The Hunter [mf]

“It must have been early morning when I heard her moving. Padding softly across the carpet, her form graceful, I know, as she slides out of her bed and over to my futon upon the floor. I crack my eyes, and she stands before me: tallish and lithe, with the wan skin of her kind. Textured magenta hair and pink lips on a face rendered silver-white in the moonlight. Black, ever-so-slightly pointed teeth. Black irises on blacker sclera.

She is naked, and she bears the lacy, complex black ritual tattoos of flowery curves and geometric wheels on her legs, extending down from the inner thigh, encasing each appendage below such that it appears as midnight. Another tattoo – symmetrical and slender – begins at her clitoris and extends two-thirds of the way up her belly. Still one more beneath her left eye, this one atypical, a stylized net of veins stretching towards her ear. And the horns: ebony, spiralling horns nearly a hand’s width long (surprisingly lightweight, for she moves her head with ease), rise through her hair from her upper skull.

She is breathtakingly beautiful.

She also so much resembles a succubus of ancient Earth that the irony is painful.