The Sentinels I am very dark, but lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem

Lotte, despite her innate enthusiasm for interaction with the opposite sex, was as virginal as the ingénue role she assumed before the wolves of Donnelaith. When it came to love, her knowledge was as rudimentary as Dagfinn’s, but her craving for attention — and her willingness to craft herself into any incarnation her audience desired in order to get it — gave her the upper hand when it came to romantic experience as a whole. She could do wondrous things with her voice. Like a particularly skilled operator of risqué aural liaisons, she could flow between octaves and accents to make love to the ears of her listeners. Too, her foray into espionage had taught her the importance of controlling her body to its finest pitch — she could accurately feign a limp, a faint, and various neurological abnormalities at will. Even those things she could not change — the color of her fur or eyes — could be altered in such a way to make her unrecognizable from one role to the next.

It was perhaps because of this chameleon-like ability that Lotte merely laughed at her beloved twin’s warning. In their mother tongue, “Falling at my paws?” she repeated. “If they so lose themselves, their kills are forfeit to me!” Her blithe insinuation, that she’d pick the pockets of those wolves foolish enough to weaken themselves before her, was in some ways inherently true. Her wiles had been used as battle tactics in the past, whether for the purpose of diplomacy or infiltration — and perhaps it had all started too young for the still-developing female, who’d learned how to be a variety of others before she’d completely learned to be herself. Still, Lotte was content with her lot[te] in life — so long as she had enough reach to turn the limelight in her direction, she was happy. “And you, terrible plague upon my existence,” she entreated with a loving lick and a fussy little preen to the base of one of Dagfinn’s ears, “when are you going to start blinking sweetly that I may scold you in return? And do you not owe me a story in turn, my twin?”