Excerpt: Halcyon

If there was one thing that Sayurr had learned in her twenty-two years of life, it was that dogs ate a lot.
Dogs, as in fourteen of them. Fourteen three-and-a-half-foot-tall (more or less) canines, who spent their days hunting, fighting, training, or partaking in excessive playing or napping exercises. Even napping was an exercise because they moved around so much. Sayurr still had a scar from when Anhui had slept on her bed.
Sayurr exhaled heavily in a strange cross between a sigh and a grunt. Her breath tumbled out of her mouth as steam in the cool morning as she trudged up stone stairs to her house and the dogs' feeding place. On her shoulder she carried just part of the dogs' breakfast, today a great brown steer. Her twenty-seven-year-old brother was behind her with the last quarter of the beast. They dumped the meat on the ground where the dogs were already feasting on the first half. Amarok and Isumine, the alpha pair, had already eaten their share and had settled well away from the others and were napping with each other.
Sayurr leaned over to let the cow flank slide off. She tossed back her long sable hair, tips stained red with blood.
“Ugh,” she growled. “I really need to cut this off.”
Her brother, Farasi, widened his eyes a bit, but said nothing and expressed no opinion.
Sayurr glanced at the dogs, then at Farasi. “They can take care of themselves. I'm changing out of this bloody mess.”
“'This bloody mess'? You're acting as if you aren't used to this after... what, fifteen years of it?” Farasi smiled playfully
Sayurr gave a light chuckle. “No, I just have things to do.” She turned around and walked through the bright red double-doors of the house.