She inches back, fear in her eyes and perfuming her skin. I want to taste it.
“Please don’t eat me.”
“Someone else will, if I don’t.” I take another step forward, my hoof splashing in the water, so I’m standing over her. She’s tiny and terrified, and I relish the power I have over her life. Heat thrums through my blood.
This time she doesn’t scramble back, and something shifts in her wide blue eyes. There’s a glint of steel, a hardness that only comes when death is imminent.
“I’ll make it quick.” Well, quicker than some. Some pick and pluck at a body for days. The screams drifting through the air and drawing others until the feast becomes a brawl, thus generating more bodies to feed on.
For a moment I consider starting one, but the danger is someone bigger than me will come along and kill me. I stayed at the fringes for a reason. The closer to the center, the bigger the beasts and the harder it is to survive. And I will survive at all costs, though the reason why, I have forgotten, and it irks me when previously it didn’t bother me.
I should snap her neck before she realizes it is done. Take her back to where I live with another. We all mark out our own territory. A place where we can sleep in peace and most respect that.
Most.
Not all.
Which is why I share an area. It is safer.
Out here by the water holes is no-man's-land. A place where we scavenge whatever we find. Today I found her.
Something else twinges in my mind, the twisting of a blade deep where it hurts, and I immediately push it aside. While my stomach grumbles, an unholy sound because it hasn’t been sated in too long, a deeper hunger has awoken. I want to hear her scream, but not as I tear her flesh away from her bones.
She gazes up at me, mud smearing her cheek, and I know she wants to survive. But she doesn’t understand the price. I didn’t either, not at first. Now I don’t care. The reasons I should care are lost.
“Beg,” I grit the word out.
She lifts her hands and clasps them in front of her. “Please don’t eat me?”
There’s no desperation in her voice, only confusion.
I lean down and run one claw tipped finger up her cheek. “Is that the best you can do? Do you have any idea what it means to survive here?”
She doesn’t look away, even though our faces are only inches apart. Still no screaming. I’m almost disappointed.
“I know exactly what this place is, and I will survive long enough to get home.”
A laugh bursts out of me. She is a fool if she thinks there is a way to escape. None of us would be here if we could leave. Well, some of us might choose to stay. Some like the pain they can inflict a little too much. They dwell closer to the center, to the current ruler, a queen I believe, but she might have already been dethroned.
“Help me and—”
I stop laughing and wrap my hand around her throat, not tight enough to kill her, but enough that she knows her life is in my hands until someone bigger and meaner takes her.
My claws press into her soft skin, drawing rubies of blood.
That I know what a fucking ruby is, but not my own name is a poison that is hard to swallow while she’s staring up at me like she thinks I can do anything more than survive.
But I don’t want to disappoint her either.
There’s a glimmer in her that I don’t want to snuff out. Maybe everyone who crawls out of a puddle has that glimmer, but they don’t live long enough for monsters like me to see it. That or the ones that find them don’t care.
Her pulse hammers beneath my fingertips.
“What makes you think you can do what everyone else has failed to do?” Escape…I’m sure I dreamed about it at some point. Now I don’t dream at all.
She swallows, and I feel the movement of her throat. I want to squeeze a little harder until she has to beg for each breath, but I also want to hear her answer.
Why is she so special?