The fact of the matter was that Salvia was alight with jealousy. Not only was her mother dotting on the new sisters she had begun to resent, but her father and brother had gone on a secret mission for Sirius. She was frustrated she had not been invited and gone about taking her aggression out on others. Though the male slave was an easy target, she had grown bored of her harassment of him—he did make an excellent punching bag, though. Salvia abandoned her two-legged form for her lupus body, and then set out hunting.

She stalked through the Borgata’s like a wraith, moving with surefooted steps. Her blonde pelt allowed her to blend into the grass that made up the Mazatl. Salvia’s hunting techniques had advanced considerably in the months since they had left Anathema. With well-placed steps she trailed after an easy target. The fat rabbit didn’t realize it was being watched until the girl sprung from a crouch. Teeth sunk into its back but she did not go the kill; instead Salvia shook it savagely, loving the shriek of terror and pain that came from the animal. She released it, let it take one short burst of false freedom, and then struck again. This time she tossed it into the air, caught it by the neck, and shook it again—the neck snapped and with it her game ended.

The young adult began to eat ravenously, feeling slightly better once she had consumed her meal. She left the carcass to the noisy scavenger birds and trotted along, turning her path as to follow the rise of an esker and give her a wider view of the land she called home. Tall grass waved in the summer breeze, though the heat had begun to lessen in these days. Salvia looked eastward and frowned, hoping that someone would remember her and bring back a prize as she was certain they would do for her mother and those new children.

+3. Correct my Spanish if it is wrong, I am using a translator. ^^;

Each passing day brought with it growth. Salvia’s body had responded earnestly to her training and her diet, and it became a mass of steel-coiled springs under a wolf’s pelt. What coyote remained in her was only displayed in the sharpness of her face and waist, though this was slight. If she had been born a true wolf, she might have grown as large and broad as her brother—as it stood, her mother’s genetics had reduced her size.

It was for the best, however. Her stealth required a light body, and Salvia’s was built for the task. She was more like a cat than a wolf, save her instinctive drives and taught lessons of the pack. Salsola had engrained itself into her mind and there it festered, building a monster that knew only the land it had grown in. This was why the woman’s approach went ignored until she spoke, and this was why upon seeing the ring in her nose Salvia’s lips curled and revealed sharp white teeth.

What saved the orange coyote was the fact that Salvia knew she belonged—in a sense of the word—to Tlanti. She had eaten at the meal, and thus was not a slave; but trepidation still clung to her body, and showed itself in the obvious display of rank—high ears and the lingering toothy warning. “No deberías usar el anillo si no eres un esclavo,” she said sharply, her Spanish clear but lacking the native accent. It was a gift she had not picked up on, for her German tongue had come first and so dominated her patterns of speech. Salvia’s lack of an accent allowed her to learn the pronunciation correctly, but she would never speak as fast or as someone who had been born with Spanish as their tongue.

Within Salvia remained the unconscious drive to dominate. It had fueled her since she was a child, and in the games she had played with her siblings. Now that she was older, she took this out on those lower ranking members. Without knowledge of this woman’s place in the pack, the only sign of her position was the ring which she clearly wore only out of spite.

A frown was all the response that Salvia gave, and she turned her head back to study the landscape around them. “I don’t care what you do,” she said, returning to her native tongue. While Spanish was something she could speak well enough, doing so around someone who was obviously better suited to the language than she irritated the girl. Salvia looked back to the boldly colored woman, admiring her pelt. “You’re very pretty,” came the sudden compliment, one meant without spite. She could admire beauty, just as she admired herself.

Like Tlanti, this woman had the thick accent of a non-native speaker. Salvia had begun to recognize the difference in accents as her own vocabulary had broadened. Her father’s was strange, for it combined the native tongue of the Khalif (she did not know what “German” or “Germany” was) with the mountain tongue of the backwater wolves he had learned to speak it from. Even Sirius carried a faint, barely noticeable difference in speech than the others. Quite quickly, she had begun recognizing and identifying the origins for these faint differences and use them to pinpoint a creature’s homeland.

Salvia turned her head back toward the woman. “Salvia,” she replied. “You should take that out,” she went on, as if her outburst had been completely justified. “Someone might think you’re a slave. I thought you belonged to Aunt Tlanti for a long time,” she went on, turning back to the empty land around them. This was not a lie; Salvia had learned the cultural rules and codes of Salsola quickly. The orange woman she had often seen skulking about Tlanti’s home had been thought of as property until dinner, when she had been eating at the table.