Running with Shifters (completed)

Chapter 12 Meg-Elaine

Chapter 12

Meg-Elaine

Only a second's gone by and we're already a few hundred feet into the forest. She's moving at such an incredible speed I can barely breathe from the wind buffetting my face.

Just as I'm getting used to the trees blurring past, she jumps nearly vertically, landing on a branch at least forty feet off the ground. I shriek in surprise and terror once my brain catches up to what just happened and she stops right before jumping to the next branch. "I swear, if you don't stop shrieking in my ear I'll drop you." She shifts her feet and I shriek again, thinking that she's about to do just that, and she just gives me a reproachful look before detaching my legs and arms and standing me on the branch.

Making the mistake of looking down (I know, such a rookie move), I move back the two steps to the trunk and cling to it, my back pressed against it as I face her.

I'm not afraid of heights, it would be incredibly detrimental in my line of work, but this is a lot different from what I'm used to. Standing on the top of a twenty story building is easier than this. There you have cement, rebar supports, steel pilings, here you only have however much wood is in the branch and you have to pray it's structurally sound and not rotting or diseased.

She takes in my expression and stifles a laugh at my expense, "I wasn't really going to drop you, you know. I just can't take you constantly screaming in my ear. As I've already told you my hearing's awfully sensitive and that doesn't help at all. Plus, even if I did drop you, I'd catch you before you hit the ground. Watch."

Before I know what she's doing she's already walked to the end on the branch and bounced off of it like it's a diving board. I almost scream and catch myself. My screaming is the whole reason we stopped to begin with. I lean as far over as I dare away from the trunk and watch as she does a perfect somersault in the air before simultaneously landing and bouncing off another branch closer to the ground.

She jumps off another branch and angles slightly upwards, to a branch the same height as this one, a tree over. Then she does something (the movement just too quick for me to catch) and is now flying through the air above my head, waving at me as she does. Grabbing the branch on the other side of me, she swings and catapults herself around it and lets go when she's facing away from me.

She somehow manages to catch this branch, making it tremble and me squeal quietly and cling back against the trunk, and swings herself up until she's crouching in front of me, not in the least out of breath. Her toes grip the bark and I just now realize that she's barefoot. But she had shoes at camp; she must have taken them off.

She catches me looking and stands in one fluid motion. "Yeah. I took them off. It's just so much easier. Another cool thing: I can barely feel any pain and what I do is so fleeting I just ignore it. Look," with this she lifts one of her legs at a ninety degree angle, not even wobbling at all, and shows me the bottom if her foot. Perfectly unscathed and barely even any dirt, either.

I stare at it in amazement before she puts it back down and laughs. Following her eyes, I stupidly look down under the branch, clinging even harder as I do. She chuckles again, "that was fun, I'm glad it worked. To tell you the truth I didn't know if I could pull that off." She takes in my slack jaw and continues. "Calm down. I knew what I was doing... kind of. Anyway, let's get back to what we came for."

With that she walks towards me and turns around once almost touching me. Hesitantly I climb back on her back and hang on (without shrieking this time, thankfully) as she starts making her way through the trees like a monkey. For some reason I feel much safer with her than I did with the tree, even though some small niggling feeling says that she would actually drop me if she had to.

Her gaze on the ground, after a few moments she finds what she's looking for and drops straight down to the ground. She lands with barely a sound, the leaf litter both muffling the sound and crinkling slightly, warning the little grey rabbit in front of us a second too late. It barely has time to blink and she's already got it in her grasp, its neck snapped.

She rolls her shoulders and I get off as she takes a few steps and keeps her back to me. She stays like that for a moment before moving a pile of leaves near the base of a tree and lays down the prone rabbit before covering it again.

She turns to me, her eyes slowly turning back to green, and she looks somewhat guilty. "Sorry but I didn't want you to have to see that." She licks her lips of any residual blood and winces as if she just sucked a lemon. "That was disgusting. Not nearly as bad as the deer, but still... just ew."

I can't help but be grateful that she'd hide her eating from me. After what happened with Toby and Shaun, even though I know she had absolutely nothing to do with any of that, I'm not entirely sure how I would have taken it.

"How do we find our way back?"

She smiles, "that's the easy part. Hop on." I do and we're in the trees a second later, following the same path we took getting here. I wonder if she's following our scent or something. I remind myself to ask once back at camp and then relax, closing my eyes, as the wind whips through my hair.