Salted [m]

I don't even know.

She had abandoned the borders in the wake of the cougar's death. It wasn't that her duties had become less important, but that her sanity was questionable. It had been too sudden, too unexpected... And so her mind had constructed its own prison of emotional walls to hide behind until she was able to cope with it better. It left Jinx a strange shell of herself who wandered the pack's interior with glassy eyes and a grim frown, whose composure could be shaken and broken at any moment. Her grief did not manifest as shrieking tears, but as rage and misunderstanding.

It would be all too easy for the volatile she-wolf to turn on a pack mate if they got too close, and so they had wisely kept their distance. In time, she would re-emerge from her dark depression and become Swiftcurrent's capable warrior once more, but for the time being, she was an unpredictable mess of a wolf. Today, however, her senseless meandering had brought her very close to the borders... And someone approached.

Once, Jinx had run Haunter down on the open plains and caught him and demanded to know who he was. Haunter had more than made up her mind about him since then by coming to her aid in Northstar Vale. Even if the swarthy man chose to leave in the spring, as he admitted was his plan, she owed him an irreversible amount of respect. Now, her body broke into a pained lope, but with her mind locked away, she didn't feel it. Her eyes were locked on the dark figure, but her intentions were entirely unknown, so silent and erratic was her approach.

When she reached him, she didn't peel back her lips and charge him as he might have expected. Albeit unreasonable in her grief, Jinx hadn't forgotten her pack mates. As with Fox and Lecter the day before, Jinx didn't know what she would say or do when she reached him; she merely responded to an instinctive desire to reach him. When she did, she wasn't disappointed, for he carried with him the smell of the sea. Home, crooned her mind, and without hesitation she went to him.

Her body abruptly collided with his in a side sweep as she passed him, collecting the scent of salt from him. Rather than that one pass, though, Jinx rounded him to press her other side to his and sidle up alongside him, rubbing her flank on his like a cat in heat, with a queer desirous light in her eyes as she growled softly. She had no control over what she did, nor a reasoning for why she did it, and in it she remembered Lecter keenly... It never occurred to her that she was crazily projecting Lecter's scent on this male, driven by her temporary loss of sense and this man's aroma of the ocean. It never occurred to her that in that mad, senseless moment of believing he was her Shaman in Sos' dark clothes, she sought to recreate that which she had lost, to offer to the Bear God a compromise for losing her children.