Catori didn't get scared. 

Not bad scared, at least. Not bone-chilling, knees-shaking, heart beats too fast scared. She had died once, and that hadn't been too scary. She had helped kill a demon, too, and then she had just been angry. Fear wasn't an emotion she was familiar with, to say the least. Maybe because she had grown up surrounded by death. Or maybe she was just weird.

But the thing standing at the end of the dark and empty street, staring her down, filled her chest with an icy dread. It was like someone had dipped her heart into ice water, stopped her pulse right in it's tracks. She couldn't even breathe. That wasn't normal. She could always breathe. 

It was tall, almost as tall as the windows of the second floor of the building next to it. And it was...long. It's limbs were arched away from it's body like it didn't know quite what to do with them if it wasn't tearing someone's lungs out. They were almost as long as it, and as it moved, she swore they got longer. 

Moved. It was coming towards her. 

It was locked on her with an intense stare, except it didn't have eyes so she wasn't even sure how it could see her. Could you see with no eyes? That didn't seem right. Nothing about this seemed right. Not the low fog on the pavement or the dead silence around her, like the street itself had stopped to hold its breath the way she was. 

Her feet wouldn't move. 

Normally, there was a constant sense of companionship around her. You could never be truly alone in a town where the spirits of the dead were sealed into the bricks that made up the buildings. There was always someone there. Always someone who knew her name. 

She was alone, now. 

It was in front of her now. She kept her eyes level with it's legs, afraid that if she looked up she would lose whatever she had left of her mind to the fear. From the corner of her eye, she caught movement. It's arm reached up, reached out. Towards her. 

Where are you, Catori?

It was Garret's voice. False, of course, because Garret had died so that she could live, and he was long gone now. But it was. Sometimes, after the events of that night, she could hear him. Like a little voice in her head. Like a conscience that sometimes told you to push your annoying classmates out the window. 

You need to be here, babe. Internal monologues don't help when you're about to die.

He was right, of course, even if he was an ass about it. And maybe it was that, that finally spurred her into motion. His condescending tone, as though her being terrified out of her mind was something to be disappointed it. 

So she grinned. It was the first thing that came to mind, and spirits, did it feel like holding a knife in hand. Like a little safety blanket, or a loaded gun. 

"You new in town?" She asked, and the thing stopped moving. She couldn't blame it. The question kind of confused her as well. Did towns even mean anything to a being that looked like it crawled out of a sinkhole in the middle of the woods?

They stood there, like that, it's eyes on her and her eyes on it's legs until she glanced up at the same time that it moved. There was a hand on her cheek. And something achingly familiar in it's eyes. 

"Kin?" 

It spoke, and it's voice sounded like a million voices haphazardly spliced together, overlapping again and again. The hand on her cheek was numbingly cold. At the same time, the touch seemed infinitely gentler than the being in front of her looked capable of. 

"Who, me?" She asked, stupidly, suddenly glad that there was no one else around. At least if she died now, they would assume she died cool, and not like a total loser. 

"Blood." It said, like that clarified anything to Catori, who was still scared out of her mind but also confused as all hell. It could speak. And it knew her, she was sure. 

And suddenly, it hit her. Like catching a memory that had been on the edges of your mind all day, she saw it. This thing, against the night sky on the mesa, arms stretched out like the branches of a tree. She could feel it, an essence of the same kind she was made of. The dessert, the stars, the wind. And the dead. 

Whatever this thing was, something in her came from the same place.