Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
An intruder.
The entity that he had taken from the Silver Cove hums in some part of his mind he has no name for. It’s been louder since he’d accepted Mazikeen’s offer, more insistent in his not-ears when someone unknown crosses the border.
Gale thinks he could easily come to hate it and the responsibility it signifies, but tonight he is hungry and it clangs within his head like a dinner bell.
She runs along the mountain path, reckless in this land of shifters, and Gale watches her from the sky before diving beneath the water with no more than a kingfisher’s splash.
He surfaces not far from where she floats, blue lightning dancing across his nereid face and illuminating the space between them with more than starlight. He looks not at all like the brindle creature that had asked about her fire, and Curse had not kept the each useless memory of its host to recognize that they have met before.
The brown mare is not Hyalinian and she is unrelated to his host, but there is a chance she might be a friend of Mazikeen. His recent promise to the white Alpha should ensure her safety, but there is a nearly equal chance he might leave Popinjay’s corpse beside the water to remind his lover that his promises are worthless.
He’d have her heart first, and he is hungry enough that he would use his teeth to rip it out and not the magic he’s practiced on Aela and Ciri.
“Have you come alone?” Gale asks. Or will there be others? Best to not glut himself early on a single dish, he decides, especially not if there might be a larger variety on the way. Perhaps she’s on a diplomatic trip, perhaps they’ll bring a trainee with tender young flesh.
Or perhaps it is just this small brown mare, who he drifts beside with a smile.
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