She thinks of her mother sometimes.
Her beautiful, brilliant mother, miserable with that fool back in Taiga.
Oh, how she delights in knowing that she will never have to lay eyes on him again.
She is bigger now. Stronger, too.
She no longer cuts her tongue on her teeth. She is quite certain that the venom coursing through her now would lay him to ruin. He has not tried to come for her, perhaps because he knows. He knows that she is superior, that she could drain the life out of his eyes without trying now. She thinks about it constantly, dreams about it sometimes. Sinking her teeth into the vulnerable column of his throat. She is a girl obsessed, perhaps she always has been.
Ghaul comes to her one afternoon with a dead thing between his teeth. He drops it at her feet and she wants to turn away. Not because she is delicate but because she is proud and she can hunt on her own, she does not need him. But the scent of blood sets fire to her chest and she takes the bird between her own teeth, her eyes closing briefly as the stench of its fear and its death overwhelm her senses. And then she unhinges her jaw and swallows it whole. She does not thank him when it is gone, merely allows him to settle into the space beside her despite the fact that he reeks of someone else.
They are different now, the both of them, than the first time they met in the forest. Him drenched in his mother’s blood, she drenched in her own. She is not the same impulsive thing she was then. Her actions are deliberate, measured. She does not stink of death or killing because she cleanses herself in the sea. She no longer hisses or spits her disdain, instead swallowing it down and letting it fuel the fire of her hatred. This is what she does now, when she presses her mouth against the peculiar curve of his shoulder and catches the scent of another girl there.
She does not cast him away, though it is her first instinct to do so. Instead, she lifts her head and catches sight of a sickly tree. She nods her head in its direction, unaware or perhaps uncaring that he cannot see it. “Set that on fire first,” she muses. “That will do for now.”