Page 8 of Embers of Midnight
“Please,” he says.
The part of me that answers isn’t the part that makes coffee for nurses. It isn’t the part that buys ramen and tells the mustard she’s proud of it. It’s older. It has hooves. It knows hunger in a different language. It also knows fairness.
Leave,I think. The word is heat and pressure and a push that isn’t touch.
He doesn’t leave. He grabs for the knife in the snow like a moth around a porch bulb and I understand something about people that I hate. I lower my head. The horn—that pressure line, that rightness—lines up with soft meat and fear.
The hit is brutal and clean. There’s resistance, then there isn’t. His breath leaves him in a single shocked sound. My momentum carries both of us a half-step and his back hits brick. The impact shakes the edge of the horn in my skull like a struck tuning fork. I pull back, and he goes with me for a fraction before weight does the rest and he slides off. Gravity is ugly when it has blood to work with. He collapses into the dirty snow and the red steams like the rest of this night does.
Silence after is its own creature. The only sounds left are my breath and the slow spit of snow touching heat and dying. I back up, not because I fear anything here now, but because I’m suddenly aware of how big I am, how narrow the space is, how my body takes up everything and leaves the air hanging on the edges like fabric on too small a frame.
What did you do?my mind asks, and then,What are you?
I need air that isn’t flavored like them. I turn, careful, horn away from brick, shoulders angled, and shoulder through the drift at the mouth of the alley like it’s a curtain someone forgot to tie back. The street greets me with quiet—empty lanes, soft falling flakes that flash to steam when they land on me, a busted streetlight trying to decide if it’s a star.
Instinct says run. Panic says run. Pride sayslook. I catch the dark window of a parked car and stop, sudden. The glass holdsa warped reflection, the kind you get when the world refuses to be still. A horse looks back at me. Not a horse anyone rents for birthday parties. My coat is black as midnight, split by lines of red like lava seen through cracks. Heat bleeds off me in slow waves that make the snow at my feet turn to slush, then to water, then to a skin of ice that breaks when I shift my weight. My mane is fire. Literally Fire. Long and low and restless as breath.
My eyes glow. Not because glow is pretty, but because light lives there now and it wants out. A horn grows from my forehead, sleek and curved and edged with marks that look like they were laid there by intention and not by chance. They hum. I feel them in my sinuses, in the hinge of my jaw, in the part of my brain that used to keep track of what day ramen goes on sale.
Congratulations, universe,I think, deranged laughter shaking loose somewhere under the shock.You finally found my “off” switch. It’s labeled “murder horse.”
Out loud, there’s only a sound like a furnace sighing. I can’t shape words. I try, idiot that I am, and it comes out a whuff that throws sparks across the glass. It spiderwebs in a crack. I jerk back, too big for this joke.
Sirens? None yet. But that’s about time, not luck. The air is thin on the edges of my lungs, the way it gets when adrenaline empties your bones and leaves them hollow. I need to move. The alley is a story I don’t want the snow to tell when the sun gets nosy. The knife is a memory cooling in a drift. The men—men who were men—are ending. I can’t fix that. I can decide not to stand here and let the cold write my outline around what just happened.
I pick a direction that doesn’t lead home. My hooves find purchase without asking the part of me that ever wore boots. The first stride feels like falling forward. The second feels like a secret I stole from running water. The third feels likemine.
The city thins faster than it should. This is not a big place. Houses give way to a lot where snow piles up against chain-link and remembers summer in shapes. Street gives to service road gives to trees. The scent of diesel and old fries drops away. Pine takes over. Cold takes on a clean edge. My breath roars and settles into a rhythm that sounds like I could do this until morning, until forever.
Branches strip steam off my flanks as I pass. Snow hisses under my hooves like I’m insulting it by existing. The cold can’t climb me. It tries and melts into a drip that paints my sides. Somewhere behind, a city remembers it has emergency services. A long way ahead, the world opens into dark without people.
I think of the whisper again.The flame shall wake when blood is spilled.It didn’t feel like a threat. It felt like a fact. Like gravity introducing itself.
I run until the trees close over the sky and snow stops reflecting streetlight. My hooves bite into packed ice and then into soft drift. The ground hums up my legs like music. Fear chases me anyway, nipping heels, reminding me there will be morning and there will be mirrors and there will be a girl with a ripped sweater and a question mark where her life used to be.
I don’t look back. There is nothing behind me I need tonight.
The forest breathes. I breathe with it.Keep moving,I tell the panic.You can fall apart later. You can hate later. You can be everything you don’t understand later.
The snow hisses under my hooves, and I run before I can decide who I am now.
Bambi Wouldn´t Approve
Seraphina
Forest. Snow. Steam peeling off my skin like I offended the weather. My hooves punch down and the ground answers with a muffled crack that travels up my legs, all bone and heat and wrong shape. Breath roars in my chest. It shouldn’t sound like this—like a forge pulling air. It does. I am a bellows with panic attached.
What the hell am I. Unicorn, but make it arson? Hellhorse with a stick?
Great branding, Sera.
The trees close in and widen again as I move, trunks slipping past in a rhythm my new body understands better than I do. The night presses cold on everything that isn’t me; I throw it back without trying. Snow skitters from low branches when my mane flares. Mane. I have a mane. Fire where hair should be. Everytime it gutters, heat touches the inside of my ears and I want to crawl out of my own skull.
Don’t stop. If I stop, I will think. If I think, I will fold. So I keep moving until my pulse stops trying to climb out through my throat, until the running becomes a line I can hold. Panic settles to a tight, bright knot just under the point where the horn grows from my head. The horn I killed with. The horn I feel now with a pressure like a headache.
Hunger hits sideways. Not a gentle complaint. A hook under the ribs, tugging. It yanks with each stride until I stumble and catch myself, hooves skating, heat flashing hotter to keep me upright. The taste that rises in my mouth is metal and ash and something animal that isn’t mine. No, it’s mine now. I hate that.
Eat something. Fine. Sure. I’m a horse, right? Horses eat grass. Let’s do science.
