Being confined to my dorm for another three days was almost worse than the prospect of actually going to class with my head so messed up. But I guess I had to live with it. The head thing wasn’t bad at all when I had enough painkillers, and it gave me a great opportunity to catch up on the schoolwork I’d missed. Too bad I was missing even more.

With so much time on my hands, my thoughts eventually wandered back to that night. 

Just why the hell did I go out there? I knew, rationally, that nothing good would come of it--big scary thing in the woods that scares away a dozen grown men? Yeah, let’s just go right on in! 

Sure, there had been someone calling for help, but maybe a bit too belatedly I realized that I was in too deep over my head. These wolves were huge and extremely dangerous. If someone was calling for help in the center of all that, they were toast. 

On the other hand, there was no way that any ordinary wolf would let me reach out and pet it. No ordinary wolf would give me a sense of peace and clarity. And judging by their size, they weren’t ordinary wolves.

I sighed and grabbed my laptop before settling into my bed. 

Feeling extremely silly, I typed ‘werewolves’ into the search bar. 

Honestly, I didn’t know what I was expecting. Over half the results had to do with Twilight and Teen Wolf (not to mention the more... questionable results that boasted low price furry suits). Almost none of them were serious. And the ones that even remotely seemed to take the subject seriously were those sketchy pagan ritual sites.

I ran my hands over my face in exacerbation. This was getting me nowhere.

I glanced out the window and peered at the construction site and the beckoning streetlight at the entrance to the woods. 

No. No way. Absolutely not! Going down there was just asking for trouble, and I was in no condition to hurt myself further.

But then again, if I just went down there to... you know... investigate... that wouldn’t do any harm, right? If I didn’t actually go into the woods, it was fine. Yeah.

I shook my head, grabbing at my hair in frustration. In all my years, I had never been so curious about something. I had never been so intrigued. Maybe it was the fact that I could possibly be dealing with supernatural creatures that weren’t supposed to actually exist outside of Stephanie Myers’ universe, or maybe it was the fact that this situation presented a new challenge to me--either way, I seemed to be the only one on campus who was aware of the tree felling and the enormous wolves in the forest, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to get to the bottom of it.

After another couple seconds of intense deliberation, I decided the only thing worse than something bad happening to you due to your own sheer curiosity is waiting for said bad thing to happen to you.

So with white bandages still clipped securely around my head, a pocketful of aspirin, my phone, wallet, and heavy flashlight, I tottered out of the dorm. Eunah was undoubtedly Skyping her girlfriend and didn’t notice the little jingle of my keys as I stuffed them in my pocket, too.

I got down to the edge of the forest and shined my flashlight on the abandoned construction equipment. It began to nag me that all those workers had just left their stuff here. Was anyone ever going to come pick it up? I’d been out for two days, so surely some higher-up had been notified of the situation and the company would collect their equipment. 

I got closer, about to further investigate what was in the cab of the nearest bulldozer when I felt my foot kick something hard. I looked down and squinted at what appeared to be a clipboard.

The handwriting was messy, but from I could tell, the workers had been assigned to clear a neat section of the forest to make room for new dorm apartments.

I was right about them clearing the woods, after all.

I flipped through the rest of the papers secured to the clipboard, but found most of them were legal documents and permits for the construction, until I got to the very last sheet.

A thicker piece of paper had been taped to the clipboard itself, and at first, I thought it was a drawing that one of the workers’ kids had made. But after a second glance, I realized it was a crudely-drawn map of the campus and surrounding woods, and what specific dimensions they had been assigned to clear. 

I knew the woods served as a barrier between the campus and the freeway in the North that ran through the center of town, but I didn’t know that on one side, to the West, the woods ran long and deep and didn’t end until the edges of the next town over. And that was miles away. 

The East side was where the main expansion was taking place--there was a giant red rectangle with an “x” in the middle of it marking off the section to be cleared. It looked like the western edge of the expansion was right here where I was standing, while the eastern bit backed right up into the suburbs and shopping centers directly outside the gates of the college.

It was a lot of land. 

Land that some people--or animals--might want to protect.

I shuddered and placed the clipboard on the hood of a company truck. I glanced down at the time on my phone and sighed when I saw I had only been out here for ten minutes.

I took a long glance at the woods. I couldn’t deny that there was something pulling me out there, begging me to go in, but I just couldn’t bring myself to take a step in. 

I was stubborn and curious, yes. But I wasn’t stupid. The thought of my last encounter made me quick to start along the sidewalk on the other side of the road and decide to take a spontaneous trip into town.

It was about 9:30 when I crossed the street and left the security of campus. Taking a quick glance around told me that a few restaurants an