He was in no mood to go anywhere, much less to find this stranger. He never stopped muttering his complaints from the moment he had shrugged into his leather jacket on the way out the door. Esmeralda, on the other hand, was giddier about their trip to the forest. She wore a long, flowing, brown beaded skirt with a turtleneck sweater to match and her own black leather jacket over it, all topped off with a pleasant smile, while Connor’s lips were puckered into a scowl. It wasn’t a lie that he was curious about the young woman’s sudden appearance, but he didn’t want Esmeralda to tag along. She was more of a nuisance nowadays than she used to be, and her presence set Connor at a constant state of edgy discontentment. They walked a ways through the low-lying dense fog until Esmeralda skipped towards a large burrow in the side of a sloping hill on the edge of the path. She bent over at the waist and peeked inside the dark, shrouded hole and turned back to him with a toothy grin.
