Tunnel’s flat, cold eyes pick his dark pet out of the undergrowth and she comes to him as she has so many times before. He does not notice how tall she is growing or the shadow of future succulence in her curves. What he does see are her glassy hooded eyes and the wrongness in the way she wears her skin. The smell of plague comes to him and though he expects it, it still offends. Shroud takes shelter beneath the muscular curve of his neck and a gentler master would take pity on his charge but they both know that isn’t going to happen.
His nostrils flare and he breathes her in along the ridge of her spine, from the pinions of her wings to the soft place behind her ear where the right amount of violence could sever her spine. Her scent (changed from that infant sweetness that had first made him keep her, but still narcotic) is polluted, thick with some cloying foulness. A rumble of displeasure, and he drops his head to draw her in against his chest. She fits against him in new ways as the months march on, he notes this only vaguely.
“You have brought back your reward for serving another.” His voice is low and his lips wander possessively over the sick-sweat on her overheated neck and back making himself sure his Shroud is whole. She is his, polluted or not. “You seem rather pleased with yourself.” He states as if by observation but condemnation is a rather more appropriate word.
Features ever still Tunnel pulls away from the sabino girl, pushing past her as he does when she has bored him. “Come.” He drives toward the river, there is a slow wide place where they have spent time before, when she was smaller and could not be trusted not to wash herself downstream. At the shore he stops, turns to look at her, looming blue monster. “Drink, and then tell me where you have been.” Perhaps now she is thinking he pities her too much to punish her. Oh no, his Shroud is more clever than that.
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
as though we were drowning inside our hearts
@[shroud]
