He is Ghost

Icy

Neira locked the door behind herself as she slipped into the cabin that was partially hers. It was clean, not that she could remember what it looked like before leaving it last. Someone had again filled the cupboards with food and left ice packs to harden in the freezer. She inched at her lower spine, the heat there beginning to irritate her skin.

Neira dropped the pheasant on the counter and stared at it. When she had woken up underneath that pine, there had been a folded shirt waiting for her. And to the left of that had been the pheasant, still warm. But that hadn't been the strange part. No, the peculiar part had been its death. There were no puncture wounds on the animal at all, no teeth marks, no claws, no evidence of a blade. Nothing. Closed flesh.

Its neck had been snapped as if someone had held it in their palms and crushed it.

And the charcoal t-shirt, the one now draped across her body, was even more... concerning. She assumed that once she had lifted it to her nose, Judd's scent would waft from the fabric. Misty pine and crisp wind. But there had been nothing. Not even a tiny trace of Jaro's scent or Landon's. Nothing. Just forest and nothing. Like it had fallen from the sky, and foolishly, she had looked up.

The sky had been bright in the morning, the dew on the grass making everything clear. Neira had closed her eyes, feeling the sun press against her human cheeks. When she opened her eyes, directly in front of her, under a shaded pine, was the greyish curling shadow. Twisting under the bows and seeming to watch her, it ebbed and flowed as if underwater.

She didn't know why she did it, why she said anything at all, but the words seemed to form without conscious thought.

"Was this you?" she asked quietly.

It seemed to pulse in response, flounce in that invisible current a little more noticeably than before, as if to nod.

A small skittering of fear had run up her legs, along her back—nothing so all-consuming as the fear that swallowed her when standing before Shade. It was a trickle rather than the hurricane that had doused her the day before. Part of her was too tired to realise what she was doing, talking to a shadow in the underbrush. A smaller part screamed at her for being a delusional wanker. On top of all that, the pain on her skin had returned for a long while now, coming in the night like an unwelcome guest.

As if it could sense her fear, discomfort, or whatever else thrummed against her skin, the tendril of dark shadow retreated into the underbrush.

"Wait."

It didn't sound like her voice as the word rushed between her lips. It was no use anyway; it disappeared right before her eyes. Maybe she had imagined it. But no, because on the walk back to her cabin, she had seen a shadow following her. It ducked in and out of the trees, appearing and disappearing with ease. Sometimes, it seemed to take on a familiar shape: a wolf's shape.

Neira looked out the window over the sink, expecting to see that dark shadow watching her, flouncing in a non-existent wind. She was unprepared for the lash of disappointment that struck her when she spotted nothing.

Neira spent the afternoon scratching at her skin and trying to relieve the heat with ice packs or her own fingers. She knew she wouldn't last much longer without Judd, and she hated him a little more for it.

She tried to sleep; she tried not to watch the door. She tried not to wait for him to turn the door handle, even if it was locked. Neira thought he would have at least tried. She rolled her neck, wolf jowls jutting uncomfortably under her human skin. The fire was in the back of her throat, the needles were piercing her arms with their poisoned tips, and her nails were carving craters into her palms. Her bones burned at the joints. Her skin felt the lash of a whip. Neira felt as if she were bleeding all over, blood dripping off her face and onto the floor once again.