Page 283 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

I wave.

He doesn't wave back.

So I blow him a kiss.

His hand drifts up. He catches it against his jaw and holds it there.

Then he steps back and the darkness swallows him.

I stand alone on the slope, my breath visible as foggy puffs in the cold. Even the wind has died, and the silence that replaces it is heavier this time.

I click off the flashlight.

Something's… different about the darkness this time.

It's nothing I could point at or name specifically. But the air shifts, the same way it does when you know without looking that someone else is already there.

He's been here the whole time.

Watching me with Wraith. Watching me blow a kiss. Watching me stand alone in the dark like an idiot with my heart going a hundred miles an hour.

And there, in the shadows maybe forty feet away, something glows in pulsing neon lines tracing the shape of two pointed ears, a tapered snout, and X's for eyes.

My brain catches up with my eyes.

It's a mask.

A wolf mask.

The towering lean body beneath it is invisible in all black. Turtleneck, jacket, dark pants, everything swallowed by the night except that glowing wolf face. It tilts slightly, regarding me.

"Val?" I breathe.

The mask tilts the other way.

He takes a step forward.

I take a step back.

Another step. And another. Closing the gap between us at a pace designed to make me feel every single foot of shrinking distance.

I match him step for step, retreating, my eyes locked on the mask.

The gap closes to twenty feet.

Ten.

My boots hit the path hard and I'm fucking gone, coat flapping behind me, the cold air searing my lungs as I sprint uphill. Branches whip past my face and I duck under them, feeling more than seeing, my feet finding the path instead of my eyes.

Behind me, nothing.

No sounds of pursuit at all.

Which is somehow worse than hearing something.

The path forks at the boulder. Left drops into a ravine I can hear water at the bottom of. Right climbs higher, the ground turning rockier, the trees thinning into scraggly pines that lean sideways from years of wind.

I go right.