buried in a shoebox labled burn

Kaena Lykoi · 01-25-2010, 05:37 AM

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Perhaps better than anything else, the hybrid woman understood the use of blood as a salve. It had been her favorite medicine in her youth—when nothing else would quiet the rage fuming just below the surface, the life of another did just fine. It would seem the only way the young woman could offset the imbalance in her was to kill. Death and blood were two things Kaena was intimately familiar with; she had awakened to the truth of the world by blood, watching her family slaughter each other and inflict their spare rage on her as Delphine, Kairo, and Sabryne had done. The coyote woman was old now, but her first family, the one that she had buried before her first year, still featured prominently on her thoughts sometimes; were it not for them she would certainly have turned out different in the end. She had them to thank or curse for who she was, and anymore she did not know which it was.

It would seem as she had grown stronger (mentally, anyway), more stable, Ahren had lost some of his strength—there was a glint to his reddened eye that had not existed there before, some deep-seeded thing that spoke volumes of hurt and hate at once. The other was a marker for all that he had suffered through; it was now as dead and unseeing as the empty socket in her own skull. Still, with the useless eye and the almost ragged quality of him, the hybrid could not help but see the echoes of his former self there, the sharp, bright young thing she'd ensnared in a church one evening, drunk off of wine and blinded by lust. Those moments in the abandoned and ramshackle house of worship had been plenipotentiary of desire. Later moments were warmth and happiness—Kaena had often considered her life, and in the brief moments with Ahren, when he'd lived with her in Inferni and they'd raised their children together, all bouncing eight of them, she thought maybe she'd glimpsed true happiness. Of course, it was doomed to brevity with all other such moments of her life—now she stood alone; there was no one at her back and no one to her side, only the man who appeared years beyond his age standing before her.

They were both quiet; the silver-furred coyote could hear their last words swirling around one another. Those good-byes were supposed to have been permanent; Kaena could have laughed aloud with the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. For all the wide world, they had passed within scenting distance of one another, and here they stood once more. She realized he must have passed through 'Souls on his way to wherever he was going at the very least, and it made her immensely sad—they'd missed each other then, and now as she headed toward home he ran away from it. She would not ask him what had driven him away, whether it was for fear of the answer he could give or simple indifference. All that mattered was now, and this fleeting chance—if she lost this one, she would never have another.

Something flickered across his face, a ghost of the youth she'd once known. He had never quite been without sin, but there was worlds more innocent to the younger Ahren that she had once known. At least here she could not blame herself for creating a monster; this was no Salvaged Eternity that she had shaped and molded. His words brought something like a smile to her face, though it seemed almost ragged—her teeth were shades yellower since the last time he'd seen them, her fur grayer in some places and whiter in others, and in a moment she appeared exactly her age. "Almost," she responded quietly. The scar across her belly was still a fresh and angry pink, reminding her of just how close she'd come. Her golden eye never left his bloody red one for a moment. She feared if she broke her gaze with him he might disappear, fading away into the background of forest like any other hallucination she'd dreamed up. "I thought you would not come back," she said, though there was no accusation to that tone. She had the horrible sinking feeling she should have never let go in the first place. She should have fought harder to keep him and hold him to her. She had not broken her promise—she had never so much as whispered of their meeting on the beach, of his brief return home. Unless he had spoken of it, only they knew.

Word Count: 774

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