the stars. What was her body doing without her? She imagined it slumped in the saddle as if asleep, perhaps drooling out of drooped lips. If a wild animal, one of the many creatures she had heard calling and screaming and laughing in the night, came upon her like that, would she realize it? Would she know to return to her body in time to save herself? If she didn't, the animals could very well kill her body and leave her stranded, a nomad of the spirit world. The idea washed over her like cold water on naked flesh. Despite her earlier wish, she found herself not at all eager to learn what such an existence would be like.
Victoria's worry blossomed into full-blown panic when she realized she no longer knew where her body was. She may very well have traveled miles from the small cliff where she and Cora parted ways. The desert landscape, now barely discernible in the advancing gloom of the night, offered her no clues. Desperate, she began zipping to and fro, hoping for something - a prominent rock formation or odd-looking hill - to jump out at her as a familiar sight.
So great was her panic that she did not notice the creeping shadow on her mind at first. When it finally caught her attention, she dismissed it as a product of her own mounting fear. It burrowed deeper into her awareness, pricking and poking at her mind like a grain of sand in her undergarments. Finally pulling her mind away from her frantic search, Victoria paused to consider the growing sensation. It only took her a moment to recognize it. A thrill of excitement and fear ran through her. It was the skin-walker's aura; she was certain of it.
The dark energy flowed out from beneath the approaching night to the east. It would be easy enough to follow, but Victoria had to find her way back to her body first. Shutting the skin-walker's power out of her mind, she envisioned her own aura as a sphere around herself. She willed the sphere to expand, to envelop the landscape beneath her. The radiating power from the witch became a visible stream in her mind, but she turned her attention away from it, stretching her energy westward.
After a few minutes, her growing alarm broke her concentration. Maybe the Navajo spirit walkers could navigate the world in such a manner, but she didn't seem to have the power herself, and now she would be forever trapped in the spirit world. Worse, the skin-walker might find her in this state and devise some method of torturing or enslaving her spirit. The singer had been vague on what sort of interactions could happen between spirits, but Victoria's imagination was more than willing to supply various outcomes, all of them terrifying.
The skin-walker's ripples of energy abruptly changed. They became waves, large and full of purpose. Victoria could sense them closing in on her like the jaws of an animal trap. She dove for the desert floor, hoping to somehow hide herself from the witch's awareness. Pressing herself as close to a large rock as she could, she watched and waited.
Above her, the waves began forming a narrow cone of darkness against the evening sky. They swept through the space she had just occupied like an animal sniffing after some escaped prey. Had her spirit needed breath, she surely would have been holding it. She didn't know what she would do if the skin-walker discovered her. Flee, most likely, but to where? The desert's endless march of shrubs and rocks had already defeated her sense of direction; a blind flight through it would destroy any hope she had of finding her body again. If only she could stumble upon that same instinctive reflex that transported her back in an instant during her last journey. Somehow, though, she figured it wouldn't work if she was expecting it to, much like a kettle refusing to boil until she looked away.
Giving herself a mental shake, Victoria pulled upon the rational side of herself that even now insisted that she was only dreaming. Her body was somewhere west of her, and the skin-walker was somewhere to the east. She didn't know how far the dark waves - now looming scarcely twenty feet overhead - could reach, but she knew it wasn't forever. Their power had to fade over distance, or she would have sensed them when she first left her body.