“ and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye,"
Everything in Calliope roars inside the cage of her skin the moment the birds gather and circle overhead. Each beat of their wings and each clack of their beaks is echoed with a crack of lightning in the hollow of her spine. Her muscles are alive with electricity, alive and enraged.
When a lone monster lands it takes every ounce of her will-power not to leap over the resting queen and latch her teeth onto the bird's jugular like a lion. Calliope, when she blinks, can still remember how Shrike looked swinging like a noose from the talons of a thunderbird. It's only the queen, sprawled like a fool on a bed of feathers that holds all her muscles coiled like a spring that hasn't yet been loosed.
The stallion joins her and Calli shakes her horn like a wolf when she watches the lambs bed down on their faith. Faith, she thinks, is for queens and golden-boys and not for black-as-night unicorns.
Black unicorns are made for violence, for freedom, for blood-letting the world until all the monsters and the sinner are nothing more than dust. And so she watches, says nothing and refuses to look at Raymond to see the censure in his gaze. Calliope has always been ready to die for her 'blood-letting'. She was created for it.
But for all the tight, silence of her lips the lightning licking around her skin like forked, snake tongues sings a eulogy to the metronome of the monsters, swinging tail.
The thunderbird waits for words and Calliope waits for violence, and for a moment she's not sure which of them might 'want' more.
