparently his boss had about 2,000 of them to hand off to his buddy, for perfectly legitimate and normal reasons.

As if.

He wasn’t stupid.

But it wasn’t really any of his business. The pay from these jobs was fantastic, triple what he was normally paid in a week for his regular work at the liquor store. As long as he wasn’t actually transporting something directly illegal—like heroin, which was probably what these needles were meant for—then he didn’t care and was willing to look the other way. Things were just better like that.

He took the needles to his boss’ friend—who coincidentally didn’t know Rowan’s boss’ first name—and was handed a small box in exchange. He was warned not to open this box or else.

Rowan promised not to open it, not for anything. He was a good little messenger, just trying to get by in an unfair world.

Now he was here, on the outskirts of a tiny little Virginia town known as Abingdon. The exchange was made in a town about four miles to the east and a little bit south, known as Wyndale, or Windy, to locals. He had come from the interstate to the north, and now he planned to follow the highway just outside Abingdon, all the way back home. It was midnight, which meant the journey would take him well into the next day on foot. Or, on paw.

He knew there was an orchard in Abingdon and was thinking he might be able to stop by and add some late summer, early fall fruit to his backpack for free, but this pine forest wasn’t an orchard. It wasn’t anything, because he hadn’t known it existed. It wasn’t on any of the maps he had looked at before and during this journey. He’d even visited Google Earth to plot the most discreet way through to the highway, and there were only rolling hills depicted around the town.

Odd. Must be some sort of glitch.

Not that he was some sort of computer wizard who even knew if that was possible.

Something unnerved him about the forest. His wolf senses were straining to detect any sign of trouble, something that would account for his unease. There was nothing, no sounds but for the rustling branches, and no scents but for the spice of healthy pine trees. There was no one around to watch him, probably no one awake in the entire little town at this hour; yet he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched.

He used to struggle with that back when he first started these jobs a few years ago. Now, he was used to them, remaining cautious rather than afraid. Maybe this was only a remnant of the past, come back to bite him.

Rowan tasted the air again. Warm pine. His hearing strained, the wolf inside him pricking its ears, but he couldn’t even hear any animals stirring around inside the forest. He couldn’t have been more alone if he were at the bottom of an ocean.

This made it a very good time to do some snooping.

Dropping down to his knees, he pulled his backpack off his shoulders, and set it on the ground in front of him. Unzipping it, he reached inside and shoved aside a random assortment of junk he hadn’t really needed. A change of clothes, another pair of shoes, a tiny travel-sized first aid kit, some energy bars, a water bottle, and a good amount of spare change and loose trash. None of this shit was actually necessary. He’d never needed any of it except the snacks and the water. It was all just props, the sort of thing a real hitchhiker might be innocently toting around. The junk helped to disguise the fact that there was a hidden pocket on the very bottom of the backpack.

Undoing the secret strap which held the hidden compartment shut, Rowan reached in and drew out the slim box so the moonlight could fall upon its surface. Though the box was made of some type of light wood, perhaps bamboo, it had none of the usual bulkiness that one might expect upon hearing the word “box.” It looked like the cardboard container a person might put socks in, if they were very bad at giving Christmas presents.

There were no straps or latches holding the lid on. The box was entirely featureless, two seamless pieces. Rowan gently held the lid and lifted it up. Even if his eyes weren’t wolf eyes which could see easily in the dark, he would have been able to tell what the contents were. A person would see things like this all the time if they watched a movie or two.

It was two bundles of money, each one composed entirely of $100 bills. He didn’t need to count the money to know there was quite a bit of dough here. Shaking his head, he replaced the lid and slid the box back inside the backpack. No wonder he was getting paid so well for these jobs, if there was money like this involved.

Well, if he wanted to be paid, he would have to get the money back to his boss.

Straightening up again, he slung the backpack over his shoulders again and started forward into the pines. He could have gone around the forest but he was tired of taking detours, and he was also curious about this place. It just didn’t seem quite real.

