She smells her company before she sees. Young. Young. Maybe it is hypocritical, for Anandi is young herself, but it is not Andi who smells young. It is the beast in her– calculating, alert, hungry. Always hungry. It wonders– what would this child taste like? As wonderfully tender as it smells? How easily would the meat tear apart, pulled underwater and then violently rolled and thrashed until the flesh split open to reveal…
heaven?
“Is someone there?”
From the tone in her voice you would not realize that she knows, of course she knows, without a doubt that someone is there. How could she not know? The girl smells like the sun. Eventually she steps forward and Anandi, she sees the girl not just for what she is but what she could be: all those lean lines and warring colors and that captivating look in her eyes, one gentle and one fierce. (and the third?) The girl is beautiful in a way that only land horses are, and more. So Andi smiles in a way that still hides those terribly sharp teeth, in a way that suggests she has a secret– would you like to see what it is, girl? Come closer, I'll show you
“Hello,” she echoes. Her voice is low and it crackles the way insects do when they sing in the night. She makes it a point not to notice the trail of dark spots on the inside of the girl’s thigh (how… delightful) but there are so many other things she can’t help noticing. The smell of her blood racing, for one, her heart straining for the feel of those sharp teeth and that slick tongue. I could show you, if you like, it would feel like nothing else in the world, I promise.
She swallows and tries to think of moonlight, of Boudika, of anything but the hunger, the endless hunger. “My name is Anandi,” she says before she can be addressed as water horse for what must be the hundredth time. There is something shy about the way she says it, something enticing– did you hear? Maybe you should step closer… and as she tilts her head invitingly it catches the moonlight, turns it to flesh. “What brings you here tonight? Is it that relic I keep hearing so much about?” Those wide jade eyes blink innocently, not so different from a doe.
A young girl with full painted lips and magnificent almond-shaped eyes.
The air all around her smells of the sea.
@
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
