Greykin Valley

| 62 | Siren

"Are you ready?" Damon asked him.

"Yeah, I'm good," he said with a nod.

"All right," Raphael mumbled. "Damon?"

The Alpha nodded.

Jackson stepped back and watched them move closer to the edge of the cliff. And when they lifted their heads towards the moon and howled, a shiver ran down his spine. He'd only heard Damon's howl a few times, and whenever he did, he always felt a strange sort of anticipation, like he was ready to face whatever might follow. And he was ready.

He set his sights on the siren. The faceless creature turned its head in Damon and Raphael's direction, and a lot of the cadejo looked up, too. The entire ocean of undead turned around and started flowing towards the bottom of the cliff that they stood on, and the siren started moving, too. It climbed down off the rock, but it struggled to slip through the tight crowd...so it started climbing and walking on top of the cadejo as if they were the ground itself. And the snarling corpses didn't react, either; they let the siren walk on their backs, and it made its way towards the cliff.

Dread and angst constricted Jackson like a snake, but he held on to his composure. "It's coming," he told them.

Raphael stopped howling to glance at the siren. "Get ready," he told Damon, and then he continued his howl.

Jackson kept his eyes on the siren, watching as it prowled closer and closer. He could hear it chittering as it tilted its head and moved its strange body, and the nearer it got, the faster Jackson's heart raced.

"I-it's halfway here," he told them, glancing at Raphael and Damon.

And then it started moving faster.

"And...now it's speeding up," he panicked.

The creature sprinted over the corpses, snarling and panting—but then it stopped. It halted as if the cold had frozen its bones...and Damon and Raphael went silent.

Jackson shivered worriedly when he looked at them both and saw the swirling black patterns in their iris', the same ones he'd seen when they first came into contact with a siren. They were stuck in its trance, and now it was down to him to deal with it.

He stood on the edge of the cliff, trying to calculate whether or not it was far away enough from the ledge that Wilson would soon be on. It was only roughly thirty meters away from Raphael and Damon, including the vertical drop...and the ledge was at least double that distance away. So...Wilson would be fine, right?

But their howls didn't only attract the corpses in the pit.

The brush rustled behind Jackson.

He frantically turned to face the noise, tensing up, his heart racing. He could see something moving around in the gloom, and what it was, it was big.

Jackson stepped back and stood defensively by Damon and Raphael. Maybe if whatever was stalking him saw that there were three of them, it wouldn't attack. But if it was a cadejo—and he had a horrible feeling that it might be—then it wouldn't care how many of them there were, would it? It would just want blood.

He held his ground anyway, staring into the woods. The snow crunched quietly, and a low growl echoed from the dark. He could feel eyes on him, and he knew that it was watching him...but what was strange was that his feeling of danger wasn't focused on whatever was beyond the trees. He felt afraid, sure...but his instincts weren't trying to convince him that something terrible was about to happen once the watcher pounced out of the trees.

In fact, whatever was stalking him didn't make him feel threatened. So he shakily asked, "H-hello? Is someone there?"

There was no answer.