She knelt over her kill, so close that her dark hair fell over her face and that death mask, movements sensually graceful, terrifying. So close that she must have felt the heat radiating from open wounds... She tasted the cooling blood slowly at first, and then lapped at it with heightening need, until she finally drew back, hunger satiated. She bent over it once more, kissing cold lips, sucking the last vestiges of life away, devouring its soul...

Her body rippled with convulsive pleasure and he nearly looked away, disgusted. Drinking blood like an animal... The mere thought made his throat tighten, and he bit back a flood of nausea.

She seemed to notice his presence for the first time, then, and rose gracefully from the bloodless body. She shook back a sheet of dark hair from her face, almost Egyptian in its features. Her eyes were unfathomable, with no pupil and no depth, and her lips were stained with darkness. Darkness clung to her body, her hair, her skin.

"What a surprise, Csiyraih," she murmured, lips curving in a smile that he was sure she didn't feel. Her voice was husky with a slight burr; incongruous with the form she'd chosen for herself.

"You're not fooling anyone," he informed her, frowning distastefully at her illusion of humanity. "Why can't you have the decency to look like rikahvrai so they'd at least have a running chance?"

She shrugged, and her body contorted in a rippling wave, exchanging smooth golden skin for scales, becoming a clawed thing with myriad razor-edged wings. He looked quickly away; his own true-form was much the same, but the change made his stomach twist.

"Why do they need a chance?" she replied, answering his question with a question, the transformation distorting her voice. "How can you call yourself rikahvrai if you fear to kill?"

Don't meet those eyes, don't don't don't...

"There's an age of difference between ending one life in the night and slaughtering many in a single day," he defended, breath quickening. "What we do is necessary, the slow victory against the asthalei. But you're helping no one; what you do is savage... disgusting... evil..."

The smile that crossed her lips was almost as feral as that of the beast to which he had compared her. "So I don't deny what I am. You're lying to yourself, Csiyraih; you're trying to hide from yourself, and there's nothing down that path, nothing but fear and death..."

He backed quickly away, not liking her expression, suddenly intensely that in her true-form, too, her lips were the sickly dark of blood... "You wouldn't. You wouldn't, Kyytalan. Not even you."

She laughed mockingly. "Why not? You think you know me so well; you should know that just because you share my race doesn't mean I care what happens to you any more than I care about the humans." The warning behind her words was clear. She'd kill him on a moment's fleeting fancy, and that moment would not be long in coming if he lingered here...

He licked dry lips. The Ksaithri would be no less dangerous if he came back and had to admit he hadn't brought the rebel to their side... "The war goes on whether or not you wish to admit it," he insisted, but with little conviction. "You're violating every rule we've agreed on, and if we disregard our part, there's no reason to think that the asthalei will keep theirs. Chaos again, Kyytalan. Do you want that?"

She grinned, a smile that showed all her teeth. "I'm willing to try anything once. But the asthalei won't choose chaos. They're much to noble to break their part - it doesn't matter what I do. So I'll do what I want. And Csiyraih -"

Her eyes insisted on his attention; he shivered convulsively and broke away in a flurry of dark wings. He wouldn't dance with death; if the Ksaithri placed such importance on this rebel, they could find their own way to trap her...

It had been too long since she'd tasted the addictive, cloying sweetness that was rikahvrai blood... She ground her lips against those of the corpse fiercely, and pulled herself finally away when the rush of power that of the dying soul, far stronger than that of any human, lay melting in icy-sharp sweetness on her tongue.

She slashed a clawed paw almost offhandedly across the body's chest, and washed herself in the swirling darkness of its blood. It clung to her like a lover's hands, tendrils curling up to join the darkness of her robe...

"You should have known that rules are for other people, Csiyraih," she whispered, and turned, striding briskly away as from a completed task.

Who would remark, after all, who wanted to live, on the body of a rikahvrai fast crumbling to dust in the shadows of the skyscrapers that waged their own war on the defeated sun...

She wondered at her luck, when, less than an hour later, a human materialized her in a whirl of dusky sunlight. He stared for a moment, eyes wide, and she quickly shimmered into human-form. She looked up at him through her lashes and dared him to put it down to more than a trick of the light.

He blinked, startled, and frowned at her, brow furrowing, but she could almost feel his reasoning - I didn't see that, this woman couldn't have been a monster a moment ago...

You saw what you saw, a voice insisted, and a creature of blue hide and huge white wings stepped out of the shadows, very incongruous against the cityscape, dwarfed by skyscrapers too high to see. Dragon - a creature of myth - the thought entered her mind. She's no human, J'udas. It gave her an inscrutable glance annoying because it reminded her so much of herself and remarked almost conversationally, And if you hurt my rider, darkling, I'll kill you.

Likely untrue; if it knew her for what she was, if it was on the human's side, it would have used any powers it had already. It was keeping her from her prey, and for that it would pay, but why bother with it now when the human stood so vulnerable, so close...

"No, that's not the way, Asari'" the human contradicted quietly. There was fear in his voice, but not enough. What human on this world did not live in secret, cowering fear of the rikahvrai?

"You could kill me, and Asarishitath too, maybe. But I think we're more useful to you alive."

She laughed, the need for blood drawing in on her, lapping around her feet like beautiful, painful flame... "I doubt that. Human lives are plenty, and one is as sweet as another, but you can't tell until they're broken and dying at your feet..."

He shivered but wouldn't look away. "That's why you're the right one..."

"Would you like to bond, a companion utterly devoted to you? Your completion, the one most like you of all the worlds?"

And she looked up at the dragon Asarishitath, the great creature of blue and white wings, cold as the asthalei, and hated him for that, because his rider's words intrigued her, and he couldn't die yet, not yet...

Your time will come, she promised, silently.