Page 9 of Embers of Midnight
I slow under a stand of spruce where the snow thins to a crust over dead grass. Lower my head. My own breath curls over the ground and the frost changes color and texture—goes soft, then slick. My lips—muzzle?—brush the blades. They sear. The grass wilts at the touch. The smell is bitter and green and then it’s not; it’s cooked. I flick out my tongue, take a mouthful, chew.
It is exactly like chewing hot rope soaked in old tea. My jaw works. My stomach says no like a slammed door. I try to bully the swallow down, fail, and spit. It hits the snow in a stringy, steaming mess. Classy.
Great. Herbivore my ass. Betrayed by biology. Again.
I try a second mouthful because I am stubborn and because the knot under my ribs has sharpened to pain. It goes worse. My body remembers how to retch even if the shape is new. I turn my head aside and cough the mess onto the ground, breath kicking steam over it like I’m embarrassed on its behalf. The hunger laughs and tightens.
No grass. Okay. Then what. Do I—no. Absolutely not. We are not doing carnivore. We are not—
Something moves in a low bush to my right. The snow there is thin as lace between twig tips. The sound is small, a sift, a brush, a breath holding and then letting go. My entire body locks so fast I hear the ligaments complain. The horn angles without asking. Heat draws down my throat and pools behind my teeth.
Don’t. Don’t you dare. Back up. Turn away. Be a person about this.
The bush quivers again and the world shrinks to the size of that motion. The forest, the night, the echoing mess of the alley behind me—all of it thins to a single sharp line between me and a heartbeat I did not hear until now. I feel it. A tap-tap under the brush. Fast. Light. Alive.
I try to step back. The muscles in my haunches hear me and say no. They coil and release like I trained them for this since birth. Hooves bite, snow bursts, and I am forward before my mind can make a better plan. The thing in the bush bolts and my bodyanswers with a joy I wish I didn’t feel. The ground flicks under me. Breath stacks in precise heaves. The night wind presses my ears flat and the heat along my spine becomes a clean, hard line that points at the moving life ahead of me.
Rabbit. I know it not because I see it well—weaving, small, quick—but because scent finally punches through the smoke in my head. Fur and cold and a tiny streak of fear. My lungs flare. The horn drops. I cut left, then right, and the rabbit makes a desperate hook that would have saved it if I were only a girl with bad shoes. I am not. Not now. My right forehoof pins it. The body squalls once, thin and bright, and then stops.
Silence takes one step closer. I stand over the stillness I made and the knot in my gut opens like a fist unclenching. The hunger looks up at me with a smile and says see, this is easy.
I hate this. I hate that my mouth waters. I hate that my head drops without my permission. I hate that the heat inside me knows exactly where to put itself to make the rest of this quick.
I am not delicate about it. I do not have the hands for delicate. I am a furnace on legs with a blade on my face and a body that wants. Fur scorches where I touch it. The smell is wrong and then less wrong, the way an awful truth becomes tolerable when you can’t afford the luxury of refusal. I bite. Warmth floods my mouth and it is the worst thing and the best thing at once. My stomach, the traitor, sings.
I keep waiting for disgust to stop me. It does not. It sits beside me and takes notes like a doctor at a bad appointment. My jaw works. The sounds I make are ugly and necessary. When I finallypull back, my muzzle is a mess and the snow under my hooves is punched into a wide, dirty ring. Steam lifts off everything. Off me. Off what’s left. The forest air tries to clean it and fails.
I sit in the knowledge of what I just did because lying to myself feels worse. The hunger is quieter. Not gone. Dented. The knot under my ribs loosens, and shame slides into the space it leaves. I let it. It does not get to take me apart tonight, but it can sit here and look at me.
I just ate Thumper. I’m Bambis worst nightmare.
Somewhere far off, a bird shakes a tree and snow whispers down in a soft rush. I let the sounds happen to me. The steady tick of melt on bark near my left ear. The hush of my own breath when I will it lower. The tiny, obscene clicks of cooling hooves in snow I flash-melted and then refroze by standing still too long.
Water. I need water. Not because I deserve kindness. Because my mouth tastes like heat and metal and fur and the echo of a scream. Because the back of my throat is raw from breath that burned on the way out. Because if I don’t wash this off, it will keep being tonight forever.
I try to change back. The idea arrives like a rope thrown into a flood. I reach for it. I close my eyes—lids heavy, lashes singed—and picture hands. Fingers. Keys between them, brass teeth biting the pads like anchors. A scarf scraping the underside of my jaw. Human weight. Human knees. I tell my body to fold smaller. I tell the heat to bank. I tell the horn to go to sleep.
For a breath, something listens. The pressure behind my eyes shifts, the heat in my hips dulls to a bearable throb, and my spine tugs like a zipper being drawn in reverse. Then the knot of fear remembers itself, jerks the line, and the change snaps back with a jolt that makes my hooves scrape forward. The horn thrums once in my skull like struck glass. My skin flares. My breath ratchets high again.
No. Not yet. Fine. Not yet. Then water first. Then try again.
I lift my head and listen. My ears know how; they swivel without my consent, catching layers of night and sorting them into useful and not. Wind under branches. Old ice cracking in a log. A far-off, thin line of sound that is not wind or bird or the miniature disasters of snow. A thread, constant, like someone tearing paper very gently forever.
There. Water moving. Small, but moving. A creek. Maybe a river if I’m lucky. Luck and I are complicated tonight. I take the direction the sound gives me and start to walk because running is loud and the forest has had enough of me.
The heat in me doesn’t want to go down. It’s a stubborn thing. It clings to joints and the long lines of tendon like pride. I breathe slow, mouth open, trying to trade out air in great, stupid lungfuls. Frost tries to land on my muzzle and fails; it melts and runs and drips. I want to laugh and don’t. My throat is not a place for laughter right now.
The snow here is deeper. My weight brings water up from underneath with each step and the wet grabs at the edges of my hooves, trying to cling, trying to cool. It steams and lets go. Sapis a sweet ghost on the air. Resin somewhere got warm enough to remember summer. The smell sneaks under the fur-and-blood tang and unties one small knot inside me I didn’t know was there.
I pass between two young birches leaning together and the night shifts from close to open without warning. The sky presses wider. The sound of water is louder now, and colder somehow, as if my ears can taste temperature. The ground drops a little under the snow and the crust gives way to a hidden hollow. My foreleg plunges deeper than I expect and my body jerks, horn knifing forward on reflex. I catch myself, weight rolling, and stand there with my heart in my mouth while it learns how to stay put again.
Stupid. Watch your feet. Watch—hooves. Watch your hooves.
The hunger ghosts in the edges of my gut, reminding me that one rabbit is a bandage, not a cure. I tell it to shut up with as much dignity as you can tell a bodily function to shut up. It sulks and waits. I keep moving because motion is the only decision tonight that hasn’t argued with me.
I try the change again as I go, because I am apparently incapable of learning the easy way. I think of skin that isn’t a kiln. Of hands that can cover a face. Of a voice that belongs to a mouth and not to a furnace. I pull at something inside like I’ve found the edge of a rug and I’m going to yank it free. My back tightens. The horn hum drops half a note. The world blurs once at the edges, the way it does when you stand up too fast. Then the heat surges like a tide up my spine and the rug snaps back into place so hard I could swear I hear it slap. I stumble and swear inside my ownskull because if I can’t have words, I’m going to have the idea of them and they’re going to be rude.
Fine. Be a monster a little longer. We can litigate identity after hydration.
