List really had given her shit directions.

And yet, Valerie found it hard to put too much of the blame on her. If she were trying to give directions to the shed in the woods outside of town, she wouldn’t really have had much more to add beyond “half an hour that way.”

“Half an hour,” incidentally, turned out to be a lot closer to three hours when you were searching a forest for a tiny, half destroyed shack with no real landmarks and only a vague heading.

But, eventually, and more through luck and persistence than any skill with navigating the woods, she found it. In a small clearing only slightly larger than the structure itself stood an old, overgrown building.

She could see why List had called it a shed. It certainly wasn’t much bigger than one. But it looked closer to the jail back in town than something a person might use to store their tools.

The walls were thick and sturdy, built out of logs stacked on each other and held in place with multiple braces. There were no windows, and the door frame featured metal rungs that could have been used to bar the door shut . . . from the outside.

The door, incidentally, was in mostly rotted away pieces scattered around the forest floor. What was left of it, along with the door frame and the whole of the otherwise bare interior, was covered in long, deep claw marks.

Now that she was here, she could make out something in the forest floor she could call a path, if she squinted. She never would have noticed it if she’d just been walking through, but actually looking for it and knowing this was where it led, there was a clear part of the forest where the brush had thinned out, where fallen twigs were more scarce. Abandoned, much like the shack, but not long enough for the forest to fully reclaim it.

She could see why List hadn’t slept here. The sheer number of deep, jagged scratches in the walls gave the place the air of a brutalized animal corpse—a sign of a violent predator, to be avoided at all costs.

The beginnings of a theory took shape in her mind, but pieces were missing. She needed more information to give it shape, confirm a few things, and fill in the gaps. And for that, she needed to go back to town.

Even though he was the one who seemed to be the most comfortable around her, Valerie chose to stay away from Sheriff Darshan for now, opting instead to take her chances with the rest of the town. She walked the town, catching people who weren’t in a hurry, and started asking questions.

It was more of a struggle than she expected.

When she wasn’t met with outright distrust and dismissal, she got confused reactions from people who thought the monster problem was over and done with already. At first, she’d tried to convince the people that they were wrong, that List wasn’t their monster, but too many people had apparently seen the fight she’d put up getting dragged into the cage, and the rest had heard even more wildly exaggerated versions of it.

So eventually, she stopped trying to convince them, and just started lying.

“I’m just trying to collect a complete record of events. This kind of information is invaluable in the event something like this happens again.”

“Just because it’s in a cage doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. If I can figure out exactly what kind of monster it is, I can make sure it doesn’t have any more surprises up its sleeve.”

“The sheriff is concerned there might be more than one. Which is why I’m looking into things. There are certain behaviors that give away whether a monster is alone.”

Invoking the sheriff in particular proved extremely effective, dissolving some of people’s worst attitudes toward her and more often than not leading to compliance. She hesitated to use it too much, though, lest word work its way back to the man himself faster than she wanted. He was going to find out what she was doing, if he was even halfway decent at his job, but as long as Valerie finished her investigation before he turned up and interfered, she didn’t care.

No one knew anything about a shack in the woods, and asking if people ever spent a lot of time out there in a town of hunters and loggers just got her laughed at. The only halfway useful tip she got was to ask the sheriff, since he used to go into the woods often with his wife, before the monster had arrived.

The attacks had begun a month ago, with the sheriff’s wife being the very first victim. On a romantic evening in the forest, the couple had been ambushed, with the sheriff only barely escaping with his life.

Intermittent sightings followed in the forest, along with several mauled animals. Initially, the sheriff forbade search parties to search for the monster, advising people to stay within the town as much as possible and only enter the woods in groups for hunting and logging. But then the first attack inside the town happened.

Late at night, while everyone was at home asleep, a family living at the edge of town were woken up to the sound of their front door being torn off its hinges. The thing that attacked them in the dark was fast and vicious. It was driven back, but not before it had taken a woman’s arm, blinded her husband, and left all of her children with nightmares that still hadn’t gone away.

Several people left town the next morning, and that was when the search parties began. But up until the night they’d caught List, they always either came up empty handed, or had to flee the woods for their lives.

What intrigued Valerie the most was one person who swore on their unborn children that they’d heard the monster in the woods before the sheriff and his wife were attacked. Months before. When she asked where they’d heard the monster, the area lined up tellingly close to where she’d found the shack.

The late afternoon found her back in the town’s tavern, collecting her thoughts over a mug of cider.

Technically speaking, she’d done her job. She’d been sent here ahead of a real monster expert to do the groundwork of an investigation. Get a lay of the land and a basic understanding of the situation to separate fact from rumor. She’d done that and then some.

And yet, she felt so close to doing so much more than that. She could feel the momentum of her investigation, and she was terrified of losing it. She had to keep going. Keep digging.

A bell ran somewhere in the town, and everyone in the tavern stiffened. A moment later, a haggard, terrified man came storming in, red in the face as he gasped out, “Monster!”

One word, and the entire tavern exploded in a chorus of voices.

“How?”

“Did it escape?”

“There’s more of them! What did I tell you, there’s more!”

“We should have killed it when we had the chance. It’s called for help!”

“Sheriff said—” The messenger paused to take a few more ragged breaths. “—everyone inside! Shut the windows! Lock the doors!”

“The sheriff! Where’s the sheriff?”

“He’s going to try and run it off, and make sure the one in the cage don’t get out!”

“Gods above.”

“It’ll kill him!”

“Shut up! The sheriff knows what he’s doing.”

For her part, Valerie hadn’t moved since she’d heard the word monster, as she absorbed the town’s messenger’s words. The sheriff was out, potentially in path of the thing that had really killed his wife and terrorized his town, by himself, while everyone else was instructed to lock themselves indoors.

She almost felt the click in her mind as the last piece of the puzzle fit into place.

She stood up in her seat, and made straight for the door.

“What are you doing?” someone shouted. “We can’t go out there! It’s too dangerous.”

“You’re right, it is,” Valerie said. She fingered the safety mechanism of her wristbow, and the arms of the weapon sprang into place with a metallic snap. “In fact, you should barricade this door as soon as I’m gone.”

With that, she scooped her hat back onto her head, and marched out of the tavern.