ASHBY LAKE AFTER DARK · FREE NOVELLA

B-Were

Read the prologue and Chapter One

Prologue

I woke up in the woods again. Naked.

My jaw ached. My palms felt like I’d spent the night sanding hardwood without gloves. I let out a long, practised sigh and stared up through the spruce branches swaying overhead. Morning sunlight filtered through the needles in narrow beams, while somewhere nearby, a chickadee chirped with entirely too much enthusiasm for this hour.

“Morning to you too,” I muttered.

I carefully pushed myself upright, brushed pine needles from my arms, and took inventory. No blood. No broken bones. No angry black bears. Good start. I turned in a slow circle. About twenty feet away sat a neat pile of freshly felled saplings. Mostly aspen. Stacked perfectly.

I closed my eyes.

“…Seriously?”

I walked over and nudged one with my foot. Clean cuts. Well… not cuts. I frowned.

“I really need a less embarrassing curse.”

The trees were arranged almost artistically, sorted by length as though whoever had collected them had been planning a very ambitious woodworking project.

Which was ridiculous.

I knew exactly who had collected them. Only me. I rubbed my face. Only in Canada.

At least I’d stayed close to home this time. My little cabin sat just beyond the next stand of spruce, exactly where I’d left it, which I supposed wasn’t something most people needed to feel grateful for when they woke up in the morning.

Then again, most people didn’t wake up naked in the forest once a month.

I frowned as I noticed the sagging eavestrough. Right. I really needed to clean that before the next full moon. Add it to the list.

The very long, very strange list my life had become.

Still, this was much better than last month. Last month, I’d woken up nearly four kilometres away beside a creek I’d never even intended to survey.

Naked.

Walking home barefoot through the Canadian forest while carrying absolutely nothing except my dignity, or what remained of it, had not been one of my finer mornings. The mosquitoes hadn’t helped. Neither had the two early-morning hikers.

I’d told them I’d lost a bet. At the time, it had seemed like the most reasonable explanation. Judging by their faces, it had not been. I winced at the memory. Never again.

Hopefully.

I started toward the cabin, carefully picking my way over exposed roots and patches of moss. There was coffee inside. Clothes. A shower. All the important building blocks of civilization. I was almost to the tree line when I stopped. Something tugged at the back of my mind.

I turned. The saplings were still there. I stared at them.

“…I mean…” I sighed. “They are stacked really nicely.”

There was no one around to hear me.

Thank God.

Because the worst part wasn’t that I’d spent part of the night cutting down trees with my teeth. It wasn’t even that I’d collected them afterward. It was that somewhere deep inside me, in the part governed by moonlight and instincts I still didn’t completely understand…

I was proud of the workmanship.

Chapter One

By the time I’d showered, brushed an alarming amount of bark out of my hair, and convinced myself there wasn’t still a leaf tucked somewhere I couldn’t see, I was running late.

Again.

I grabbed my travel mug, locked the cabin behind me, and climbed into the government-issued pickup parked outside. The dashboard clock read 9:41, which left me plenty of time unless I got stuck behind tourists.

Or moose.

Or tourists photographing moose.

The last one was surprisingly common.

By 9:59, I slipped into the forestry office, balancing my coffee, laptop, and a blueberry muffin I’d bought from Joy Bakery on the way because I’d forgotten breakfast.

“Morning.”

Lucas glanced at the clock. “Cutting it close.”

“I blame traffic.”

“You live alone in the woods.”

“Exactly.”

Nobody questioned it.

Wednesday mornings always followed the same routine: ten o’clock sharp, coffee, weekly updates, new assignments, and the occasional argument over whose budget had mysteriously disappeared.

There were only four of us. Rick LeBrea, our regional manager and master of colour-coded file folders; Lucas English, our waterways specialist, who could identify a fish by the ripple it made; Ben Sharp, wildlife management, whose office contained enough trail cameras to monitor a small nation.

And me. Lindsay Simpson.

Arborist. Botanist. Professional tree nerd. Unofficial owner of the best coffee mug in the department.

Rick glanced around the table. “Anything exciting this week?”

Lucas shrugged. “Someone dumped a shopping cart in Beaver Brook.”