Almost as soon as he stepped beneath the rugged boughs of the pine canopy, the world descended into darkness around him. It was impossible to see the moon or the stars from beneath the tangle of evergreen trees. Only very rarely was a fragment of silver moonlight able to break through the needles, spilling in thin, milky puddles on the undergrowth. Knotted thorn bushes and patches of fern constantly snagged at Rowan’s legs as he walked, tearing little holes in his jeans and tangling around his shoes. The process was difficult, making him wonder if this venture would actually be worth it in the long haul. Probably not, but curiosity killed the cat.

Or the wolf.

As he walked, he found himself becoming more and more aware of how odd this place was. This entire area was incredibly hilly, with roads that curved and twisted with the lay of the land. He would have expected the pine forest would be the same, rising and falling, but the ground here was almost unnervingly flat. There were no burrows, no dips of any kind. It was as if a thousand feet had trampled the earth flat, but there were also no footprints, no pawprints, no sign that anything living had ever been nearby at all.

There was no grass, no twigs on the ground, no fallen pine cones; only ferns, bushes, and a blanket of spongy pine needles. Every step he took was a step he might as well not have taken at all, what with the way the needles bounced up again as soon as pressure was lifted. Maybe that would account for the lack of footprints, but he didn’t think so. Surely an animal would have stepped in the mud at some point or dug around.

But everything was perfect, much too perfect.

Like all wolves, Rowan had an excellent sense of direction. The animal part of himself was more in tune with his surroundings than a human could ever be. He couldn’t see much directly ahead of him, couldn’t have known that he was still heading in a relatively straight line, except for the fact that he could feel it. A real wolf would have known what it was that guided him, some sort of magnetic alignment or else simple instinct, but all Rowan knew was that he was going the way he wanted to go.

Also like a wolf, Rowan was capable of sensing when something was wrong. In this case, it took him a long time to figure out exactly what was off, but he did eventually figure it out.

It wasn’t just the animals that were missing in this place.

There were no birds. He should have been hearing the soft nighttime music of sleeping birds, or the ponderous hooting of owls waiting for their next meal to trundle by. Insects should have been chirping, cicadas humming, and crickets playing their tiny fiddles. There was nothing. No squirrels leaping in the trees above, no foxes slinking by through the bushes.

Nothing.

He came to understand that this was not a place where animals were meant to stay. This was a place for trees, for plants that had been alive for longer than a person could comprehend.

It was an ancient place.

I’m being superstitious and foolish, Rowan thought, but he couldn’t really convince himself of that. All of these pines were absolutely huge, with no saplings at all. Nothing new had ever come here to stay, that was for damn sure.

Maybe there was even something dangerous here, though he didn’t sense anything like that. He was just uneasy, vaguely disturbed, as if he was walking through the territory of an unwelcoming wolf pack.

His unease reached a peak when the pines suddenly opened up around him, and he found himself standing on the edge of a clearing. This should have been a natural thing, since forests naturally had clearings and thicker patches. Nature was hardly ever so perfect as to be this even and constant.

This place was too perfect, that was for sure, and this clearing was the weirdest thing he had ever come across. Suddenly, the forest just ended. The clearing was nearly a perfect circle, with the trees forming an orderly line around a small, grassy meadow. Moonlight poured down through the gaps in the branches, turning the grass silver.

In the middle of the clearing was a structure that at first he mistook for a rocket ship, if an extremely small one. That impression was more from the shape of the structure than the details, it being broader at the base and triangular and narrow at the apex. Then, he shook his head and saw the thing for what it really was: a well.

“Just keeps getting stranger,” he muttered to himself. He felt like he’d walked more than enough to be all the way to the middle of Abingdon, but he was still only in the middle of the pine forest with no way of knowing how much further he had left to go before leaving it. If he turned back, would he even be able to leave? Suppose he was trapped here now? How long could a man survive on pine bark?

But that was foolishness. This was just a forest, no matter how odd it might seem. And this was only a well, despite the fact that it made no sense for a well to be here at all. Typically, a well had purpose. It was a source of water, deliberately dug in the best spot possible to avoid being a waste of time and effort.

Who on earth was out here needing to draw water? There was no sign of any habitation, human or animal.

