“Come out!” I screamed. I ran into the clearing, turned around, searched, and still didn’t see anything. “I want to see you! Let me see you, you coward!”
This was stupid. Whoever laid that curse on this place wasn’t going to come out in the open. If they’d wanted to face me, they’d never have snuck around gutting rabbits on my porch in the first place. All I’d do with my screaming and thrashing around was chase it off.
But that feeling was still there. That weight, that hint that something wasn’t just watching me. It had trapped me. It had marked my territory as its own, and was now smothering me rather than letting me run.
Maybe this wasn’t the curse. Maybe this was something else. Cormac said it might escalate, but escalate to what?
Something like eyes glowed, making a shape in the darkness.
My imagination. There wasn’t really anything out there. But I went into the trees, stepping lightly. Think of wolf paws, pads barely touching earth, moving easily as air. My stride grew longer. I could jog like this for hours without losing my breath.
“Kitty!” Ben pounded down the porch steps, but I didn’t turn around. If something was out there, if this thing was after me, I’d find it.
There, movement. That same shadow, large but low to the ground. Lurking. My pulse sped up, beating hot. This was what I should have been doing all along, turning the tables, hunting the hunter. Counterintuitively, I slowed, waiting to see what it would do, giving it a chance to leap this way or that. Once it moved, all I had to do was pounce and pin it with my claws.
Two red eyes, glaring, caught me. The gaze fixed on me, and I couldn’t move.
I had good eyesight—a wolf’s eyes. But I couldn’t make out the form the eyes belonged to. Even when it moved closer, I only saw shadow. I heard a low noise, like a growl, so low it shook the ground under me.
All my instincts screamed for me to run. Get out. This wasn’t right, this wasn’t real. But I couldn’t move.
Something grabbed my arm and yanked me from behind. I stayed on my feet, but I might as well have flipped head over heels, the way my vision swam and the world shifted.
“Kitty!”
My senses started working again, and I smelled friend. Pack. Ben.
“Did you see it?” I said, gasping for air, clinging to his arm.
“No, nothing. You ran out of the house like you were in some kind of trance.”
And he followed, out of trust, out of loyalty. I pulled myself close to him. I kept looking out, scanning the trees, the spaces between them, looking for red eyes and a shadow. I saw skeletal branches against a sky made indistinct with clouds, earth rising up the hill, and patches of snow.
Both of our breaths fogged in the cold, releasing billowing clouds that quickly faded. Nothing else moved. We might have been the only living things out here. I shivered. Once I stopped running, the cold hit me like a wall, chilling my skin from toe to scalp. I was only wearing sweats and a T-shirt and went barefoot.
Ben blazed with warmth; I wrapped myself up with him. He was smart—he’d grabbed a coat. We stood, holding each other.
“What is it?” he asked. “What did you see?”
“Eyes,” I said, my voice shaking. “I saw eyes.”
“Something’s here? What?”
“I don’t know.” My voice whined. Worse, I didn’t know what would have happened if Ben hadn’t come for me. If he hadn’t shaken me loose from that thing’s gaze. I made it a simple observation. “You came after me.”
“I didn’t want to be alone.”
I hugged him tightly, still shaken, speechless. With my arm around him, I urged him forward, starting back for the cabin. “Let’s go.”
I’d traveled much farther than I thought. I couldn’t have been following the shadow for more than a couple of minutes. But the cabin was over a mile away. I hadn’t noticed the time passing. We followed the scent of smoke from the stove back home.
“It had red eyes,” I said, but only when I could see the light in the windows.
“Like the thing Cormac saw,” he said.
Yeah. Just like it.
That was it. This was war. I didn’t need Cormac’s help stopping this. I was a clever girl. I’d figure it out.