In Baton Rouge, Monica Scales sat in her corner office with the lights off and the city shining up at her like an obedient thing. The glass walls made a mirror of the night, her reflection calm, flawless, silken. The only glow inside came from a tablet propped against a stack of deed transfers.

  Onscreen, a true crime podcaster in a thrift store blazer, eyes gleaming with the high of a scoop. He spoke the way liars do when they’ve finally found a truth worth selling.

  “…and here’s where it gets interesting,” he said. “A Department of Defense subcontract for hazardous cleanup at the Bayou Mounds Research Annex. You’ll never guess who signed off on the disposal manifests in the final month before the blast—a Dr. Carlos Marsh. Paper trail’s a mess. Names blacked out, dates misaligned. But the initials match on three separate invoices. And get this. One of the truck drivers who hauled bio waste swears he saw Marsh load a private crate into a personal vehicle the night before the explosion…”

  Monica smiled the way a blade smiles when it remembers it’s sharp.

  She flicked to another window, an internal list she should not have had. County permits. Emergency procurement. Demolition schedules. It was amazing what you could buy with cash and a well-timed favor. A clerk in Records owed her a debt. A code inspector owed her two. Half the city’s bones were in boxes with her name on them.

  There. MARSH, CARLOS.

  A forwarding address buried in a permit addendum no one bothered to read. A weedy road near a floodplain. A cottage swallowed by trees. She traced the pin on a map with her fingertip and felt the hive inside her flex, a low, warm hum like a choir that only sang for her.

  She hit a button.

  The office door opened. Calus Jones filled it, human and immaculate, a suit struggling to pretend it was in charge of him.

  “We have a ghost to catch,” Monica said.

  Calus’s grin showed a cleanliness that had nothing to do with teeth. “Name?”

  “Dr. Carlos Marsh. He broke our story once. He won’t again.”

  “How loud?” Calus asked.

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  Monica considered the skyline. “Quiet,” she said. “Until it isn’t.”

  She slid him a folder containing the permit printout and the map, with a circle marked neatly, just like lipstick. “Bring him breathing. If he doesn’t cooperate, break something he loves. If he loves nothing, break his science.”

  Calus nodded and left.

  Monica watched his reflection go, then leaned close to the glass and breathed on it. For a second, her pupils flared bright gold in the window. The city blinked and did not notice.

  They released Derek with antibiotics, pain meds, and a pamphlet about exotic animal exposures that might as well have been a bedtime story. Olivia drove him back to the motel, her jaw tight, eyes hunting the mirrors.

  He slept. Or tried to.

  On day two, the room began to shrink. The AC rattled at sixty and did nothing. Heat climbed his spine and pooled at the base of his skull. His skin felt a size too small.

  He stood in the bathroom and watched his own mouth breathe. He splashed water on his face. Steam rose when it hit him.

  By dusk, he couldn’t hear the TV anymore over the drum of his pulse. He opened the back door, and the night poured in. Pines whispering. Humidity is like a hand. Cicadas sawing the dark in half. He stepped into it because he needed air that wasn’t already used.

  Halfway across the gravel, his knees went soft. A cramp took both arms at once, folding him over. Another chewed through his back in a slow, cruel bite. He dropped to one palm and felt the ground grate under it. No, not a palm. Something harder. Nails that hadn’t been there this morning clicked against stone.

  Saliva roped his lips. It tasted metallic and new.

  He staggered into the trees.

  Branches closed behind him, polite about it. He threaded through palmetto and vine with the surety of a man who’d walked these woods all his life, though he hadn’t. Sweat ran in rivulets, beading at his collarbone, dripping from his jaw. The world narrowed to scent. Sap. Mud. Electricity. Something prey-like flinched a hundred yards ahead, and he knew it without knowing how.

  Pain became architecture.

  It built him.

  His eyes went red, a bloom from the iris outward like a sunrise played in reverse. His nails lengthened, not growing so much as remembering. Feet arched and pitched forward, bones reorganizing with careful violence until his heels lifted and the earth met him on digitigrade terms. Muscle surged under his skin, striations cording like cables pulled taut. Hair spilled down his neck and shoulders in a dark mane that drank the moonlight and gave nothing back.

  He fell to one knee.

  He stood nine feet tall.

  His teeth hurt until they didn’t, until they found the shapes they wanted. Canines honed to purpose. Incisors are ready to open anything that they thought was closed. The night made room for him because it had to.

  When he breathed in, the forest came with it.

  When he exhaled, the sound he made was not a howl.

  It was a lion’s roar, thunder rolled into a throat and was set free. Birds flew from trees. Somewhere, a deer’s heart decided it had always been a drum.

  He moved then. Four limbs, two, four again. Graceful and catastrophic. A lesson in how to be inevitable.

  The thing he had become did what it was built to do.

  The woods kept the secret.

  Bayou Blood: The Awakening. Comments, follows, and ratings help this series grow on Royal Road and tell the algorithm the woods are awake.