Four syllables was all it took for Acton to perform a different kind of magic.
Swift as a magician’s trick he shed the guise of the grief-stricken boy and became the Crow, the performer, the man who had never flinched at the idea of having blood on his hands. Lazy stance, lupine smile, eyes like embers.
Temper, temper, said the voice, and though he’d heard the words before (more than once, more than twice) he was relieved not to recognize the speaker. It would be mortifying to be caught in such a state by anyone he knew, but a stranger – well. Acton had spent much of his life coming out on the better end of encounters with strangers.
It only took him a moment to find the man, and one ear flicked back (even a little rockslide drew up big memories) as he watched him scramble down the slope in a half-controlled descent and a shower of dust and ash. Acton huffed a breath at the little mock-bow, as if he himself weren’t constantly on the lookout for a way to make an entrance.
As the stranger swaggered nearer Acton’s gaze meandered over him from hoof to horn-tip, recognizing nothing. A foreigner, maybe, come to see what spoils there were in a court abandoned to chaos – or possibly someone who was unaware of what was going on.
At the sound of his voice, Acton at last flicked his gaze up, over the curl of lips and to the golden eyes.
“Oh, that’s alright,” he answered languidly, all venom gone from his voice, but his eyes burned bright as autumn leaves. He did not take them from the golden stranger’s, and there was something very much of a crow in the way he watched him, all dark interest. “Something better usually comes around.”
Better for Acton, right now, was a distraction. And as he took in this stranger with his horned head high and his grin like the sharp side of a knife, the buckskin wondered if one had found him.
Temper, he thought again, and his gaze turned appraising. For a man like him those were as good as fighting words, and thought this fellow might be good for it – knew it the way any shrewd-eyed kid in a souped-up Subaru could tell from the expression of the driver who nosed up to the stoplight beside him that here was someone looking for trouble.
Acton loved trouble. It made him forget everything else, and reminded him exactly who he was: alive, alive, alive.
So now he angled his expression slant-wise on the golden stallion, then jerked his white muzzle up the slope, where gouge marks told of the stranger’s slide. His lips did not shape a smile, but there was the beginning of one in his flintlight eyes.
“That looked fun. Need a push the rest of the way down?”
NAUSEOUS, OR MAYBE JUST INSPIRED
@Thranduil