Maybe there had been something else out here at one time, though there was no sign of anything now. In any case, Rowan didn’t think anyone had used this well in a very long time. It looked as ancient as these rough, enormous pines. The stone wall which surrounded the hole of the well was covered in cracks. There was an angular wooden roof over top of the well, and it was rotting, covered in swathes of moss and ivy. The entire structure was leaning over to one side, tilting even though the ground was as flat as could be.

“I should get out of here,” Rowan muttered to himself. At least, he thought he had spoken. The sound of his voice was so small and insignificant in the face of this silence it might just have been absorbed into the ether. After all, if no one was around to hear him, then what was the point?

Chills ran up and down his spine just from standing here, but though he really wanted to walk away, he just couldn’t seem to do it. His feet were carrying him through the clearing, across the soft blades of grass. He felt as if he was walking on clouds, and the accompanying lack of sound only completed that impression. He was being drawn forward, pulled by something he just didn’t understand. There was no turning back. He felt it, felt that this was going to change him.

Rowan didn’t want to be changed. He was just fine with living his own life the way it was, without anyone or anything interfering with him.

Now here was this well, a thing that wasn’t even alive, and it was fucking with him.

He came right up to the wall, standing so that his thighs pressed against the cold stone. The entire damn thing radiated with cold even though the weather had been quite agreeable in the past couple of days. A steady damp chill poured up from the mouth of the wall as he set his hands on top of the wall of the well. He didn’t know why he was doing it, but he was going to look in the well. He had to. His body demanded he do so.

For a moment, he didn’t see anything at all. It was so, so impossibly dark down there. The well had to be so incredibly deep, as far down as could be. He couldn’t even tell if there was water down there, or if this well had run dry.

Then, something seemed to shimmer from very deep within the darkness. Rowan couldn’t tell how deep down that shimmer was, but he knew damn well what it looked like. He’d done a lot of wandering at night in his time, and that glimmer could be nothing but moonlight on water.

Which should have been normal, as everything else should have been. But, like everything else in this damnable forest, that shimmer was just a little off in a way he couldn’t quite understand. After a moment of staring, he realized what was bothering him.

He was leaning out over the mouth of the well. There should have been a shadow down there, a silhouette where he was blocking out the moonlight coming from directly above. But there was no shadow, no outline of himself at all. It was as if he didn’t exist.

Or as if the glimmering sparkles of silver were coming from somewhere else entirely.

Impossible, he thought. Unless it’s some sort of…bioluminescent algae?

Like any man who had ever been bored in the middle of a sleepless night, Rowan had watched the Discovery Channel a time or two. He knew that he was by no means an expert on any particular subject, but he had definitely heard of such a thing before; glowing plants and animals weren’t all that uncommon at all, if he was to believe the programs he’d seen. It made sense that there could be something like that here.

Except he was fooling himself, because he also knew that most bioluminescence came in a distinctive shade of blue. Not moonlight-silver.

Now the silver was strengthening, the water seeming to swirl and shift as more and more glimmers appeared. He felt as if he was the one spinning, as if the world was holding still. Gripping at the stone wall so hard his fingertips hurt, Rowan leaned down and peered harder at the water.

This was magic. He didn’t understand, but it was magic. The sparkles of silver were changing color now, and he wanted to look up at the sky to see if the moon had exploded, but of course that wasn’t happening. The sparkles weren’t from the moon. They had originated from within the well, and now they were swirling around though the surface of the water was still and placid. The glimmers were golden and pale peach and brown and blue-white, forming a pattern that sharpened and solidified the longer he stared.

This looks like a person. I’m seeing a person in the well.

His eyes were throbbing from not blinking, water gathering behind them. He blinked and when he opened them again, he half-expected this weird illusion would be gone. But no, the image of the person in the water only continued to strengthen until he might have been looking at a photograph.

It was a man with curly golden-brown hair and piercing blue eyes that seemed to see everything all at once. Rowan could only see what the man looked like from the shoulders up, like he was studying a portrait, but it was obvious to him that this man was slender and also undeniably handsome. His features were sharp and strong and also somehow forlorn and profound, as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.

How someone could be so beautiful and yet so sad, Rowan had no idea.

He was very aware that he was now leaning dangerously far out over the well. If he slipped, that would be the end of him. However, he couldn’t stop himself. He needed to look, to memorize every detail of that gorgeous man.

