can you hear that wonderful sound?
The Ferris wheel has started, now we’re stuck going round and round…
Carnival was the lurker in the shadows, the one who tickled the sixth sense with her roiling caramel eyes. Could the wolf sense her now? Feel her presence slightly behind her, a presence she had thrown herself unwittingly into, so entranced in the pursuit of her prey? Though this was no trance; the pursuit and slaughter was calculated, if wild, and the victor tore voraciously at her prize with a primal gleam in her eye. She had been hungry, she had left her den to kill, and she had killed. A respectable stroll—one that knew no fear despite the night’s obvious possession of the terra. Oh, the joy of slaughter in pursuit of life, the irony.
That she was awake didn’t come as a surprise. It had been exactly a night’s time since her midnight rendezvous with the infamous Devil May Cry. Since, she had not slept again at night, preferring to tread the lands while her new pack mates slept, unaware of her very existence while the night owl walked among them, breathing poison in their dreams.
The den had a potent smell in the way that birthing dens always did, the sweating mothers inside too-ready to unleash their pent-up energy and tension on the first to cross them. Carnival had no wish to pick a fight, but it could hardly be helped if the wolfess came to her, trim at the face and healthy in muscle with the traditional pup weight still weighing slightly at her midsection. She couldn’t tell how long it’d been since the birth, but her extreme health spoke of many weeks.
My, Queens had been missed.
She slipped off and Carn followed. The vibrancy of the bloody tang smothered across her maw bit into her encroaching fatigue, awoke a craving in her that she knew not how to satisfy. She did not follow as a stalker would but loudly, confidently, as a comrade would who was trying to catch up to their Alpha. When the stream came into view she crossed it where it tapered to a deadly hourglass shape; the water more sluggish than one would expect and bogged down by leaves and mud from the tropical terrain. Was it safety in the distance that she sought?
When Queens lifted her head, and a curious expression entered her features, Carn emerged alongside of the stream with her head lowered, shoulders and back adjusted to angle her body towards the ground. But though she walked in this odd way, her ears were twisted to the sound of the howl. She wore Devil’s scent like armor on her coat, as a disdainful grin colored her lip at the recklessness of the idiot on the border.
“There will be time for introductions later, my Queen. You seem to have…an appointment, at your borders, so I won’t keep you. Good luck.”
But she didn’t need luck to kill a wolf, and Carn knew it.
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