"It is just as well that you came with me, Madeline," the girl murmured, lengthening the stride of her young legs to keep pace with the reddish wolf who pressed close protectively. Oui, came the soft response. Your father would have not had it any other way. Claudia did not respond; perhaps it was the ignorance of her guardian's innocent words that caused silence to befall her lips, or further: perhaps it was that she had no words with which to rejoin Madeline. The heavenblue of her eyes swept the landscape as they passed through, missing little despite her small stature.
The starlight caressed them both, cloaking Claudia in a seeming aureole of gold; this she did not notice, for her small lobes had swept forward at the piteous howl that pierced the veil of night. "Madeline!" the child hissed softly; bidden, the taller of the two figures, full-curved and yet innocent, halted her delicate step. As if one mind controlled them, the blunted muzzle of the child and the longer snout of the woman lifted to the darkened sky, scenting the air for whatever danger had wrung such an agonized sound from their nearby counterpart.
Another child, in another time, would have felt the cold prickle of fear climb her spine, but Claudia was not that child and this was not that moment. Her tail flicked idly at her heels, then lifted in an arc of unconscious dominance; she commanded Madeline forward alongside her with nary a word, and together the two of them embraced the nightfall with a strange eagerness.
It was not long before the drifting curtain of darkness, stippled with the jeweled tears high above them, revealed its secret; Claudia's eyes swept with cold intensity the graceful slimness of the weeping woman, beholding the beauty of her feminine figure. Not for the first time, a fierce bolt of jealousy plummeted through the child, a quarrel shot from the bow of some sadistic Cupid, but she shook it away, approaching the dejected figure with a child's fearlessness.
"I have not heard such howling since I was thrown out from the Theatre," she observed dryly, and Madeline simpered a quiet chuckle, though she kept back from her delicate charge, ears and head lowered in abject submission. "For what do you weep?" Claudia demanded in her soft tone, edged in the accent of her homeland, but her eyes held all the malice and scrutiny of a much older being.
