Its nostrils widen, pupils dilate. It caught our scent. Sweat, mud, teenage girl, lavender, wormwood. Poor creature has no idea what’s coming for it.

Ivy shoots me a grin, more snarl than smile, and I know she feels it too. Feels the doe’s heartbeat pounding with ours, feels it racing and quivering, stuttering to keep blood pumping through its delicate tissue. I take a deep breath, forcing my heart to slow, lulling the creature senseless with a song of the deep woods.

That’s right. Sleep now, darling. Sleep.

And we’re off, racing through underbrush, thorns ripping at our ankles, trying to hold us back, begging us to slow, but we slow for no one. Ivy flanks me, heading the deer toward the pond, where I know Florence is waiting, bared teeth and a glinting dagger. We break through the trees, gray sky suddenly blinding, and the creature takes flight, leaps, mad-eyed and frothy mouthed, into an abyss it prays will be its salvation.

And with a thud, I know Florence has leapt to meet it.

The dagger sinks to its hilt.

The deer sinks to the ground.

And it is over.

---

“Nice shot, Flor.”

Florence throws me a wink. It was her first time taking the kill- she’s finally sixteen, old enough to take a life. Seems a bit arbitrary, but ever since we first started coming to the woods, we’ve had rules. Without rules, I don’t know what would happen. What we would find. What would find us.

“God, I’m tired of taking flank.” Ivy flops to the ground and begins expertly skinning the deer. She flicks the knife with the skill of someone much older than her, and I can’t help but be proud.

“It’s your turn. I was taking flank when Scar wouldn’t even let you in the woods.”

“Oh yeah? And how long did that last? A month? Two? She always knew I was strong enough.”

She has a point- I knew Ivy wouldn’t be shaken by what we did in the woods. If anything, she was probably best suited to it out of all of is. Flor would be perfectly happy to stay in the clearings, collecting mushrooms and snowdrops, making lavender tea and bundles of burning herbs. But Ivy had it. The thirst, the drive, the need to run. She feels it as strongly as I do, the call to rip off our shoes and feel the moss between our toes, take off, deeper and deeper into the woods. We have to resist it, but sometimes it gets the better of us.

In the end, it’s all nature.

---

The moon is high in the sky by the time we finish, silvery starlight slipping down between our bloodstained fingers. We walk back through waist-high grass, seed pods dropping to the ground like glass beads, pressed into mud by bare feet. We are silent beneath the open sky, no longer worried by our hunger, no longer pressed into action by thirst. We are creatures sated, slow, lolling, stretching out our sore limbs to one another, one pack, one mind, one body.

“Do you think they see us coming?” Ivy’s voice is honeyed, drunk on the power of taking a life, on the power of the moon, on the power of being us, three sets of bared teeth in the darkness.

“I’m sure they do.” You can see it in their eyes, the way their pupils pinhole, light leaching out like so much blood dripping onto the forest floor.

“Then why do they stand still?” I know what she means. For one moment, before they take off in a fury of galloping legs and white tails, they are breathless, staring at us.

In that moment, we see each other for what we are.

Animal.

Desperate.

Hungry.

Free.

“They pray.”

---

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