The Last Full Moon.

Charlotte was going hunting. She waited until an hour after sundown and then set out, taking only her heaviest cloak and her sturdiest pair of boots.

The cottage door closed behind her as the wind whipped down the side of the mountain. The trunks of the trees stirred and groaned, as though their sleep had been disturbed. It was late autumn and Charlotte felt the cold down deep in her bones. She wanted to turn around and go back inside, to just sit by the fireplace and wait for the morning. But she couldn’t.

There were no stars in the sky. A pale yellow moon drifted in and out of the clouds as they passed. A full moon meant danger, it meant fear and anger and Horror, and more often than not it meant death. Every month on the night of the full moon the people down in the village barred their doors and prayed that the morning wouldn’t find one of them missing. Many were already talking of leaving, and Charlotte guessed that within a year the town would be abandoned.

She lived alone in her cottage in the woods. The entire village knew her and she knew each of them, but she wasn’t one of them. Even so, she had always felt they were her responsibility, and this danger they faced now was special. It was something wild and vicious and untamed, something from her world, but it was one of their own too. It was a being that lived on both sides, human and animal, and she was the only other thing that lived the way it did, halfway between one world and the next.

She waited until the wind shifted and then she made her way to the banks of the river, the soles of her boots crunching brittle leaves and dry grass with each step. Following the river to the narrowest part, she dropped to her knees to examine the ground, and there in the mud she found the paw prints, just as she expected. From the looks of them, they were less than an hour old.

Her quarry had stopped here, probably to drink from the brook, but it had gone back to the forest rather than follow the river all the way to the town. For now it would hunt wild game in a fruitless effort to slake its bloodlust on animals. When it found that nothing it could catch in the woods would satisfy its hunger, then it would go hunting for other prey. The last time she had visited the village she had seen too many frightened, grieving faces, and too many fresh markers in the church graveyard. This time she would intervene, even if all she accomplished was to get herself killed instead.

She followed the tracks into the forest. There was no use trying to move quietly, it would smell her long before it could hear her anyway. Even in the dead of night and amidst the grim torpor of autumn the forest was more familiar to her than the inside of her own cottage. She knew the placement of every rock and stump for miles, knew every twist and turn in the river, every field and clearing. Her mother had taught her the forest from the day she was born. She had always been grateful for it, but tonight more than ever. She could never have hoped to do what she was about to attempt otherwise.

The tracks were deep and easy to follow. It was such an obvious trail that she wondered if it had been on purpose. Could the beast know she was hunting it? Was she following it exactly where it wanted her to go? Perhaps it didn’t bother to cover its tracks because it thought that nothing could hunt it, that no one could threaten it, that it was impervious. She hoped that was the case..

There was nothing else moving in the forest but her. Even the animals were staying in their dens. They knew what night it was as well as the villagers did. Nothing would voluntarily show its face in the forest, nothing except the thing she was looking for. And her of course.

The trail was leading in the direction of monument field. That was good. It was where she had counted on the beast going, where she had intended to lead it if didn’t. It was following the same path as the previous month, the one she had painstakingly retraced the next morning. She quickened her pace, almost running. She would have to catch up to the creature as it came into the field or just before. If it was moving at full speed she wouldn’t stand a chance, but if it hadn’t yet scented game, and if it didn’t realize it was being followed, then it would be taking its time, and she could intercept it.

Charlotte moved fast to keep pace with her prey, but also to avoid letting fear catch up with her. Action meant less time for thought, and doubt. She was committed now. It was further to return home than to go on ahead, and equally as dangerous either way now that she had left such an easy trail through the forest that even a blind man could have found her. Whether her plan was good or not, there were no longer any other options. Her heart beat fast inside her ribcage, but she didn’t let herself feel it. Her mind shut out everything that wasn’t the next step.

It was hard to say when she noticed the change. The forest was still silent, the moon still full, the trail still there at her feet as plain as day. But something was wrong. She should be catching up by now, but the tracks didn’t look any fresher. They were uniform and regular, the impressions nearly identical, every broken branch and bent blade of grass leaning at nearly the same angle. The creeping tingle on the back of her neck confirmed what she was thinking.