For clare_dragonfly‘s prompt, after Bitter Vintage

The Wild Ones are a family line of half-breed Ellehemaei; the lives of three of them are chronicled in my very dark webserial The Wild Ones’ Blood.

The guest at the gate turned out to be female, which set the trio of sisters no more at ease, female, and with pointed, Doberman-like ears. Kin, perhaps? they stood casually, their tails and their ears the only thing showing how tense and fight-ready they were.

The Doberman-woman wasn’t hiding it at all. Her face was set in a snarl. “You have what is mine,” she growled.

“This is our land,” Aglæca answered, her voice lazy, her hand on her knife. “We have only what is ours here.”

“You have what is mine,” the woman repeated, “and I will have it back.”

“Bitch, we don’t have anything of yours,” Cassandra hissed. “Be gone before we cut you into pieces and feed the pieces to our pigs.”

“He came here,” the dog-woman insisted, and now all three of them were listening very, very intently to her. “He came here, I know. he told me it was the last thing he had to do for the Old Man, and so I let him come. And he never came back.”

Aglæca was not certain if the low whining sound of anger came from her throat, her sisters’ throats, or all three, but she knew it was her that spoke. “He. He was your Kept, your possession? You owned that creature?”

A beat, and then Cassandra asked over the rising silence, “You owned our kin?” Because creature, monster, and bastard he might have been, but he’d been a Wild One, too. That was why, in part, he wasn’t dead.

The Doberman snarled. “Own. I Own him. He is my love, and it was the only way to keep him from the Old Man’s grasp. So yes, yes I Own him.”

“Then you should join him,” Angela snarled, and, in a heartbeat, they attacked.

~

They planted the second rose – a red one – and the second grapes near the first pair, so that the two could twine together, and when the time came to make the wine, they mixed fruit and petals from all the plans together. “Let them be together,” Aglæca toasted, with the first glass of the season, “in the only way they deserve.”

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