The siren on Julian’s cruiser remained silent, but the lights cut through the gray afternoon like rhythmic slashes of blood. I sat in the passenger seat, gripping the door handle until my knuckles turned the color of old bone.
We were heading toward the treeline.
“You don’t have to do this, Elara,” Julian said, his eyes flicking to me from the road. The wipers slapped frantically against the windshield, fighting a losing battle against the drizzle that had turned into a steady, miserable rain. “I can turn around. I can drop you at the motel.”
“Drive,” I said. My voice was thinner than I wanted it to be. “If she’s wearing the dress, Julian, I need to see it. You know I do.”
“It’s a crime scene,” he argued, though his foot stayed heavy on the gas. “Not a tourist attraction. If Miller finds out I brought a civilian—let alone you—inside the perimeter, I’m turning in my badge.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He turned the cruiser off the paved road and onto an old logging track. The suspension groaned as we hit deep ruts of mud, the tires spinning for a sickening second before finding traction. The forest swallowed us whole. The sky disappeared, replaced by a canopy of ancient Douglas firs that knit together like the fingers of a giant hand, blocking out the light.
“Because,” Julian said finally, his voice low. “Because whoever did this… they didn’t just kill her, Elara. They prepared her. And I have a feeling you’re the only one who can tell me what the preparation means.”
We parked behind two other cruisers and a coroner’s van. The red and blue lights reflected off the wet trunks of the trees, making the moss look like it was pulsing.
I opened the door and the smell hit me instantly.
It wasn’t the metallic tang of blood I was used to in Seattle. It was the smell of the Weeping Woods. Damp rot. Wet wool. The sharp, acidic scent of pine needles decomposing into black sludge. It was the smell of secrets being composted.
“Watch your step,” Julian muttered, grabbing a flashlight from the glove box. “It’s a hike.”
We ducked under the yellow tape stretched between two saplings. The ground was soft, sponge-like. With every step, the mud tried to suck my boots down, holding onto me, asking me to stay.
Don’t go in there, Elara.
The voice in my head sounded like my mother. Or maybe it was me, the twelve-year-old version of me who used to run until her lungs burned to get away from this place.
“How far?” I asked, stepping over a fallen log that was slick with black algae.
“Quarter mile. Near the old creek bed.”
We walked in silence, the only sounds the squelch of our boots and the relentless drip-drip-drip of the canopy. The fog was thicker here, trapped by the trees. The Oakhaven Shroud. It curled around my ankles, cold and wet.
“Tell me about the victim,” I said, forcing myself into work mode. I needed the armor. I needed to be the journalist, not the girl who used to play hide-and-seek in these shadows.
Julian didn’t look back. “Sarah Miller. Eighteen. Captain of the volleyball team. Honors student. Disappeared from her backyard three nights ago while letting her dog out.”
“Cause of death?”
“We’re waiting on the ME, but… there’s no obvious trauma. No gunshot. No stab wounds. No ligature marks on the neck.”
I frowned. “Overdose?”
“Maybe,” Julian said. He stopped walking. Ahead of us, the portable floodlights created a dome of artificial daylight in the gloom. “But I don’t think so. She looks… peaceful.”
He turned to me, blocking my view of the clearing. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat. “Last chance, Elara. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. It’s going to live in your head.”
“My head is already full of ghosts, Julian. One more won’t make a difference.”
He held my gaze for a second, searching for the lie, then stepped aside.
I walked into the light.
The crime scene techs were moving slowly, clad in white Tyvek suits that made them look like astronauts exploring an alien planet. Cameras flashed, the strobes blinding in the mist.
And there, in the center of the chaos, was the stillness.
She lay on a bed of moss, nestled between the roots of a massive cedar tree.
I stopped breathing.
It wasn’t just a body. It was a composition.
Sarah Miller was pale, her skin the color of skim milk against the vibrant green of the forest floor. She was wearing a dress that didn’t belong in 2024. It was a Victorian-style frock made of heavy, pale blue lace, with a high collar and long sleeves. The fabric was stained with mud at the hem, but otherwise, it was pristine.
“That’s not her dress,” I whispered.
“Her parents confirmed it,” Julian said, stepping up beside me. “She was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie when she vanished.”
I took a step closer, my notebook forgotten in my pocket.
Her hair. It wasn’t matted or messy from a struggle. It was brushed. Golden-blonde strands had been curled into perfect ringlets that cascaded over her shoulders.
“He groomed her,” I said, the bile rising in my throat. “He took the time to do her hair.”
“There’s no sign of sexual assault,” Julian said quietly. “Her clothes haven’t been torn. It’s like… like he was dressing a mannequin.”
No, I thought. Not a mannequin.
I forced my eyes down to her hands.
They were resting on her chest. Not crossed, like a corpse in a casket. They were pressed palm-to-palm, fingers pointing toward her chin. Praying.
And woven through her fingers, wrapping around her wrists like natural handcuffs, were vines of English ivy.
