Boo

We walked in silence, leaving the familiar phosphorescent glow of the kitsune's grove behind us. The path descended into a deeper, more primal part of the forest, a place where time itself seemed to lose its purchase, each step feeling as though it could be an hour or a mere second. The trees here were different—gnarled and dying, their bark peeling to reveal what looked like weeping green flesh beneath. Strange, pale fungi, shaped like grasping hands, grew in clusters upon their roots.

An unsettling sensation began to creep over me, the kind I knew from a thousand lonely stakeouts over many years. It was the feeling of unseen eyes, a silent, malevolent scrutiny that seemed to emanate from the very air, from the shadows between the trees. My hand, acting of its own accord, slipped into my pocket, my fingers finding the cold, familiar comfort of my pistol.

Xiao Ru, her luminous bow a faint beacon in the gloomy air, led our small procession with a warrior's focus. I followed close behind, my senses straining against the oppressive silence. So focused were we on the path ahead that I did not even notice Ashley's departure from the rear until it was too late. She moved with the silence of a hunting cat, a phantom gliding over the moss and dead leaves. She appeared at Xiao Ru’s shoulder in the space of a heartbeat.

Her voice, when it came, was a sharp, guttural whisper:

"Boo."

Xiao Ru stopped dead in her tracks, her entire body going rigid. We all froze, staring at her. Her wide eyes were fixed in a profound shock, and her face became a landscape of salt flats after the sea has withdrawn, all colour and life evaporated.

Then, as if she were a statue carved from a single piece of wood, she fell.

She toppled over sideways, her limbs locked, her grip on her bow so tight her knuckles were white. She hit the mossy ground with a solid, disconcerting thud.

An air of weary exasperation fell over our party. I looked at Ashley, who stood over the fallen fox with an expression of mild, clinical curiosity, as if she had just poked a strange insect with a stick to see what it would do. Lalika, for her part, simply blinked, then knelt beside her sister, poking her gently on the cheek.

"Oh dear," she murmured, with the same level of concern one might show for a misplaced teacup. "She seems to have stopped working."

Lalika's bizarre diagnosis was, for once, not entirely inaccurate. I drew my hand from my pocket, and with a weary sigh, I knelt in the damp moss beside Xiao Ru's rigid, fallen form. My expression, I am sure, was a perfect blank as I reached out and patted her on the head, the motion stiff and unfamiliar, as one might pat a strange dog that has been struck by a carriage.

"Are you… well?" I inquired, the words feeling inadequate.

For a long moment, there was no response. Then, a slow blink. Her stiffly perked ears, which had been icebound in a state of alarm, suddenly flattened back against her midnight hair. A faint, almost imperceptible wagging began in the fluffy tail that lay on the moss behind her. A hint of colour, a delicate red, returned to her pale cheeks.

She looked away, her gaze fixed on a particularly uninteresting patch of fungus as she scrambled back to her feet. "Of course," she mumbled, her voice small. "It was nothing. A… a small fright, that is all."

She looked, in that moment, like a startled fawn—her attempt at bravado transparent and, I was forced to admit to the silent, watchful part of my own mind, quite endearing. The thought was an unwelcome intrusion, a spark of warmth in the cold, still chambers of my woe be forgotten heart. To my undying mortification, I felt a strange heat rise in my own cheeks, a feeling I had not quite felt since my mortal life. I, too, looked away, suddenly finding the gnarled bark of a nearby tree to be of intense and immediate interest.

A loud, theatrical sigh cut through the quiet moment. I glanced over to see Ashley standing with her arms crossed, a look of sublime annoyance on her face. She performed a slow, deliberate roll of her eyes, a gesture of so much so of "give me a break" that it needed no words.

"If you two are quite finished," she said, her voice dripping with acidic boredom, "there are children to be rescued from an impending, sylvan doom."

And with that, she turned and began to walk on, her leather-like coat vanishing into the dark of the path ahead.