She is just everything he never expected.

As she barrels in with all the graceful subtly of a drunk rhino, his eyebrows inch comically high towards his hairline as he blinks at her, dumbfounded.

Kane bets he could blow on her and she’d topple over. There’s just nothing to her, no word beyond petite that could describe how impossibly small she seems. Her height alone is diminutive, but she’s wispy and meek in the way fairies who have been looked over their entire existence are. It’s a stark contrast to the pissed off scowl she’s got going overtop her wheezing. In fact, the more he stares, the more he’s forced to consider what a walking contrast she is.

There’s not a spot of color to her, as he’s used to seeing from fairies and things that pass beyond the veil. She’s constructed solely of tones of grey, like some sculpture of a child made from ash and shadow, like a cold reflection of the sunlight off the moon. But then their eyes lock briefly, an inconvenience to her, and he’s shocked by the punch of icy blue her gaze delivers. By the laws of death and physics, it shouldn’t exist, so bold and shameless amongst the grey. But he feels the chill of it just the same, as solid as if she’d taken a palm to his face.

“Hold up.” He tries to school the dismay off his face and fails miserably. "You’re Aura?!"

However, there’s no time for a further line of inquiry. She can’t afford to pay him heed as she’s apparently preoccupied with a mission of a missing soul and Kane’s innate proclivity to be a good soldier immediately kicks in. He takes to scanning the mist with her, forcing his vision to focus as it’s strained into farsightedness. It’s like trying to spot a sea creature below the turbulent surface of the ocean. The mist rolls and churns in its airborne waves, distorting the horizon and all semblance of spatial awareness. This wayward ghost couldn’t have chosen a better ally for circumventing a reaper’s attention.

If there had only been one set of eyes on the fog, it might have successfully shielded him for another day’s worth of evasion. But Kane’s senses are relatively sharp and he’s catching the angles Aura can’t see.

It takes several seconds but eventually he latches onto movement. There! A flash of olive wool in between layers of mist, too corporeal to quite blend in, and moving fast in a eastward direction. It darts quickly back into the thick of the gloom, but this time Kane gives chase.

“Hey! You ghost! Get back here!” he barks.

It only spurs the dead soldier into a new gear. With a frantic cry, the figure picks up more speed and bolts further into the mist. Kane gives it his best shot, legs pumping and lungs burning and the lactic acid starts to cramp at his ribcage as they’re approaching a solid mile of ground covered. The oxygen is thin here in the RBR and he can feel his strength waning. He’s not a creature built for speedy sprints, the years of alcohol softening the curve of his abdomen have seen to that.

“Come on, dude,” he yells, each word punctuated on the end of a gasping breath. “If I had wanted to work out today, I would have gone to the gym.”

The ghost only answers with a cry of anguish before somehow picking up even more speed and vanishing out of sight again.

Kane swears and grits his teeth. Fuck. He’s going to have to let the panther out in order to catch this unreasonable son of a bitch. With a heavy sigh, he throws himself forward, hands outstretched and willing the shift of atoms to start. It doesn’t take as long as most fairies believe, a full shift, but it’s extremely taxing and painful and damn it all, if he won’t be stuck an extra half a day down here now trying to recuperate his energy from this hunt.

It’s not fairy hands that break his fall to the sand, but large clawed paws in their place and the piercing green stare of a big cat with prey in its sights above them. He let’s the puma take control, not bothering to rein in its overpowering instinct to pursue and catch the weaker form dashing back and forth now in crystal clarity. He can see every detail of stitching on the soldier’s uniform, the smell of blood and soot on his neck acrid and mouthwatering to flared predator nostrils.

The soldier weeps, stumbling as he gazes in alarm at the huge cat baring easily down upon him. He protests, turning to scurry backwards several paces and raising his arms up in defense. The puma pounces. But Kane forces the shift midair a second time with a pained grunt and it’s an annoyed Lietinuent of the Dead instead of the cat that tackles that soldier and pins him in a headlock.

The boy fights him, and fights hard. Kane would be impressed with his tenacity if he wasn’t already sore and thoroughly irked from having to chase rogue souls on his day off. “The hell’s the matter with you,” he grumbles as he tightens his hold on the squirming soul. “You don’t just run from a man when he orders you to stop and then kick him in the junk.” A scream of frustration is ripped from the boy’s throat when he realizes all his frantic thrashing can’t free him from Kane’s iron grip. With some effort, he manhandles the young man up and gets them marching back to where Brock and Aura are waiting.

“Noooo,” the soldier wails upon seeing Aura. His writhing intensifies and Kane’s forced to take him to the ground with a kick to the back of his knees. Even in that position he struggles, sobbing as he does everything in his power to avoid her blue eyes. “Let me go! Don’t you know what she is!?”

Kane grins, directing a playful wink in Aura’s direction. “Well, a hell of a lot shorter than I expected, for one.”