The trees didn't whisper. They didn't groan. They just stood there, tall and old.
Lucan didn't romanticize nature. He'd buried people in forests, burned villages into the ground and watched trees soak up the blood without protest. Nature wasn't pure. It just endured.
But this place... There was something off about it.
Not magical, just wrong.
He moved off the road and into the forest, shoes dragging through leaves. The sound of town faded behind him. No more tires on gravel. No laughter. Just the woods. And the faint sound of water somewhere in the distance.
He didn't need light. He hadn't needed light for a long time.
There were footprints scattered around from a few animals, mostly deer and raccoons. One set of prints caught Lucan's attention. Too wide and deep to be anything natural, but not fresh. A few days old. No reason for it to matter.
Except it did. He knelt down, pressed his palm into the dirt.
Dry.
But there was no dust. Just compacted earth. Like something heavy had passed through. Heavy and dragging.
Lucan stood and kept walking. Not far into the trees, the ground changed. A clearing opened ahead, ringed with stunted pines and half-dead brush.
There was something in the center. Not a person. Not a structure, but a stone. Flat and wide.
'A table,'
Lucan stopped just short of the clearing's edge.
'This wasn't made for humans.'
He could see that in the geometry, too flat, too clean, no erosion. The kind of precision that didn't belong out here. He moved closer, circling the stone.
No markings. No carvings.
But the ground around it was disturbed. He crouched again. Touched the soil and turned up something.
It was a bird.
Black. Matte. Crisp and clean.
But Lucan knew this bird hadn't died of age.
Its neck had been snapped. And laid here deliberately.
He stood again and scanned the treeline. Someone had used this place. Recently.
For what, he didn't know. But it felt old. Not ancient like him, but primitive.
'Ritual, maybe.'
But it was not the elegant kind. Not the vampire kind. This was raw. Dirty. Instinctual.
He turned to leave, then stopped, his gaze landing on a footprint. Bare, small and human.
He crouched. Looked closer. It was too narrow for a man and too long for a child.
'Female.'
But what caught him wasn't the shape. It was the angle.
Whoever had left it had been.
Dancing.
Lucan followed the trail left by the woman in a wide arc, careful not to step where the prints led. The forest had gone quiet again. Not silent, just muffled, like the noise had been pushed back by something else.
He walked until the clearing was out of sight. Another forty meters. Maybe fifty.
There, he found the bones. They weren't in a pile, but instead they were arranged in circles. Not perfect. Not ritualistic in the way witches did things. But purposeful. Messy on purpose. Like someone was trying to imitate a ceremony without knowing the rules.
His eyes trailing the bones. Rabbit bones. Some bird. A dog, maybe.
He crouched.
The marrow was dry, but the wounds, he could see the cuts on them and they were crude.
Something had carved them open with human hands. Not a knife.
Nails.
'No vampire did this.'
'Too dirty. Too slow. Too eager.'
Lucan rose, scanned the perimeter again.
Then he saw it.
A flash of movement.
Not ahead.
Behind.
He turned quickly eyes sharp, but saw nothing. Just the clearing again, now in the distance.
And standing at the edge of it. A figure.
Tall.
Female.
Barefoot.
She was watching him. Not moving. Not blinking. She wasn't afraid. And that was the part that stuck.
Lucan standing firm met her gaze, but didn't speak.
She tilted her head. Then, with slow, fluid motion, she walked back into the trees.
No sound. Like she'd always been part of them.
Lucan didn't follow. Not yet. Instead, he walked back to the stone altar. Circled it again. Looked for other signs, scorch marks, blood, hair. There was nothing, just that feeling. It was neither magic nor power. It was something worse.
'Faith.'
'Or something pretending to be it.'
Lucan stood over the stone and exhaled slowly. He didn't recognize the woman, but he recognized the look. He'd seen it in the eyes of zealots, mad kings and broken prophets.
The look that said:
"I'm not afraid of death, because I think it belongs to me."
As he walked out of the woods, the night opened back up. Sounds returned. Distant cars. A breeze. But the feeling lingered.
Someone out here was playing in the dirt with old instincts. Cult behavior. Pagan roots. Something too raw to be clever. Lucan had seen what that kind of belief could do. How fast it could spread and how deep it could rot.
He stepped onto the road and looked back one last time.
'Whatever that was, it's just getting started.'
'And I'm not the only predator circling.'