I feel the static of a shadow in your place,
I see a savage in the still upon your face.

Echidna missed the blood.

The warmth on her tongue, down her throat. How bones crunched between yellowed teeth, even the smell of the guts when the air hit against them. The deer is large and fat on the sweet meadow grass. She doesn’t even flinch until it’s too late and the cheetah is wrapped around her. It only takes moments for the jaguar drops down, she is quick to puncture the deer’s neck with her claws and then sink her teeth into the throat.

There’s a small struggle but it’s over in seconds. The doe lays glassy eyed on the ground, scratched and bloodied. Echidna makes a deep rumble in her throat, it is both pleased and content by the kill they’ve made.

It takes Echidna a minute to circle around and begin to rip the belly open – entrails were her favorite, after all. She gnaws at the flesh, the ribs. When she cracks the deer open like an egg she eats liberally at her chosen bits, leaves behind organs like the heart and lungs for Quinn if he was still into those. Echidna lifts her head from the deer’s inside and licks her bloodied mouth, swallows down the last few bits of meat.

When she takes back her human form, she sits back and looks at her hands. Pale and bloodied, it’s such a weird delight. She licks her fingers, down her palms – it coats her lips thickly. Ah, she missed this. Echidna grins because this was what made her happiest, to hunt and eat and revel in the carnage they created.

“Been a while since I got to enjoy this,” she says. There is blood down her neck, on her cheeks and it mixes with the dirt she’d deposited there earlier. It stains the front of her tunic. “Eating is one thing but,” she sucks on her fingertips, “this is true bliss.”