isolt.
I do not want to be what they expect me to be.
I do not want to be a monster.
The thought comes suddenly, intrusively, spreading like ice down her spine.Isolt freezes, one foot still raised in the air like the paw of a lioness on the hunt. One step, and she would be gone, melting away into the darkness. But she does not take that step.
Not yet.
His voice reaches out to her, rooting her in place.
The wind whistles through the trees like a wolf. Isolt closes her eyes and listens to it, listens to the boy’s delicate heart fluttering like a bird inside of his chest. It nearly matches the pace of his frantic scramble out of the gully, rocks and twigs rolling beneath his hooves. Her own heart speeds up at the sound of it, like it wants nothing more than to break past her ribs and chase after it. And she wants nothing more than to let it. The endless hunger, the aching, the need to hunt — it all comes back with a flash of blood-red suns against her eyelids.
He should know better, she tells herself, listening to his pulse fly. This will be his fault.
A branch cracks in two under his hoof when he steps closer, and her eyes flicker open at once.
“You should not ask me to stay.” Her voice is whisper-thin, nearly lost in the shadows surrounding them. She turns slowly to face him, with all the wistfulness of a starving dog sharp as moonlight in her eyes. She can see his pulse now, drumming in the hollow of his throat, just there behind his cheek, and oh, oh —
oh!
Isolt can feel the cosmos burning in his blood, and she wants to bleed out all those stars and suns filling his veins. She wants to find out if the liquid in his veins is red or gold, and if it blazes like fire, and she wants to paint the night with it. Her tail blade cracks sharply against a stone, but the sound not nearly as loud as the racing of her heart, of her magic, of her furious hunger. Isolt is drowning in the music of it.
“What—” She stops abruptly, teeth clicking together, licking her lips. Only monsters would ask that question, she reminds herself. Only monsters define themselves by what they are — and she does not want to be a monster. Not tonight. Not even with all the wolves clawing at her belly, howling in her throat, filling her mouth with drool.
She swallows them down, all of them, and tries again.
And the way she says it feels wrong, sounds wrong, is wrong. “—Who, do you think I am?” The moonlight drips down her horn, makes every hollow curl of it look twice as sharp. The wolves are telling her that this is the way of the hunt, that the only thing the boy needs to know about her is that she was born knowing how to carve the magic out of bodies like his.
But Isolt starts to wonder what else he sees, beneath the promise of violence weighing heavy on her brow.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
