She should gnash her teeth.
She should rail against the sound he rips out of her mouth, takes into his own.
But the sound is thin, the tongue clumsy.
And she does not shriek her disdain.
Instead, she laughs.
The sound of it catches her by surprise. It injects a certain effervescence into her veins and her eyes – bright green and slitted – glow with delight. She wants to keep him. Wants to curl him around her and make her reek of death, too. They are both bathed in blood and he leaves his on her tiny side and she leaves hers on his shoulder. A brand.
She swallows her giggle. Tries to loath him for coaxing it out of her. She wants to hate him the same way she hates her father. She wants to want to sink her teeth into him. But he is strange and magnificent and he’s made her laugh for the first time in her short life. It feels like weakness but it makes her dizzy, too.
But her delight evaporates just as suddenly as it had wedged itself into the space beside her heart when he flaps his wings and a chill steals down the length of her spine. She exhales a warning hiss before the wings settle and the two strange children stand there in the forest and siphon warmth from the surface of each other’s skin.
He’d done what he’d had to do, he says and she does not understand what this means. She grits her teeth and recoils as he coughs. Coughs up whatever filth had lived in his lungs. She snaps her teeth, because this filth is different – a thick mucus that rouses disgust at the very center of her. She watches him taste his own blood and feels some great thing shudder in the pit of her stomach. This is not disgust, not even a distant cousin of it. It is hunger, maybe and she cuts her tongue on her teeth so that she can swallow down that same iron taste, too.
He smiles but she is not privy to his thoughts. She knows naught of what inspires it and she feels no immediate inclination to ask. Instead, she folds herself against him again. “Gospel,” she says, remembers her mother calling the name as she’d stolen into the forest and raced through the snow in search of something more worthy of her time.
“Did you kill your mother?” she asks and thinks of her own mother. So beautiful, fearsome. How she could never kill her, could never even find it in herself to want to.