Stalker
The drugged quiet is gone out of her. I did that.
I knew her smell before I ever had her. Green. Warm. The flat dead sweetness laid over the top of it. That part’s gone now. Day after day of me, my venom, my cum, my heat, and the cup’s poison has bled out of her skin and left the real thing under it. Sharp. Alive. Hers.
She fights me now. Takes me. Climbs on when the drive rests and dares me to lie still and let her ride.
There’s a heat in her that wasn’t there the night I carried her down.
Anger, with an edge on it, pointed back the way she came.
Good. Let it burn. A thing with teeth keeps better than a thing that only smiles.
I woke that in her. I’d do it again with my own hands.
But the dark isn’t only mine anymore.
I lift my head off the furs in the lull and read what the root-ways carry down to me, and every breath of it is worse than the last.
The soft ones are still on my line. More than before.
They’ve quit calling into the dark and started working it, quartering my ground, smearing their dead stink on my boundary trees, walking the trail I tore open the night I took her.
They found the gap in her cage wall. They’re reading it backward, to the thing that made it.
To me.
And under their stink, something new. Worse.
A scent with no fear in it. No sweat, no prey-shake, none of what a living thing gives off when it steps into a predator’s dark.
Just meat, and metal, and the wrongness the Ordained breed into the things they break and build back.
I caught it once before, far off, and hoped never close.
They’ve sent their made things. The ones that don’t run.
The ones you kill, and they get up, and you kill again.
A growl climbs my chest before I know it’s there. “Grrr.” She stirs against me. I drag it down. Hold her. Hate every wall of dark between me and the things walking my line.
And I can’t go.
The rut has me. My knot’s in her, my body roped to hers, and it won’t turn me loose for hours at a stretch.
Even when it eases, I won’t pull out of her and leave her alone down here with that coming.
I could carry her. I’ve carried her to water, sealed in my wings, full of me and safe.
But I won’t carry her toward the metal-stink.
I won’t walk what’s mine into the teeth of the thing that made me.
Because I know what they do.
I came out of a place like the one they want to put her back in.
The hand that fed me. The blade that marked me.
Ordained hands. Ordained patience. They don’t kill what they can keep.
They smooth it. They pour the quiet in and call it kindness and use what’s left of it.
They’d take her back to her cup and her smiling and her cage, and in a season she’d be smooth again—the heat gone out of her like I was never here.
No.
I count what I’ve got. Not much. The rut’s deep in its second turn and it’ll break soon; I feel it coming the way I feel weather. Then I’m loose, and fast, and the metal things will learn what kind of dark they wandered into.
Till then I do what my body’s already doing without asking me.
I pull her in tighter. I feed her at every lull—berries, meat, everything I can get into her.
I want strength on her. Muscle laid into all that soft, fire in her, her own legs strong enough under her to run, because when they come I might not be able to hold her and fight them both at once, and a mate who can run is a mate who lives.
The drive to do it sits in me deeper than the rut.
Older. Build her up. Get her strong. Get her ready for the day the dark opens.
She doesn’t know yet. She’s down here learning my body and her own, learning she’s allowed to want a thing and reach for it. I won’t take that off her with what’s circling up top. Let her have the dark a while longer. Let her get strong in it, where it’s only me.
She stirs against my chest. Her face works in her sleep, the small line back between her brows, the dark getting at her even down here where nothing else can. Her mouth moves. Words come up out of her, thick and half-shaped, dragged from somewhere under the surface.
“…s’cold,” she says. Then nothing. Then softer, pitched young, frightened: “Mama—”
Something in my chest pulls tight enough to hurt.
I don’t know who that is. I know the shape of the wanting in it. A small thing in the dark, reaching for a hand that isn’t coming. I know that one from the inside.
I bring my mouth to the crown of her head and let the hum out lower, deeper, until it sinks past her ear and into the bone. Her face smooths. Her hand crawls up and flattens on my chest, over the heart, and on a breath she says one more thing—clearer now, not to the dark. To me.
“…stay.”
“Here.” The word comes out of me cracked and wrong, rusted from how long it’s been since I had a use for it. But it’s true, and she’s asleep, and asleep is the safest time I’ve got to set a true thing loose in the open. My arms close around the whole small weight of her. “Here.”
Soon she’ll see the light. The canopy. The whole size of the world they kept off her.
And somewhere past the tree-line, the soft ones and their made things will be waiting for her to come down out of the canopy.
They’ve come for what’s mine before, the Ordained. Another name. Another dark. They took me, and kept me, and cut me, and left me to heal crooked.
They will not have her.
I’ll be the thing in her dark they have to get through first. And I have spent every year since the change learning exactly how their kind dies.