Chaya felt far too guilty to remain in the Horsemen's camp; they had been half-legends to her ever since childhood, and she felt as though they could see just by looking that the fog had swirled up and taken her, turned her into an indiscriminate beast. Slinking back out into the fog felt cowardly and terrifying, but she couldn't bring herself to stay in that warm-lit haven of safety.
Sound began to filter through the fog eventually, and Chaya's ears perked. Perhaps she had found her way out? She broke into a trot, moving towards the sounds, hope swelling in her chest, even though the vague compass of her internal tracking still spun wildly, unable to orient on any direction or goal.
When shapes began to loom out of the fog she almost cheered. The booths and attractions of Fright Night were appearing before her eyes. She didn't notice at first that the bright reds of the Festival itself were absent; the lack of all other color was a lack that she never noticed. Colorblind as she was, all colors but red were a mystery to her.
When she reached for a candy on the counter of one of the empty booths, though, her hand passed through it. It puffed apart in a curl of fog, and reformed in the same place just as it had been when she snatched her hand back. The sounds, she realized, were distant, coming to her ears as though they traveled through thick wrappings of gauze.
She was not out. This was a place made of fog, just as so much else had been. Her tail tucked tightly against the back of her legs, and her steps slowed. She moved through the greyed-out carnival, looking left and right, searching for a way back. She would return to the Horsemen, shamed and guilty as she was, and stay there, where she would be safe.
When the fog came rushing in on her, she closed her eyes with a whimper. She would be taken again now, she knew, and she braced herself for a futile struggle against Insanity.
It never came. Instead there was a brief and dizzying sense of falling, and when she opened her eyes, she stood before a dark figure, a pale and silent crowd behind it. A Huntsman? Chaya's breath caught. It must be a Huntsman. This was not how she had dreamed of meeting one, but it must be! Her first impulse was to drop respectfully to one knee, but a strange and enervating lullaby sounded in her ears as the figure spoke, and she found that she couldn't move.
She didn't understand what the figure said. She had never forced anyone into anything. She had never taken anything from anyone! She'd only picked up lost things, sometimes, when she was sure there was nobody to claim them. "What did I take?" she whimpered.
"You know very well what was taken. I would like it back.""I don't know!" She looked desperately past the figure, looking for some kind of sympathy among the pack behind him, and realized that it was not a pack at all - Sura was there, and Anna, looking at her with forbidding stares, and her sisters, and friends she had gone away from to go to school; Maria stood there behind the dark figure, and would not meet her eyes, painted skull turned away from Chaya.
"You're not a Huntsman," she accused angrily. "You're not a Huntsman! You're just a liar! I didn't take anything! I'm not a thief!"
"Stubborn, aren't we? No matter." The figure's weapon rose slowly to point at her, and despite her bravado, Chaya felt herself trembling.
The fog rose all around her, and she was alone again, the carnival and the figures wiped away as though they had never been. Chaya wrapped her arms around herself and began to walk again. It took a very long time for her shivers to ease.
