The black and sapphire stallion is not the only one who watches the weasel decimate the nest of infant kits. It is the sound of their squealing grunts that attracts her attention, and she shifts readily into the copper and white fur of a small fox as she lopes through the greenery of the forest towards their cries. She comes too late to intervene though, and that wiry heart crumples in her chest as she sits with her tail wrapped around her paws and looks down upon the carnage from the shadows beneath thick ferns.
The bodies are mangled and strewn all about, crumpled and copper like autumn leaves. The fox in her is unappalled, feeling the fingers of dawning hunger clawing at her belly, the understanding that this is natural. But as the weasel returns to select just one of the mangled bodies, she feels wrath swell to overtake the hunger, feels the girl in her rise like fire to the surface. How dare he kill them all to take just one and leave the rest for the ants to chew holes through.
It is such waste, such needless violence, and at once she is on her feet and bounding silently after him. He is so busy with the thick scent of blood in his nose and the body of the rabbit in his teeth that he does not notice her until it is too late to do anything but make that same screaming grunt the rabbit kits had. Her teeth close around his shoulders and she shakes him violently, feeling the satisfying snap of his neck as he go limp in her jaws.
There is violence in the satisfying way her fox strips him bare and guts him, feasting on the soft meaty flesh until she is full and the girl in her is horrified. It will never not be strange to want meat in this way, to crave it even when her mind recoils and hides within the shape of the horse. Nauseated, she steps away from the mangled remains, and there is copper stain on her light face and the thick bib of white down her chest.
She turns back to the kits, meaning to bury them back in their nest in the only way she knows how to honor their needless deaths, but she is startled to find the sapphire stallion stepping in her direction. Her hackles raise and she paces sideways, that little orange body growing and elongating into a much larger wolf as she circles back around to leer at him. She is beautiful in this form, powder blue with black points and a black mask, a tail too full for it to belong on this body. Even her eyes are mesmerizing, glittering like blue crystal as she draws to a snarling stop a few strides from his shoulder. “You aren’t welcome here.”
the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight