He sees it all.
From his station in the shadows, where he is most comfortable, he watches.

He drags in a thin breath, feels a tendril of something dark snake its way through him, and watches. He studies the dead thing through the dark. He can smell the blood even from here. But he makes no attempt to intervene. There is no flame that swells in the parched column of his throat as he studies her, the hunter.

He is no hunter, this Messiah.
He is no coward, this Messiah.

She discards her kill. And he moves forward out of the shadows. Though the halo likely would have given him away even before the sound of a branch snapping underfoot as he moves toward her. He folds the wings, big and heavy and leather, tightly against his sides and never shifts his focus from the hunter’s blood-slick face.

“Look at you,” he purrs, the voice smooth, thick like honey. Something more suited to the halo that casts that heavenly glow down across the ridge of his brow than to the monster that lives beneath it. The fire in his belly. The magic in him that can destroy on a molecular level. “Beautiful,” he murmurs and then he simpers. Because he knows. Knows that underneath all that feline flesh, she's just like him.

Will he ever tire of magic?
How divine to watch her shift from feline to horse.

Still, the mouth drips with blood. Still, he can see that she is a hunter. But he feels no glimmer of fear, no stirring of nerves as she speaks. There at the center of him, something even darker stirs. There is a low hum in the network of those gilded veins when she purrs like a challenge. It is a fish hook in his belly, claws sunk into the meat of him, and he takes a step toward her.

She smiles, feral, and he follows suit. It is a dragon’s smile, all teeth. It belies the monster beneath the angelic appearance. How he wants to touch her. To taste the blood that still drips from her chin. It is a hot and wild thing that surges through him as he drags in a steadying breath. Finally, the nerves bristle. But not with trepidation. With something else entirely. Something electric.

“Show me,” he coos and takes another step toward her. “Teach me a lesson, won’t you?”

Part of him hopes that she might sink those teeth into the place where his pulse is the strongest. Part of him hopes that he might venture too close and she might show him the hunter she really is.

He is young, even still.
Young in a way that he does not understand.
Young in a way that has nothing to do with the years he has lived.
(Do years live in shadow count? When they are not lived but merely survived?)

Young in a way that should make him wary.
And yet, he does not have it in him. Because he is a predator, too. Because he does not know that dragons should fear tigers. He does not know that dragons should fear anything at all.

They are so close now that he can smell the deer’s blood on her breath. It chases a shudder down the length of his spine just to smell it on her. He is young in a way that stops him from understanding that the twisting in his gut, the primal scream at the center of him, has absolutely nothing to do with the stench of death and everything to do with their proximity.

Her focus shifts and he is suddenly acutely aware of every golden inch of himself. The throat where her gaze lingers most of all. He can feel his own pulse as it carries lifeblood through him. He wonders if she can smell it. If she can taste it without even having to take it on her tongue.

Teach me a lesson, he’d said, and she wastes no time in lunging for him. He recoils but only just so. He stifles his want to flee, to fling himself out of her reach. He lets her sink her teeth into the meat of his neck. Lets her spill his blood. Lets her paint him red. And isn’t he just a sight? An angel bathed in his own blood.

Hungry, she growls, and he grins that dragon’s grin and exhales a shaky breath. He knows what it means to be hungry, certainly. But he says nothing, just pulls back his own lips to expose his own predator’s teeth, dips his head to skim them across the surface of her shoulder.

“And?” he asks then, draws away from her and licks his lips, “what else?”