Ben snorted. “It’ll probably become habitat.”

Rick considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Fair.”

I took a bite of my muffin just as Rick turned to Ben.

“Still no luck tagging that beaver?”

My muffin immediately turned to cardboard in my mouth because it seemed like I couldn’t get through one staff meeting without discussing my monthly nocturnal activities.

Ben leaned back in his chair with the weary expression of a man who had been personally offended by one exceptionally clever rodent. “I swear the little beast knows our schedules.”

Lucas laughed. “You’re saying you’ve been outsmarted by a beaver?”

“I’m saying…” Ben pointed a finger for emphasis. “…this particular beaver is a genius.”

I stared very, very hard into my coffee. Thank you. Definitely not the time to feel flattered.

“We keep finding fresh tree work every month.”

I stopped feeling flattered.

Ben opened the map on the screen, and red circles appeared across the forest, marking locations I recognized with an uncomfortable degree of familiarity.

“Look at this.”

Everyone leaned in, including me, because refusing to examine evidence of my own supernatural forestry activities would probably look more suspicious than pretending I had no idea what we were looking at.

“One month, it’s here.” Ben tapped a point near the eastern wetlands. “The next month…”

Tap.

“…four kilometres west.”

I nearly inhaled my coffee. Don’t cough. I coughed.

Lucas frowned at the screen. “That’s… actually weird.”

You have no idea.

Rick scratched his chin as he studied the map. “So where’s the lodge?”

“There isn’t one.”

“No den?”

“No completed dam.”

“No sightings?”

“Nothing.”

I took another bite of muffin because eating seemed considerably safer than participating in this conversation.

Ben spread his hands. “It’s like the beaver appears overnight, fells twenty saplings with surgical precision, tidies everything into neat little piles…”

He paused.

“…and vanishes.”

I chewed very slowly.

Rick blinked. “That’s unsettling.”

“It really is.” Ben nodded gravely. “I’ve started respecting it.”

A tiny spark of pride warmed my chest. Stop that. I was not going to become emotionally invested in compliments directed at my beaver form.

Although…

Surgical precision was pretty good.

Lucas chuckled. “Trail cameras?”

Ben brightened immediately. “I was thinking exactly that.”

Every muscle in my body seized. Absolutely fucking not.

“Uh…”

Three heads turned towards me. I’d said that louder than I’d intended.

I forced a smile. “I don’t think that’ll help.”

Ben tilted his head. “Why not?”

Good question, Ben. Because there’s a reasonably good chance you’d end up with several hours of footage featuring your coworker turning into a large semi-aquatic rodent.

I couldn’t say that.

“Well…”

Think, Lindsay.

“It isn’t exactly… consistent.”

“What do you mean?”

I gestured vaguely towards the map. “Its range is too big now. Before, it stayed near my cabin, and now it’s roaming four kilometres away. We’d need cameras everywhere.”

Rick studied the map for another moment before nodding. “That’s a fair point.”

I exhaled. Crisis averted.

Ben rubbed his chin. “Unless…”

No. No unless. I didn’t like unless.

“…we use the drone.”

My hand jerked, and I almost dropped my coffee. Probably okay. What were the chances Ben would run the drone on exactly the right night in exactly the right place?

“The thermal drone.”

Shit. But who could say it was me and not just another beaver? Right?

Lucas laughed. “You’re really taking this personally.”

Ben looked offended. “Lucas.”

He pointed dramatically at the map. “This beaver has outsmarted me for four years.”

I looked down at my muffin.

Sorry, Ben.

“It stacks the trees.”

I took another bite. Chew.

“It never gets photographed.”

Swallow.

“It is either the smartest beaver in Ontario…” He folded his arms. “…or someone is messing with me.”

Silence settled around the table while three sets of eyes remained fixed on the map and mine stayed firmly on my muffin. I probably should have kept my mouth shut. I didn’t.

“Probably just… a really good beaver.”

Ben nodded solemnly. “…Exactly.”

I took a sip of coffee to hide my smile. Being complimented for my professional skills was nice. Being complimented for my supernatural beaver skills was even better, and that was probably something I should unpack at some point. Later.

Much, much later.

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