I brought her down with one swipe to the legs and she tumbled into the snow. She panted, tail flickering. Her hind legs tightened as she prepared to scramble up and run again. I stood over her. I could take her throat in my jaws and suffocate her until she was a heartbeat from death, then rip her open and swallow her heart as it struggled to beat, feel its muscular contraction inside me. The lungs next. Rich with blood. Slippery and dense. Then the shoulders.
But she didn’t move, and I didn’t move, and she was a woman again.
“Why?” Her hoarse voice seemed more human now. She didn’t know why she was still alive.
I didn’t, either. “Cold Wind. That was my first name, before people crossed the land bridge and I followed. Or perhaps I crossed and they followed, I forget. You think you’re old…”
I looked at the steel sculpture: huge, undeniable, but rust would eat it as surely as leaves fall in winter and dawn breaks the night open and spills light afresh on the world, and I would still be here. Alone. I had killed them all, because that was what I did.
“Get up,” I said.
“Why?”
“So you can run.”
Surely she wasn’t weary of life, not yet, but she began to lift her jaw, to offer her throat. Cats are faster than deer. I would catch her, and as young as she was, she felt it: this is who we were, this is what we did. It was the old way.
“Run. I won’t kill you. Not this year.”
Silence. “But next?”
Predator and prey. We were the last. I said nothing. And she was gone, running, running.
The stars shone bright but the moon was setting and more cloud was on its way, ordinary northwest cloud. The night was warming, the silence already thinning, traffic starting up again at the edges. By tomorrow the snow would melt, the cameras would work. But tonight it was still a white world where Deer Woman ran toward daybreak, and I had someone to hunger for.
Copyright (C) 2014 by Nicola Griffith
Art copyright (C) 2014 by Sam Wolfe Connelly
Cold Wind Page 2
