you're too young & eager to love

A bunch of random snippets. I meant to write more, write better, or at least write more significant things. Then I realized that they're just snippets, and I'm just wrapping my head around Austin and Sabra and pack dynamics. I didn't even proof read this. Oh weeeellll.


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“She has every right,” Austin says, pulling her shirt up and over her angular body. She is lean muscle, her skin rippling over her ribs, her cells already sensing the change that is about to happen.

Chason scowls. It’s an angry expression on his otherwise beautiful face. “I don’t like it. We don’t have to fight each other.”

“We aren’t,” she laughs. “Not really. This is the most natural thing of all.” Her hands drop to her canvas pants and she undoes the old buttons, pushing the fabric down and away.

There are old scars on her legs, peppered with freckles and sun marks. They remain after she shifts, slashes crisscrossing through her abyss spots. She has sharp teeth, long and white, but Chason has never felt them himself. He has heard the clamp of her jaw on another’s tender neck, felt the hot spray of arterial blood against his muzzle, and cannot imagine the weight of her teeth on his own skin.

Tilly has. She’s thought of all the different ways this could play out, and no matter the outcome she finds the struggle essential. She’s already shifted. She’s down the dune, waiting with the rest of the pack, their role simply to observe and judge.

Chason is the last to change, the animal inside of him uncharacteristically cautious. He follows Austin’s loping shadow, eyes bright, teeth bared.



There are rules. Austin has not raised her pack to be uncivilized.

This is not about death, but in many ways it is about life.



She catches Tilly by the hind leg, her teeth slicing, gouging flesh and fur. The blood tastes bitter to her. Too familiar. Too like her own. She craves cold water, but now she’s caught the scent of vitality and copper. As tart as a lime. She shakes her bearish head and hears Tilly’s whimper.

(Austin lets go. Ever the matriarch.)

Tilly turns with such sudden viciousness that Austin slips in her surprise, claws and padded feet grasping futilely at the sand, body rolling in a final effort to avoid her snapping jaws.

Austin kicks. Tilly lunges. They reel.



“I just got lucky,” Austin says later, her fingers twisting, working to finish the last of her braid.

“You don’t have to say that,” Tilly murmurs, but she thinks otherwise. She thinks Austin wasn’t lucky at all, just more used to an audience.

“How’s your leg?”

“Hurts.”

“Tell that to my arm.”



Garret has a grin as wide and sloppy as his manners. He licks his fingers around the fire, too close to Chason’s left side. He watches Austin with a hunger that is palpable, burning ten degrees hotter than the flames centered between them.

He leans towards Chason, rubbing his hands over his jeans. “Don’t you wish her tits were bigger?”

Chason sneers. “She probably says the same about your dick.”

Garret laughs, a sound that is all bite.



Garret was their third. He was obnoxious when they found him, mostly drunk, ripping apart a drifter bar with half an arm dangling from his teeth. He’s still obnoxious; Chason can’t figure out what Austin sees in him. He thinks it’s because she wants the numbers – it’s safer to be in a group – because two people alone cannot be a pack. Or maybe she just likes their kind. He doesn’t know. She doesn’t tell him everything.

She can sense his distrust though. His disapproval like a bitter scent in the wind.

She winds her fingers into his air and nips at his ear. Chason smiles begrudgingly, feeling the weight of her hand against his arm when she stands to leave, trailing her palm across his shoulder.




Sabra hitches when she breathes. Her chest like a rattle, all the air strangling in her throat. She should be used to it by now, but the pressure threatens to knock her over every time. She has to rest, bent over, hands on her shaking knees.

She is sixteen years old and alone in the desert.

The sun scorches. The sand stings. She thinks it is a friendless land.

She is wrong.



Austin bites her wrist. Austin pulls her hair. Austin digs her fingers into her ribs till it is more painful than ticklish. She laughs and laughs and laughs, the sound like sharp glass.

Sabra doesn’t laugh. She whines and struggles to breath and pushes up. Her nails are blunt and do not scratch.

Austin rolls her eyes, relenting. “C’mon. Where’s your spirit? I’m only playing.”

Sabra can’t answer. Her words choke in her throat like her breath, and Austin is too impatient to wait.



She has steady, sure fingers. She breaks apart metal, electronics, rusted bits, frayed wires, and puts them back – makes them better. She shows Austin the repaired radio and feels pride warm her chest like a sunburst when her older sister nudges her arm and thanks her.

Sometimes, if she feels like she’s been helpful enough and deserves it, she curls into Austin’s bed and listens to the easy rise and fall of her chest as she sleeps. She breathes in her scent of pepper and lemon, the softer undercurrent of fresh cream. She smells like their mother, although she’s sharper, harder to curl against.

Austin never says anything in the mornings. If she’s lucky, Austin will pull their blankets up and over their heads and speak in her sulfur early morning whisper. Sabra will laugh then, the noise easier and more natural in the wake of Austin’s kindness.