She might not have noticed the thing, if she had not spent years being chased.
When she’d first escaped His lair, things had hunted her – she called them hellhounds, though she never caught sight of them, not directly. They were flickers at the corner of her eye, hot breath on her heels, snarling yelps and howls, all indistinct things that she could never pin to a form. Still, she knew, with a heartbreaking acuity, how to look for them, and though, at some point, the hellhounds ceased to pursue her (He found other ways to hurt her, of course, as her heart opened to a golden woman, a weakness made living), the instinct stayed. She is alert, constantly, a woman who was once confined too long, chased too long, that she will never forget the feeling.
She is safe, of course – when she was last pursued, she did not know the extent of her magic. She did not know that there was a horrible sweetness in causing pain, that she had within her the capacity to hurt, to maim – to kill, even. She never wants to hear those hounds again, but should they come baying, she thinks now she would turn to face them.
This is not such a case, of course. Cordis does not hurt indiscriminately. Yet when the flicker of shadow catches her eye, and she freezes, alert, trying to pinpoint the sound. Her electricity crackles, an audible sound in the stillness, a reminder to the unseen thing that she is untouchable, unless she should deign otherwise.
“Show yourself,” she says, and her voice does not waver, although her heart beats faster as she stands in the trees, surrounded by the dark.
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)