BLESSED BY A BITCH FROM A BASTARD SEED
pleasure to meet you, but better to bleed
“Who are you, little girl?” And there are flashes in her mind, faded, torn. A girl, left out on the streets. A girl, picked up by a man (or was it a monster?) and taken into the desert. A girl, tormented, tortured, trained. Who are you, who are you? and something inside her says nothing and something else says a machine made for war. She reaches for that little girl, crying, and wants to say… What does she want to say? But the girl is too far out of reach, too buried in the shadows. There is too much space, too much time, between there and now. The girl slips away.pleasure to meet you, but better to bleed
Teiran looks up at Mathias and the cold steel glint in her eyes does not change. Not until his hand is there, slipped between her skin and that silver collar on her throat. Everything flees, and something wild and feral fills her instead. She could kill him, and there is no fear in her. There is no turmoil. There is nothing. The soldier, quick as a striking serpent, hooks one of her legs around his own front two, and at the same moment she moves to sweep his hooves out from under him she too, shoves all of her weight into his shoulder.
She doesn’t wait to hear if his body hits the ground, doesn’t wait before her tele is reaching, grasping a knife. It draws up in the air before her and she doesn’t even know where it comes from, doesn’t hear the offended shout of the passerby she had stolen from. She could kill him, and the dagger is raised, raised, poised to bite any flesh, to take any blood, that it can. The animal thing inside her screams, begging, salivating. She is a machine made for war. A hissing sound escapes her lips. She could kill him.
She doesn’t.
Her eyes close for only a second, the emptiness being covered by the dark rose of her lids, and she sees the girl again; thin, frail, broken. Teiran meets her fading, hollow sage eyes, and when hers open again there is no beast clawing through them, thirsting for blood. She looks at Mathias, and feels her white-knuckled grip on the knife, and there is a crack in her veneer. It spiderwebs outward, delicate and gossamer, catching the light. “Do not touch my collar.”
She turns to where the bystander is, the one she had taken the knife from, as he looks on in terrified silence. One, two, three flips through the air and he is clutching the weapon and disappearing. As though any of the citizens of this court needed more reasons to avoid her, but she doesn’t care as she turns back to the black and white man. “Next time you want a fight, we can take it outside the court. Do not, however, make the same mistake again.” What she doesn’t say is that next time, she isn’t sure if she can stop herself from taking his life.
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