Daughter of Death

III

When the horse knocked Hallez down, something weird happened.

    She turned invisible. She concluded that it was triggered by her survival instincts, but how it never happened before, why it decided to just appear now, she wasn't sure.

    She'd already had a theory about how she had the ability in the first place, given her...heritage, (she refused, refused to think about it). She didn't question how it was scientifically possible; Please, she'd seen worse.

    Hallez couldn't see her own body, which was disorientating. Actually, she couldn't see much in general. Her vision was like someone had switched a lever that lowered her focus by a thousand. She could only see blurry colors and shapes. The sunlight seemed to waver, like a flickering flashlight, and the little she could see of the physical world blurred even more, swimming in and out of focus, which made standing up a huge headache. When she blinked, however, she could see—or feel, she wasn't sure—different shapes of energy around her, some weaker than the rest.

    She didn't know what it was, obviously, but she didn't have time to dwell when a high-pitched voice screeched from the distance. She felt two new shapes of energy come from...actually they just appeared there. They sort of formed out of thin air.

    The horses had stopped running circles now, and she could see and feel the vague shape of Cade, lying in the sand. She desperately wanted to run to him, but something told her that she would be revealed if she tried to move, even when invisible.

    "What is the meaning of this?" one of the...new things, hissed. It sounded like a female. "Where's the girl? Why do I have a dead boy here?"

    Hallez wanted to yell He's not dead! But she had a feeling that it would be a fact, if she did, and not just hoping. She didn't yell out loud, of course.

    One of the horses neighed.

    The second female thing snorted a puff of grey smoke. So, they could all breathe fire.

    "He told us to get the Shield of Mars and the human girl! He mentioned nothing about a boy, you lousy smoke-breathers!" Thing #2 shrieked, oblivious to the irony of her last sentence.

    Thing #1 walked over towards Hallez, and for a panicked second, (if she wasn't panicked enough already) she thought she had been made, or discovered. (She'd been dragged into too many TV show marathons recently that she was using their slang.) Then she walked right past Hallez, and grabbed the weird eight-figured shield off the sandy ground. It was only then that Hal realized it had somehow slipped off her arm. She thought she had it tight enough that it wouldn't slip off if someone yanked on it. How did it come off?

    "Let's bring what we found. Don't eat the boy, he's obviously alive," she said. "But you four-legged smoke-breathers are going to be the ones to explain why we don't have the girl!"

    Then, for the first time, Hallez ignored her instincts, and did something foolish. She reached for the shield. If someone asked her why, she would deny it. She would say that the shield had a strange energy, that it was beyond tempting, which wasn't completely false.

    When she reached for the shield, however, her hand (at least, Hallez thought it was her hand, since she couldn't see herself) went straight through the shield. Before she had the time to be confused, suddenly, her vision shimmered back to normal. She couldn't sense the energies of the horses or the female creatures or Cade, or even the shield, around her. She looked at her hands and they were there, as real and physical as they should be.

    Yet now that she was back to normal, she realized that she felt more awkward, more exposed, like this.

    Her thought process was interrupted when Thing #1 in front of her shrieked.