The world tilted.
The sound of the rain faded into a rushing white noise. The floodlights blurred. The smell of cedar became overpowering, choking me.
Flash.
Suddenly, I wasn’t standing in the mud. I was kneeling in the dirt.
The light was different—dappled sunlight filtering through leaves, warm on my back. My hands were small. My fingernails were caked with black soil.
“Dig deeper,” a voice whispered.
I looked up. A boy was crouching across from me. I couldn’t see his face—it was a smudge of static in my memory, a blur of shadow and light—but I saw his hands. They were rough, scarred, holding a trowel.
“Why do we have to bury her?” I asked. My voice was high, childish.
“Because she’s sleeping,” the boy said. “The Princess has to sleep for a hundred years. That’s the rule.”
I looked down at the hole we had dug in the garden behind the Glass House. Annabel lay in the dirt. My beautiful, expensive porcelain doll. I had brushed her hair for an hour. I had put her in her best blue dress.
“Will she be able to breathe?” I asked, panic fluttering in my chest.
“She doesn’t need to breathe,” he said. “She’s magic. But we have to bind her so she doesn’t wake up too soon.”
He reached into the pile of weeds we had pulled. He took long strands of ivy.
“Like this,” he said.
He wrapped the ivy around Annabel’s porcelain wrists. He pressed her palms together.
“Now she’s praying for the Prince,” he said. “Cover her up, Elara. Hurry. Before he comes home.”
Flash.
“Elara!”
I gasped, sucking in a lungful of damp air.
I stumbled back, my heel catching on a root. Strong hands grabbed my arms, keeping me from falling into the mud.
“Elara, look at me.” Julian’s face swam into focus. He looked terrified. “You went white. You stopped blinking.”
I shoved him away, staggering a few feet to the side. I bent over and dry heaved, my body trying to expel the memory like a physical poison. Nothing came up but acid and spit.
“It’s the game,” I choked out, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
Julian was at my side instantly. “What? What game?”
I turned back to the body. To Sarah Miller. To the poor, dead girl who was playing the role of my doll.
“The Sleeping Princess,” I said. My voice was shaking so hard the words chopped apart. “I… I invented it. When I was twelve. We buried the doll. We buried Annabel so she would be safe.”
Julian stared at me, the rain dripping from his nose. “We? Who is we?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. Or maybe I wasn’t lying. The boy in the memory was just a voice and a pair of hands. “My imaginary friend. The Sandman.”
“Imaginary friends don’t dress murder victims, Elara.”
“I know that!” I snapped, hysteria rising in my chest. I pointed a trembling finger at the dead girl. “Look at the ivy, Julian. Look at the knot around her wrists. It’s a figure-eight. A sailor’s knot.”
Julian looked. He shone his light closer. “Yeah. It is.”
“I didn’t know how to tie knots,” I whispered. “He did. He taught me.”
I looked around the dark woods. The trees felt like they were leaning in, listening. The shadows between the trunks seemed to shift and stretch.
“He’s watching,” I said. The sensation of eyes on my skin was primal, electric. “He put her here for me to find. It’s not just a murder, Julian. It’s a love letter.”
“A love letter?” Julian looked disgusted.
“He dug up the real doll to show me he remembered,” I said, the pieces clicking together in a horrific mosaic. “And now he’s replaced her. He’s upgrading. Porcelain to flesh.”
I looked at Sarah Miller’s face again. At the serenity he had forced upon her.
“He didn’t hurt her,” I realized, the horror settling deep in my marrow. “He thinks he saved her. That’s the point of the game. You bury the Princess to save her from the Dragon.”
“The Dragon?” Julian asked.
“My stepfather,” I said. The word hung in the wet air between us.
Julian went still. He knew the rumors. Everyone in Oakhaven knew the rumors about Vance senior, even if no one ever said them out loud.
“Elara,” Julian said, stepping closer, his voice dropping to a protective growl. “If someone is reenacting games you played twenty years ago… that means it’s someone who was there. Someone who watched you.”
“Or someone I told,” I said. “But I never told anyone. I never spoke about the games. Not to the therapists. Not to you.”
“Then how?”
“Because he was there,” I whispered. The memory of the boy’s rough hands was tactile on my skin. “He wasn’t imaginary, Julian. He was real. And he’s been waiting for me to come back.”
A twig snapped in the darkness beyond the floodlights.
We both spun around. Julian’s hand went to his holster.
Nothing but fog and trees.
“We need to go,” I said, grabbing Julian’s jacket. “I can’t be here. I can’t be near her.”
I felt like an infection. Like I had brought this plague down on this girl just by existing.
“Okay,” Julian said. “Okay. I’ve seen enough.”
He steered me away from the body, back toward the trail. I didn’t look back. I didn’t have to. I knew exactly what Sarah Miller looked like.
I knew because I had closed her eyes myself, twenty years ago, in a garden that smelled just like this one.