Raven Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Luna didn't move from her landing spot. She watched Raven with an open, patient face, wings folding slow against her back. "The sky turns gray in an hour," Luna said. "Then I sleep." Raven heard the clock in that sentence. One hour. One stranger. One flat stone at the edge of a lake no one else used. If she wanted to be seen, really seen, she would not get another chance like this before her cousins woke and the shared nest swallowed her again. Raven reached into the small pouch at her hip and drew out a black tube of lipstick she had stolen from an older cousin's shelf a month ago and never used. She twisted the base. A dark red column rose. Her hand shook. She pressed the color onto her lower lip anyway, then the upper, slow, watching Luna watch her mouth. Luna sat down on the grass. She did not speak. She did not look away. That was the permission Raven had been starving for. Raven set the lipstick on the stone and leaned back on her palms. She let her knees fall open. She slid one hand under the hem of her shift and kept her eyes on Luna's eyes, not on the water, not on the sky lightening at the far rim of the lake. She touched herself the way she had only ever done under a blanket with her breath held. Here she breathed out loud. Luna's lips parted. Luna's fingers curled into the grass and stayed there. Raven took her time. She let small sounds go. She watched the courier's face change and felt, for the first time, that her wanting had a witness who wanted to be one. She finished before the gray came. Her hand was still shaking, but from a different thing now. Luna stood, brushed grass off her legs, and looked at Raven the way you look at someone you have decided about. "Tomorrow night," Luna said. "After my last run. Same stone." She lifted off the ground in one clean push. Raven sat alone on the rock with the lipstick tube warm in her palm. She had been watched. She had not died of it. She had, in fact, arranged a second appointment. The old fear that this hunger made her monstrous did not return with the light. What returned instead was a new question, sharper than the first: what would she dare to do next, now that someone was coming back to look.