Hideaway Strath the immaculate conception

INJURY LOG: Lotte has epistaxis. The attempted lunge was deflected.

The flex and twitch of the woman’s thigh against Lotte’s mouth — the warm spurt of metallic blood that pooled in her mouth and streamed out of its grimacing corners — the bitter tang of the intruder’s panic — ah, these things were sweet. There was a part of Lotte’s brain that registered her successful hit with a heady rush of addictive, near sexual pleasure; but she had been trained from a very young age to temper that bloodlust with a hefty helping of prudence. Later, provided all went well, she would gloat to her husband as she had the first day they’d played tag amongst the bleeding sequoias — and perhaps he would allow her to work him up. Hemlock would be the beneficiary, but his reaction was reward enough.

Her instinct was to swing her hips in a calculated body check while yanking the leg the other way, wreaking havoc on the woman’s hamstring if not dislocating the hock or hip — but fighting alongside Arturo caused Lotte to adjust her tactics. The woman was taller than Lotte but not broader; she was willowy and thin, and her gangly legs whipped like a whirlwind. Muffled noises of protest sputtered from the former alpha’s lips as she was kicked repeatedly in the face, but the pain these blows engendered only encouraged her to bite down harder. She had a significant grip on the woman’s leg and didn’t risk trying to adjust her bite.

The stranger’s muzzle snaked out, her greater height and serpentine musculature allowing her to whip around — but the northern bitch was blessed with quick reflexes and an upper hand. Instead of gripping Lotte’s knee or haunch, making of their bleeding bodies a weird ouroboros, the woman’s fangs made harmless contact with the flat part of Lotte’s upper thigh. Having sustained a particularly virulent kick to the face — one that left her nose freely dripping blood — Lotte moved with the inertia of the blow and threw her weight back onto her hindquarters, pivoting sharply to try to jerk hard on the appendage she held tightly betwixt her jaws. She attempted to hip-slam the woman’s open jaws in a way that would hopefully do one of the following: smother her in the winter-thick fur that made Lotte so miserable in summertime, obscure her view of Arturo so Ceannasach could work undetected, or give the woman a smarting smack to the nose that would temporarily stun her.