Note: Hope this is better than the first one. ;P This covers a little bit of the first presence of the Between.
Halee rolled over on her side and tossed her book onto the bed table, muttering to herself and rubbing her eyes. Lightly she touched her reading lamp and it flickered off, leaving her to pull up the covers of her small bed. Winters in these mountains were relatively warm, being that they were coastal, but tonight was a little chilly. Again Halee rolled over, and opened her eyes lightly to look at the stone floor, expecting to see the light from the full moon of the Roving--Traveller--, only to find a shadow across it, leaving little room for light.
Her heavy eyes shook off their sleepiness and she drew in a sharp breath--it was a deformed...thing...hovering in a crouch in the glass-less, screen-less window. Slowly, as slow and delayed as possible, Halee turned her eyes towards the window where they remained fixed.
Out of seemingly nowhere, two bright, pale yellow-green eyes tore into her mind, and then, yellowed teeth appeared, bared in a vicious grin. The thing was all but transparent--a dark shade, a shadow. Halee lay frozen, feeling cold creep up and down her spine, as her fear strangled her voice and mind. The eyes blinked and moved, turning to something behind her, shrinking back as if unsure--then something grabbed Halee--something strong that made her jump out of her icing, but something else slapped over her mouth and dragged her kicking and writhing out of the room.
She clamped her eyes shut and felt tears biting at her eyelids, ones of fear, ones of question--why me? Suddenly she was gently set down in a cramped space that smelt heavily of Rustie, and heard both a door shutting so softly she barely heard it, and her name, as soft as a night breeze in the late spring. "Halee," came the whisper.
Halee's eyes snapped open, stung by fading tears and blinded by the dark, and she wailed, "Oh, Julia!" and began to sob.
"It's alright, Hay," Julia said as she knelt down and hugged her friend tight, sniffing a little. "We're alright." Halee squeezed Julia, hearing her heart ram against the woman's chest, figuring that Julia had been just as scared as herself.
"Where...where are we?" She asked quietly, pulling away to dry her eyes and nose with her nightshirt's sleeve, sniffing in the smell of Rustie.
"A Rustie hideaway, believe it or not," snorted Julia with a laugh.
"I see nothing amusing," came the flat voice of a Rustie's translator, making Halee jump like a startled rabbit.
Julia rolled her eyes, not caring if the Rustie's eyes could penetrate through the darkness. "Eye Light, you're right, nothing's amusing, and neither is anything visible. Aren't there any--"
A dim light flickered on. The Rustie's of the small residence were clustered on one end of the cramped compartment, and Julia and Halee on the other. Before Julia could say anything, or the Rustie dubbed Eye Light, Halee spoke up. "Why are you all in here?"
An uneasy quiet settled over the group. The youngest Rustie present, a little chubby 'foal'--as Halee thought to call them, since Rustie's resembled horses in...some...vague way--named Call Distant, shyly spoke up. "B-b-because they came." The translator accurately picked up the little guy's stutter.
"Who?" Halee asked, confused.
"Them things in the window," explained Julia with a scowl.
"XCs?" Questioned Halee again--she'd never seen one, but she'd heard about them.
"No," said Eye Light. "Something else. I don't know what. We'll have to wait till morning to speak with the rest of the Pride about them. Perhaps we'll even have to send a message to Arm Wild."
"O-r-r the O-o-ones w-w-who C-c-command," Call Distant pointed out, his mother nodding.
"Call Distant is right. But maybe they were XCs...?" Call Mellow murmured through her own translator.
"No." Eye Light said firmly, looking Rustie-ly over at the two humans present. "They weren't XCs. They were...something, someone else."