Anastasia had been told many things growing up. She had been told how to shake prey just right so that the neck snapped between your teeth and the body went limp. She had been told how to hunt downwind so that the currents did not carry your scent to the target (a lesson that had ultimately been futile when her father had learned that she carried no scent). She had been told how to stalk for hours, how to follow behind your prey—studying its motions and its behavior and learning its motivation. The act had always seemed like an intimate one; in her own way, she loved everything she killed.
But she was not often told that she was good—her father was not casual in his compliments. She purrs beneath the attention, opens up like a night rose beneath Chantale’s prompting, and her shadowed face is exposed as she glances toward the mare. Leaning against her, she shifts her weight so that they are as close as possible. “What is Chan-tale good at?” she questions, her voice quiet as it slips between them.
Glancing upward, she memorizes the lines of the other’s face—the beauty, the otherworldly other-ness to Chantale’s form. The other mare looked like an echo, something designed to resemble life that was close and yet not close enough, the difference startling and exciting and wonderful to Anastasia. She reaches over and her mouth rests on the mare’s rubbery neck, but she does not sink her teeth into her, instead letting the velvet of her own mouth linger there and breathe in her sickly scent.
“Mine,” she finally decides aloud. “Chan-tale is mine.”
like the moon, we borrow our light
{I am nothing but a shadow in the night}