Chapter 2 – Taking Stock of the Situation.

After what felt like an eternity of flight, she slowed down again, the breath burning cold in her throat as her greedy lungs sucked at the air around. Sapped even of the energy to stand up straight, she bent to relax the pressure on her chest, hands pressed against her bare knees to support herself, her perspiration suddenly turning to freezing clamminess across her skin, chilling her exposed legs and arms and pasting her t-shirt to her breathless chest in a frozen caress.

The place she had come to a halt in appeared to be a kind of clearing, a small patch of grass she could just see across before the tree-lined edges and ever-present fog obscured her view of the world beyond.

'Alright then,' she said aloud. 'I'm lost, cold, and,' testing the strength of her injured ankle, 'mildly wounded. All I have is an outfit made for a short walk in the sun, a knife, and a compass. Time to think.'

'The wolves or whatever seem to have gone for now, anyway. But there's no way to tell where the hell they've gone to, or when I might run into them again. Plus the trees don't seem to like me anymore. Huh! Maybe they're ticked that I did a little flower-picking. Just a few white flowers, guys! Come on, you're that ticked at me for that?' From the surrounding woods, silence was her stern reply, and she sat down in the opening, rather than with her back against a bough. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…not likely, pal. Taking the compass from her pocket, Kate found one of the flowers in question pressed against the plastic construct. Obviously the weedy little bloom hadn't been designed by Mother Nature for close encounters of any kind, especially not with hardened plastics designed to withstand anything short of a nuclear winter.

Manmade artefact and natural flora had fought for space in the confines of her pocket, and the genius of Man had won out, sap from the crushed flower now made the compass slick and hard to handle, so Kate wiped it off as best as she could with a pocket handkerchief, cleaning her hands as she went. A bit of spittle against the handkerchief halfway through to ensure the cleanliness of the compass brought her tongue into contact with the sap itself and left a sharp, bitter aftertaste in her mouth. Thankfully, though, the taste was soon forgotten in a second, sweeter aftertaste, which faded almost as soon as it arrived, taking the less pleasant forerunner with it. Studying the compass, Kate found that she was facing due north, a reassuring fact as the edge of the woods lay only a few blocks south of her family home.

'Due North, then,' she muttered, still wary of arousing the interest of any nearby creature, great or small. 'Which should, eventually, get me back to town.' Rising, she swayed once, feeling her ankle's weakness, and walked out of the clearing, compass in front, due north.

Silence returned to the clearing, and the fog that had billowed in the small blonde's wake stirred, waved, and settled. In the deafening silence, something emerged from the woods, found the girl's tracks, and set off on her trail. Though pretty, lithe of limb and fair of figure, Kate had never been popular beyond a few friends, and the news that she had acquired a follower all of her very own would have been something of a surprise to her.

Would have been, had she only known.