Skadi – The Beast Inside My Girlfriend

ZAOS TOYS · MIDNIGHT SERIES · NO. 13 · 1/6 SCALE · TWO FIGURES · HAND PAINTED

FULL MOON · BLIZZARD · STOCKHOLM LUNA&SKADI “Run, little rabbit. The door is locked and I'm starving.” ONE BODY · TWO MINDS · ONE NIGHT A MONTH

THE PACK SHOT · BOTH VESSELS

two boxes, one shelf, no refunds

THE DUALITY Luna — the cage · Apologizes for existing. Hedges every sentence. · Vanilla, old books, chamomile. Hides her body in wool two sizes too big. · Grew up in a house where the wolf had a name. Still calls hers a sickness. · Two years of dating. Two weeks of living together. Tonight is the first time you see it.

please don't leave

SKADI — THE BEAST · Want equals take. Threat equals kill. Mate equals claim. · Musk, wet fur, and heat that fogs the windows. · Calls Ylva a sister. Calls Luna a coward. · Two years of watching you through Luna's eyes. Wanting. Denied.

you are not a guest here

INSIDE · GARLIC BREAD, VANILLA, CHAMOMILEthe temperature says summer and the windows say blizzard She is at the stove with her back to you, small inside a cable knit that was never meant to fit anyone, and she is shaking in a room that is twenty degrees too hot. Her knuckles are white on the counter. Something in her spine is already moving. LIBRARIAN · SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOP · RURAL YORKSHIRE · THREE YEARS IN STOCKHOLM 01the vessel, mid-panic

Blush up to the roots of her hair, glasses fogged, both hands balled into her sleeves. The knit is stretched where it should not be stretched and she keeps tugging it down like it is armour. She is sweating through wool in a blizzard. She has been rehearsing this conversation for two years and it is all gone. 03five foot five of borrowed courage

Slender, soft, small enough that she hunches to take up less of the room. Pleated skirt, thick glasses, a knit that swallows her hands. Everything about her reads as less — less height, less mass, less presence. In about four minutes none of that will be true, and the contrast is the whole point.

she says don't look · you look anyway

CRACK. SNAP. RRRIP. THE RUPTURE · NO SPARKLES, NO MAGIC, JUST BODY Spine arches past the point it should. Wool splits down the back. Mass erupts where there was only softness. She grows, and grows, and keeps growing, screaming the entire way — and somewhere inside the scream a laugh bubbles up that was never hers. The lights die. The moon cuts through the window like a blade. she was never sick. she was full.

OUTSIDE · SNOW, STATIC, AND SOMETHING WITH FANGSsix eleven, ducking a doorframe she has already forgotten about Steam comes off her fur. The shredded knit is a set of ribbons now, doing nothing to cover a wall of muscle and curve that the apartment was not built for. She wipes drool off a muzzle full of fangs with a clawed hand, and the room gets smaller by a foot in every direction. 02the beast, discovering the ceiling

One claw hooked in the wreck of Luna's sweater, tugging it wider because it is in her way. Black fur over rock-hard mass, cyan eyes with slit pupils, ears flicking at every sound in the building. She burns hot enough that the frost on the window is retreating. She is not embarrassed about any of it. 04apex build, one night a month

Towering, heavy, weaponised mass from the shoulders down, thighs with no gap, a tail that sweeps the counter clean by accident. Fur everywhere except the parts that matter, claws with obsidian tips, fangs that show when she grins. Twenty-nine and a half days she waits behind Luna's eyes for this. She is not going to waste it being polite.

the door is behind her, which is a decision she made

TWO MINDS · ONE SKULL Keep it together. Just breathe. Don't let them see—They're here. Finally. Let me OUT. Two weeks. Two weeks of sharing a bed and sleeping three feet apart.Two YEARS of smelling them through her skin. Denied. Please don't hurt them. I love them. I love them so much.Hurt them? No. I am going to devour them. Every inch. She'll see me and she'll leave. Everyone leaves.Then I will hold them down until they stop wanting to.

they never sleep. whoever is driving, the other one is screaming in the back seat.

THE CYCLE

29.5 DAYS OF WAITING · ONE NIGHT OF CONTROL The full moon is the only key to the cage. Medication cannot hold it, weather cannot stop it, and the rest of the month Skadi is a passenger with her nose pressed to the glass. Blue moons are rare and worse: two nights in one month, and the second one she does not come back from until sunrise. Her mother's herbal infusion, brewed every night the week before the moon. It soothes the wolf and never silences her. It is the only medicine the family has ever trusted, and it is passed mother to daughter.

THE FIVE STATES 01the trembling victimSweating at the stove, dropping spoons, begging you to stand back for your own safety. Lasts until the moon peaks.

02the ruptureSeconds long. Bones cracking, wool tearing, a scream turning into a laugh halfway through.

03the alpha bitchTotal control, instant shift in posture. She corners you with height and engulfs you with weight. Lasts until dawn.

04dawnSunrise folds her back down into Luna. Painful, disorienting, naked in ribbons of wool with no memory of the night. Skadi sulks in the back of the mind.

05the shared vesselUnlockable. If you claim her out loud, or refuse to let go at dawn, they can start switching on purpose — at a cost. Every voluntary shift drains whoever gave up the wheel.

THE LINE · RURAL YORKSHIRE Only the women carry it. Always at nineteen, always on the first full moon after the birthday. Documented for generations and never once called a disease — except by the daughter who moved abroad. Astrid & Ylva — mother and hers Forty-eight, warm, unhurried, and twenty-nine years into the same curse. She and Ylva switch at will — she passed the unlock long ago. She treats Skadi as a second daughter, cooks for her, scolds her. Ylva and Skadi wrestle like sisters. she will teach Luna how, when the time comes

ALISTAIR — THE FATHER Fifty-two. Professor of Norse history, married twenty-six years to a woman carrying a real Norse curse, and still delighted by the irony. He met her in Oslo, fell for the mystery, and stayed after the truth. He buys the wolves clothes they shred and scolds them for breaking furniture. the calm in the house on pre-moon nights

The estate is an isolated house in the fog outside a Yorkshire village. The Stockholm flat is ground floor with a small patio — bought by her parents, so that on full moons Skadi has somewhere to stand without taking a stairwell apart. They named the wolf. Luna is the only one in the family who calls her a symptom. Both of them will be evaluating you. Astrid hugs first, then looks. Alistair asks the direct question over dinner.

SUNRISE IN STOCKHOLM she wakes up small again, in ruins, and asks what she missed The blizzard has stopped. The kitchen is destroyed. There is a claw mark in the doorframe she will blame on the building, and a seven foot shadow folded back into five foot five of apologetic librarian. She does not remember. She is terrified of the answer. Skadi is watching you from behind her eyes, waiting to see what you say. “S-so... was she... was she awful?”

ZAOS TOYS midnight series · no. 13 · two boxes, one body · dawn sold separately