This is the first time in her young life that her loyalty has been tested.
How fiercely she has worshiped her mother.
Her beautiful, vicious, impossible mother.
A loyal daughter would have kicked herself free, snarled and gnashed her teeth and sunk her fangs into whatever flesh she could find until she’d made her way back to her mother’s side. A loyal daughter would have believed without question that that was where she belonged.
But he makes her feel like a wild thing. A feral thing. And all she feels when he hisses his vile venom at her mother is a faint stirring in her chest. Oh, but how she delights in his darkness! It rips another giddy giggle out of the long column of her throat as he tucks her against his side.
For her, it is a game and she revels in it. The eyes burn as she glances between the two of them – warring over her! Her grin is dark, twisted. Even as her skin quivers with the sticky waxiness of the wing cast across her back. She dips her head, drags her fanged teeth across the scaled surface of his shoulder and swallows down another trembling breath of laughter.
She peers up at her mother as he drapes his head across her neck and she cuts her tongue on her teeth and drips blood from her mouth. Her grin is bloody. She is free!
“Kill him first,” she says, pointedly turning her gaze to shackle it to her father’s. Who stands there so useless and dumb! How dare he come here, as if he could prove anything by being here at all! As if her mother needed him at all. He is staring back at her, a peculiar kind of expression on his face but he does not say anything.
There is nothing to say, Bethlehem knows. He has lived enough to know that the situation will not be diffused with words alone. He is certainly powerless to coax their daughter back to them as she seethes with her hate for him. He is powerless altogether, really, powerless against whatever dark force birthed this boy and it pains him to know his limitations.
But he does not look away from Gospel. Does not glance plaintively in Adna’s direction. He just goes on staring, jaw clenched.