The Wendigo's Girl

The chapel doors shuddered behind Elowen Hart, their iron latch clattering as something struck them from the other side.

She pressed both hands against the warped wood. Cold seeped through her gloves, sharp enough to numb her fingers. Beyond the doors, the blizzard screamed over the ruins, but beneath it came another sound - slow, deliberate breathing.

Not the wind.

“Please,” she whispered, though she could not have said whether she meant the storm, the locked doors, or the thing waiting beyond them.

The chapel answered with a groan from somewhere deep in its broken bones.

Elowen tore herself away from the entrance.

Moonlight leaked through the shattered rose window, staining the snow inside blue. The nave had once been wide enough for a hundred worshippers. Now fallen beams divided it into crooked passages, and snow had poured through the roof in pale ridges. The altar stood at the far end beneath a sagging arch, its stone face blackened by age and soot.

The exit lay beyond it.

She had seen it when she stumbled inside - a narrow side door, half-hidden behind the altar, its brass handle catching the flash of lightning. If she could reach it, she could cross the graveyard and find the road down to Greywold.

If the road still existed beneath the snow.

Another blow struck the main doors.

The latch jumped.

Elowen ran.

Her boots slipped over loose glass. A shard cut through her trouser leg and grazed her skin, but she kept moving, one hand skimming the wall for balance. The chapel smelled of wet stone, old ashes, and something musky beneath it all, like pine sap left too long in a sealed room.

The wendigo had brought that scent with him.

She had not seen his face clearly in the forest. She had seen antlers caught between the trees, a pale hand curling around a trunk, eyes reflecting the lantern she had dropped. She had heard him speak her name as if he had been carrying it for years.

Elowen.

The memory tugged at her now, not through her ears but beneath her ribs.

She reached the altar and seized its edge. The stone was slick with meltwater. Behind it, the side door waited exactly where she remembered - except the corridor leading to it had narrowed.

The chapel had changed.

Two walls leaned inward, their plaster split by black veins. A passage that should have been six feet long stretched into darkness, turning where no turn had been before.

“No,” Elowen said.

The doors boomed again.

Dust sifted from the rafters. Somewhere behind her, the latch lifted with a small metallic click.

She entered the corridor.

The walls pressed close enough to brush her shoulders. Her breath smoked before her face. Every few steps, the chapel exhaled a colder gust, carrying the faint sound of bells. There was no bell tower anymore. It had collapsed decades ago, taking half the roof with it.

Still, the bells rang.

Elowen pushed forward, following the glimmer of brass at the corridor’s end. Her fingers found the door handle. She twisted.

Nothing.

She tried again, harder. The brass burned through her glove.

A voice spoke behind her.

“You should not have come here.”

Elowen spun.

He stood at the mouth of the passage, too tall for the ruined chapel, his antlers nearly brushing the fractured ceiling. Snow clung to the dark breadth of his shoulders. His face was almost human in the dimness - high cheekbones, a severe mouth, skin pale as candle wax - but his eyes held a green-gold shine that no human eyes possessed.

The doors behind him hung open.

The storm had not entered. It curled around him instead, gathering at his feet like a living thing reluctant to pass.

Elowen backed against the locked door. “Stay away.”

His gaze dropped to the blood on her trouser leg.

“Your foot is cut.”

“I said stay away.”

He lifted his hands, palms visible. The gesture should have comforted her. It did not. His fingers were long, tipped with black claws that curved like polished horn.

“I heard you call for help.”

“I was calling for the road.”

“You called my name.”

“I don’t know your name.”

A faint smile touched his mouth. It held no warmth, but it held recognition. “You will.”

The corridor seemed to contract around them. Elowen felt the stone at her back, the sharp chill under her coat, the steady pull of his attention moving over her face. He did not look at her like prey. That would have been easier.

He looked as if he were resisting the urge to touch her.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Your promise.”

A laugh escaped her, thin and breathless. “You chased me through a blizzard for a promise?”

“I followed the promise you made.”

“I have never promised you anything.”

“You promised someone else.”

Lightning flashed through the broken chapel windows. For an instant, his shadow spread across the walls, antlered and monstrous, reaching around her before snapping back into him.

Elowen’s mind searched through the panic. Her grandmother’s warnings....