✧ Walking along the cold, damp sand that lines the beach that hugs the northern border of the Harrow Desert, Nadine is all too aware of why she doesn’t come here often. It’s uncomfortable between her toes, the wet sand matting her immaculate fur, the tangible salt in the air masking the scent of anyone who might try and join the, the sound of the crashing waves roaring in her ears. As much as it annoys her it’s also suspicious for her to be here. The murky depths had swallowed the vial of her poison as readily as she’d swallowed the contents. Nothing would be more unpleasant than having the evidence rock up to shore and her hastily crafted cover blown to shreds. Oh, her reputation could probably handle it – everyone loves her, after all – but it’s much nicer to not have that doubt.
The serval doesn’t have any room for doubt in her actions. Everything she does is perfect, incredibly so, maybe even blessed by her dear Red God. That’s why she hasn’t headed back to the comfort of the ice pyramids and drier dunes for her patrol. She wanted to check the unthreatened border by herself, and that was exactly what she would do.
Someone had different plans.
“Hey, pretty lady,” a husked voice croons as a male pulls up beside her, an expression on his jackal face that would make her uncomfortable if it wasn’t for the compliment. They walk together, then, the sea lapping lazily as the walk. He seems eerily familiar and it isn’t until he mentions her name that it clicks.
“Seems you’ve gotten yourself quite the life here, Incarnadine.”
No one will call you that ‘round here, honey, you’re too pretty. The man who had greeted her at her first ever party at the ripe age of twelve months, freshly departed from her family. Her nose wrinkles in disgust at the memory – shit, he has to be fifty or so months now, doesn’t he? His face is as full of teeth and carnal hunger as it had been when they first met. "Aw, that’s not my name, hot stuff. Call me Nadine," the serval corrects, keeping a smile on her face even as it falls from his.
“Mouth as pretty as yours shouldn’t be so rude,” he says, and she laughs, and they keep walking as that annoyance builds in her gut in tandem with the ache along her spine. The jackal keeps making comments on her body, her youth, her beauty, trailing further and further from the line Nadine had long since deemed acceptable and moving decidedly towards disgusting. He’s everything she had ever hated about those parties and she doesn’t even have the alcohol to keep her mind away from the grossly lewd comments that spill forth. The pair run out of shoreline as she runs out of patience. Nadine doubles back to keep walking. The jackal grabs at her shoulder, claws seeking beads of blood.
"Fuck off."
“I never got to see if you were the whore everyone called you.”
Her lips peel back at the comment and she shakes his paw from her shoulder. "’M not a whore," she says, voice cold. Who does he think he is, coming back from her past to annoy her like this? She isn’t that little girl, willing to tease all the boys so they’d buy her a drink and then leave them high and dry. She’d never slept with any of them – how dare he think she’ll sleep with him now! Everything in her life was lining up perfectly now, everything, and Nadine doesn’t need to keep a man’s bed warm just to feel that little bit of attention and satisfaction. Women practically line up at her door now for the simple pleasure of her teasing them. Fuck, women kill for her now!
An entire group of murderers look up to her twice a month, drinking in every word she feels like saying, begging for her next beautiful laugh or wink or smile. A whole desert full of creatures willing to trust every decision she makes until the end of Agrelos. Sure, she has Jace ruling beside her – the jackal is saying something but she can’t hear him over the roar of blood in her ears, can hardly see his lips moving past the red swarming her vision – but what does it matter? The Ruiners love her and she doesn’t need to have sex with the disgusting man to prove it.
It’s not until she sees the dark red on her paws (incarnadine, she remembers dimly,) that the Queen even knows he’s dead.
Oh. Oh, she just killed someone. The gory mess of his throat is still wheezing from the three puncture wounds, blood dripping from her crown of horns as she makes the connection. Deep gashes completely ruined the base of his neck and she’d bet anything it was bruised, too, from her strangling him. Her paws feel deliciously warm and, she smirks at this, the same warmth is pooling in her stomach.
Rosy eyes lock with the lifeless ones of… who? She’d never even known his name. She’d never even known his name and he felt it was right to find her in her new life, with her fiancée and children and grandchildren and demand that they complete what he started in his own head two years ago. The nerve. She’s tempted to maim him more.
Eyes locked with his she raises one of her paws to her lips and drags her tongue slowly over the flat of her paw-pad. Her chin lifts and tilts as she runs the blood along her jaw, shivering at the sensation of claws trailing along her flesh. She puts on a little show, not for the man who died for it, but for herself. She’s pretty, she can agree with him that much, but she can be pretty for herself. The serval can make herself feel good for her own pleasure, at his expense.
She killed him. Nadine had never killed anyone before, not even prey – there was always someone else to do that for her, especially since she became Queen. He’d probably like to know he was her first. She hadn’t had to kill anyone, didn’t like to get the blood on her paws, but this feels good. This feels powerful. There’s something about knowing that she can have people slaughter for her and something else entirely about knowing she can kill. It wasn’t even as hard as she thought it would be.
Nadine moans, the taste of iron chased around her mouth by an eager tongue.
She’s too involved in the ecstasy of it all to even notice when she faints. The pain in her back (dully in her stomach, but that’s familiar now, she knows what it is,) had built into a beautiful crescendo alongside her pursuit of pleasure in front of her first dead body. It’s a stunning thing for the jackal to witness. It’s almost a shame he’s dead.
The pain is searing when she wakes, no longer that dull ache, but she could almost cry tears of joy when she realises why. Red bone spikes, the same as her horns, trail down the full length of her spine. The skull-splitting headache tells her that she has some new additions to her crown as well, it fully encircling her head the way crowns of royalty should. She will have some difficulty wearing regular diadems and the likes now but who cares? Who fucking cares? Nadine is gorgeous and she hasn’t even seen the full extent of her radiance.
…she’s beautiful because she killed a man. Her first three horns had been from bringing a litter of children into the world and this new addition is for removing some wretched jackal from the living. A smile lights her face. She’s being rewarded for distancing herself from her past as the boring little Incarnadine, being rewarded for becoming Nadine more fully. That jackal had been a representation of everything horrible at those parties – everything she no longer has to endure. It all makes perfect sense!
The horned serval takes slow strides towards the water’s edge, trying to glimpse her appearance in the choppy waters. It’s too turbulent, too foamy, to see anything in all her wonderful perfection but oh, Nadine just knows she looks glorious. That same paw she had lavished runs along the horn centred on her forehead, bringing the still slick blood to her maw. She draws it over her lips, hooded gaze cast over her shoulder to the corpse.
Walking back to camp with blood, his on her horns and lips, hers where the bone spikes had broken skin, emphasising her natural beauty, Nadine decides she should visit the beach more often.
"speech"
