Hawk and the myriad of ghostly shapes around him shifted and groaned, causing the black-furred creature to look round at him, distracted from his fury at Aries. Whatever he saw in Hawk made him turn around and flee, cursing.

"Er," Yoshi said, pointing after him, "he is--"

"What the hell was that?!" Vlad said loudly then, rounding on Numair. When Numair didn't respond--he just bent double, looking out of breath and shell-shocked--Vlad amended, "Actually...never mind. I don't want to know."

Yoshi stepped forward towards Hawk, who was leaning heavily against the sedan, rubbing his eyes with his unchanged hand. Pale shapes of wings and heads, difficult to see the in the daylight, swam in a cocoon about him, seeming to grow more and more defined with every minute.

Yoshi said cautiously, "Er, Hawk? Are you..."

He turned towards her, and so did the skeletal heads. His taloned and feathered arm, oversized to even his body, hung at his side, but ghostly forms of it moved fitfully towards his injured shoulder, which was beginning to bleed rather more freely now. A twinge was going down his unchanged arm, which draped over the roof of the sedan. The look in his eyes was sort of wild, and angry, and distant.

His field of view had gone dark; he could see Yoshi, and Vlad, and Numair, but they all had a dull pallor to them, and their edges were luminous and blurry. The farther away they were, the harder they were to see--he could make out Vlad's shape past Yoshi, but Numair was just a blur of dull color. Sound fell off in the same way somehow: Yoshi's voice came out a little garbled, but he could barely make out Vlad calling his name.

"Oh," Yoshi said, "You--you are--"

But he moved past Yoshi. Vlad came into focus as he got nearer, and he could hear, "You're bleeding. We should--"

"S' just a cut," Hawk heard himself say, and passed Vlad as well.

Numair's form came mostly into focus as well, raising his face to peer up at Hawk from beneath his fringe of dark hair. There was silence.