someone else's gain will be my loss, ghaul

[adna]

I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher

She feels nothing but the panic.

Nothing but that sheer panic that finally bites through everything else—even the jaw-cracking, mind-numbing agony of knowing he would never love her. She knows nothing except the fear that sends her racing through the dark, nearly blind save for her thermal vision, the trees reaching out and scratching against her scaled sides as she continued to catapult herself forward.

When she finally breaks through the clearing, the moon is bright enough that she can make out the shapes of them. Her vision flickers and then shifts back to normal, and her serpentine eyes narrow on her daughter. She studies her, analyzes her, feeling a sharp pang of fear when she notices the blood on her chin before her head whips to the boy. He is a strange thing and her eyes narrow in instinct.

“Gospel,” her voice is a whip as it cracks through the air and she doesn’t even have the time to make sure that Beth has followed her here. Another one of her failures. Just stacking up. “What do you think that you are doing?” Her voice is nearly strangled with her relief, with fury, with fear, and she doesn’t know how to dull it—she doesn’t know how she can possibly soften it to react as her mother might.

Instead she is all angles, all sharp edges—keen and predatory.

Her voice comes out in a hiss as she finally addresses the boy.

“Do not touch her,” she bares her fangs although she guesses he cannot see them.

Still, perhaps he can hear the sound they make as they click together furiously.

in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire

Adna