SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
She comes, just as Gospel had suspected she would.
And Gospel watches and she does not try to hide it.
The viper’s eyes follow every move Clarissa makes from the moment she catches sight of her to the moment she comes to rest before her.
She studies the smile. Such a foreign thing in its inherent innocence.
These are the things that Gospel has never understood, will never understand. This primal need to be good. She shifts her weight lazy, flicks her tail against her scaled haunches, watches.
She does not return the smile.
She delights in the dark things.
She has not smiled since Stave took her life force in his iron grip, since he took her to her knees, since he showed her how sweet death could be.
She does not smile at strangers. Certainly not this one.
She merely tilts her viper’s head.
“Must I?” she asks, her tone a razor’s edge. She almost asks how the teal mare came to such a conclusion, but she doesn’t. It doesn’t matter and she doesn’t care.
Where is she from?
Her mother’s womb. Born in the forests of Taiga, if one wanted to get technical. But she was too young to leave her mother’s side when she’d slipped out from beneath their noses and made for the forest. It was there she found Ghaul or he found her. And she had murmured the name into the heat of his skin, giggled with the thrill of it. How effectively he had torn her away from her mother, the only thing she had ever loved.
Again, she rakes the tongue across her fanged teeth and exhales a slow breath.
“Should I have introduced myself when I arrived?” she asks, failing to see any correlation between how well she’d settled into the Cove and their meeting. “Ghaul asked me to look after the Cove, I didn’t realize that made me subservient to anyone here.”