It slipped past pedestrians and vehicles with the elliptical flutters of a windborne leaf's breeze, slowly sliding downtown past 12th Street in the evening lightplay of streetlamps and signage. I almost lost it when the light changed and traffic swung from 12th across the avenue, but the heat-shimmer of its presence outlined the shape of a person in the warble of halogen headlights.I didn't know why it was here, but I had a fairly good idea what it was here to do. Wraiths move slowly, patiently; they can be diverted by a cross breeze, but they never stop. Not once. They're implacable, and they'll follow their designated culmination until they reach it and wrap their fields of eldritch energy about it in autonomic ecstasy.They wander until they kill. Human nervous systems can't handle the wraith's embrace, but they'll only enfold their target, the person to whom they’ve been attuned.The real problem is that I was fairly sure this wasn't just a wraith. It was moving wrong. It looked like one, that much I was sure of; but it just didn't slide right.
