Dexter
The horse in front of him was, as he expected, not Macabre, and her snarl roused him from the delusive state of half-consciousness he had been sinking into. The eyes that flicked up to the mare’s face were not much brighter than the ones that had been staring down at the frosty grass a second before, but unlike those eyes, this gaze took the mare in and registered her as a real thing.
A real thing and probably a threat.
Dexter’s ears twisted back. His head remained low, and he gazed up at the buckskin through a disarray of pale forelock. His mind was foggy and slow, and before he could formulate something sharp and clever to say in response to her demand, a chestnut body thrust itself in front of his and pushed.
Macabre didn’t have to push very hard to back him up. The weakness in Dexter’s legs turned his resistance into something to be laughed at, and it took very little to put him off his balance and force him to take a step. He jerked his head down and buried his teeth in the small mare’s mane, half in a statement of ‘I’m-a-grown-up-you-can’t-push-me-around’ and half in attempt to keep from falling onto his backside.
”I should --” he started to spit at the buckskin once he was no longer in danger of falling over, but Macabre’s voice cut over his and he couldn’t keep speaking because his mind could hardly handle his own blurry words without throwing someone else’s into the mix. Instead he snorted his annoyance, not really registering what Macabre had said about a child with them until he spotted the colt out of the corner of his eye.
The presence of Quinn sobered Dexter a little more, though not much. He was still reeling with exhaustion, but he pulled his head up and stepped back to lessen the pressure of Macabre against him, remaining close enough to touch her if he leaned forward. He watched Quinn with one eye and the buckskin with the other, and his ears raised enough to take in everything else, including the approaching footsteps.
A pale stallion and a painted filly joined the group, the stallion moving next to the buckskin mare and matching her hostility. Dexter couldn’t tell whether any of them were afraid, though he thought it was likely; the gunmetal stallion knew he looked barbaric and wild, and the cremello would have been correct in his statement had Dexter not been so goddamn tired.
”I’m offended,” he rasped,
”that you presume me to shake in my skin under the gaze of a stranger.” True to his words, Dexter was not shaking in his skin, though he was nervous. He pushed around Macabre and stood next to her; if it came to a fight, he didn’t want her to take the full force of it while he stood behind. He eyed Quinn, praying the quiet colt wouldn’t decided that this was the moment to speak up. It would be far better for the painted yearling to keep his mouth shut, Dexter assumed.
Despite his great desire to sneer
because we could, Dexter looked between the stallion and his buckskin mare and respond instead with,
”Because we haven’t been here yet,” which really wasn’t much better. He had meant it as
as far as I’m aware, we’ve had bad experiences everywhere else, but this was not one of Dexter’s most poetic moments, and he failed to effectively relay that message. He didn’t care much, because the next few minutes would either lead to a fight or they wouldn’t, and his mind was fully occupied with calculations as to whether or not they would get out of this alive, and if so, how that miracle would happen.
