Carelessly, his laughter carried out across the lake, the kind that had no business existing after everything they'd just been through. For a brief moment it almost seemed like the sound itself disturbed the water, sending a faint vibration across its dark surface as he was enjoying himself clearly. The absurdity of the last few hours, the state they'd ended up in – all of it genuinely delighted him. But what really did it, what pushed him over the edge, was the look on her face. She didn't look like a wet dog. She looked like a drowned cat and the distinction mattered to him. He thought about saying so, but decided his eyes would do the talking for him. They had a tendency to do that – those pale, sharp eyes of his, light blue in a way that felt less like a color and more like a warning. They carried things he didn't bother to put into words and right now they were intensely bright with something caught between mockery and genuine satisfaction. They always seemed to come alive in places like this lake in front of them. Open stretches where the world held its breath and one could almost forget the things they had just seen. The particular wrongness of what a human body looked like when something had taken it apart, for example.
Mike had made a kind of peace with the vastness, the insignificance, the quiet horror of understanding exactly how small you were in the grand scheme of things. If anything, sitting at the edge of a lake with no visible bottom suited him just fine. Hayley, apparently, was not there yet and he doubted she would ever be. He watched her from the corner of his eye, noticing the tension in her jaw and the way she held herself like she was trying to keep something out. The Vast had a habit of slipping into the cracks when people weren't careful, filling the spaces between thoughts with the particular dread of existing. She looked like someone actively fighting a losing battle with the inside of her own head. His gaze drifted out toward the water again, losing himself in something unseen, something that had silently claimed his attention and pulled him elsewhere. By doing so, he also spared her the overwhelming feeling of vertigo by preventing her from looking into his eyes any longer. Dripping wet and being cold was enough for one evening, risking her to vomit on him was absolutely not something he was looking for.
He'd been staring long enough to lose track of time when Hayley finally reached the end of her patience and commanded him to follow. He'd gotten used to her, he realized. The way she walked like she'd already decided where she was going, the way she led without acknowledging she was leading. As he watched her navigate the undergrowth, it struck him then that there was something almost thrilling about the position he'd found himself in. To follow willingly a creature of the Hunt with no way of knowing whether she was leading him into a trap was not something the scarred man would have expected of himself. The uncertainty alone was enough to make his pulse quicken. It was the intoxicating kind of fear that got under his skin. It was the fear of being devoured and despite his usual distrust of pretty much everything, he couldn't quite bring himself to call the feeling unwelcome. But he wouldn't let her know that, obviously.
“For someone who's supposedly a creature of the woods,” he started, “you're absolutely terrible at–”
A branch caught him square in the face. He stumbled, one hand flying up to his face and the other grabbing at nothing. There was a brief, humiliating moment where he just stood there, cupping his nose and his eyes watering. He didn't need to look at her to know she'd turned around. Hell, he didn't even need to see her face to know exactly what it looked like. Whatever she was doing with it, it was going to annoy him for sure.
“Unbelievable.” Mike muttered more to himself than to her as he tilted his head back, noticing the warm metal taste that hit the back of his throat. “Some grotesque, otherworldly horror doesn't manage to cut me open, but a tree does.”
Too occupied with managing his bleeding nose, he barely registered that she had actually navigated them both onto a path which was overgrown and half-swallowed by roots, but a path nonetheless. And at the end of it sat an old cabin. The trees here grew so close that the canopy over their head was nearly solid and the moonlight was reduced to a few thin slivers between leaves. The cabin itself looked like the forest had been slowly digesting it for the past several decades – moss crawling up the walls, mushrooms colonizing the lower planks, wood splintering around the corners. It had a particular atmosphere. The kind of atmosphere that suggested someone had made a series of deeply unfortunate decisions here at some point in history. Mike tilted his head at it.
“Young couple stumbles upon a suspicious cabin in the woods.” he said almost fondly. “Classic.”
Her companion glanced left, then right, then at the wolf girl and without waiting for her approval simply marched forward. The door groaned and resisted under his weight until he had to force it open with his shoulder. Inside the cabin, Mike noticed that it was dry which was the only thing that immediately mattered to him, but it was also dark and clearly uninhabited for years with the particular smell of enclosed spaces left too long to themselves. He moved carefully through the small room that was divided into a kitchen and some sort of living room area. A ladder led up to the attic which he assumed was the sleeping area, though he wasn't about to go up there alone and get ambushed by whatever might be lurking there because something always occupied a place like this. Always. But the alternative was standing outside in wet clothes in the cold and that wasn't happening either.
So he turned back to the door. “I know what you're going to say,” he told her cheekily, “but I'd like to point out that some of us can't grow fur during a full moon.” When his favourite carnivore got close enough, he put both his hands on her small shoulders and steered her ahead of him. Partly as a joke. Partly as a genuine calculation that if anything in the dark objected to their presence, she was statistically the better candidate to handle it. Mostly, though, it was an excuse to be annoying. Every time she tried to get a look at a certain corner of the room, he'd steer her away with a firm hand on her shoulders until the whole thing had taken on the rhythm of a very strange, very small dance through a rotting room in the middle of nowhere. Each time she glanced back at him, he'd meet her with a shrug and something like There was a spider over there or The floor didn't look safe. It got to the point where, when something rustled in the background, he pulled her back against his chest and turned her to face whatever was out there – only for it to turn out to be nothing more than a branch tapping against the window. “You can say what you want, but we both know you don't mind being this close to me.” And before she could give him something to actually worry about, he let her go and made himself useful by stuffing firewood into the chimney which was thick with dust and half-crumbled bricks. The match he found on a shelf nearby was even less forgiving as his feral friend as it made sure that the avatar of the Vast would fail miserably to ignite some wood for them.