Those eyes were so serious, so deep. They were entire worlds within themselves.

Rowan was hardly aware the image had begun to shift again even as he looked at it and he stared harder, trying to keep it there for as long as possible. His heart was aching to see the other man fading away, though he had no idea why. This person probably wasn’t even real.

Then he realized that the image was changing, not disappearing. There was a man no longer but a wolf, the full body of which was depicted. The wolf was an omega, as slender as the man had been. The two were clearly the same, having the same beautiful icy eyes. More than that, they were both just as gorgeous. The wolf possessed a pelt of silver and white, marbled with black around the paws, rump and scruff. His snout was rounded and soft, his whiskers like sprays of light.

And now that image was fading as well, but now there was nothing coming to replace it. Whatever magic the well had possessed was running out, or maybe it had shown him all that he was meant to see. Nevertheless, Rowan stared into the water until the very last fleck of color was gone; even then, he stayed bent over the unbroken darkness, struggling to understand.

He had known from the very beginning that something was wrong with this place but never would he have dared dream something like this would happen. He didn’t understand why it happened, or what he had seen. Why had he seen that shifter, and the shifter’s wolf form? Was there even a point to any of this?

It seemed to him he should have known about this, but he couldn’t really remember why, or if his brain was trying to apply logic where none could be found.

Either way, it was over.

Pushing against the wall, Rowan staggered away from the well. His thoughts instantly felt clearer, his senses more open, but the silence around him still made it seem as if he was going deaf.

“I have to get out of here.”

For one terrible moment, he didn’t know how to orient himself so he could do that. The panic faded away almost immediately afterwards as logic managed to reassert itself, finally. He had approached the well, stood over it, and then moved backwards. He was still facing in the right direction. He just had to keep going and eventually, the pines would stop. They had to.

Right?

There was nothing to do but try, so he struck out in that direction. He skirted around the well, not wanting to go near it just in case it did something else. As he stepped outside the clearing, the atmosphere seemed to change. The air felt lighter, and the chill from the well had fallen away.

The further he walked through the pines, leaving the clearing behind, he felt better. It only took a few minutes before he saw silver light glistening through the branches, signaling a break in the forest. He hurried towards the break, hoping to God that he would emerge out into the same world he’d left behind. It seemed like anything could happen tonight.

There was a short stretch of unkempt field just outside the pine forest, scruffy grass and weeds that looked as if they hadn’t been cut in years. The growth was stumpy and stunted, each plant choking the life out of its neighbor.

Rowan thought he’d never seen anything so wonderful in all his life. He hurried out onto the grass and then turned back, backpack thumping against his shoulder blades. He expected the forest to be gone, like some sort of fever dream, but it was still there, as dark and mysterious as ever.

He grinned, feeling like he’d won some sort of battle in which he hadn’t even been rooting for himself. Spinning around again, he looked out to see what obstacle faced him now.

It was the orchard that he’d heard about. He felt like he’d known it existed even before he did the research for this job, though that might just have been déjà vu. Maybe it was on the news or he’d heard some kind of rumor.

It looked like he had come out of a forest only to face another one, but this one was composed of orderly lines of apple trees. The boughs of the trees were laden with fruit, frosted white in the glow of the moon.

Even though his plan had been to steal some of the fruit for himself, he decided that he really didn’t feel like it anymore. Rather than head straight through the orchard, he decided to skirt around the outer edge.

Rowan shifted as he walked, dropping down to his huge wolf paws. Though he was a large alpha, his steps were completely silent. Head down, tail wagging easily behind him, he picked up speed and was soon standing on a hill which overlooked the little town. There was an off-ramp in the vicinity, looping around to a highway which was absolutely abandoned at this time of night.

Come dawn, he would have to resume his human shape, but for now, he could trot down the highway just like this. A wolf was made for the long haul and traveling like this would really cut down on the time the journey took. It was five hours by car, traveling at highway speed.

He didn’t really mind. Every step was a relief, because it took him away from that weird little town and its secret pine forest.

That didn’t mean he forgot about it, because it stayed in his mind long after the sun rose.