He pounces on her in a canyon, a midnight-blue giant with claws like knives and teeth like a bear trap.

She screams, and--

Blood rips its way out of her body, leaving gaping wounds behind it, trying to form a defensive barrier around her, pushing his hands away. It shapes into a solid oblong shield, with enough surface tension to make squeezing through it very difficult and enough wetness to make it slippery.

...well that's unexpected. And very attractive.

He slashes at the barrier with his claws.

This works, for certain definitions of "work"; certainly he pierces the barrier. But it reforms as soon as his claws have passed through, and begins moving away from him.

'Away from him' is a tricky prospect when there is so much of him in such a comparatively small space. He grows, and grows wings, and his wings come down to seal off both sides of the canyon, leaving her trapped in darkness.

The blood bubble is still for a few moments.

Then it reconfigures itself from a solid barrier into a cage, and she demands, "What do you want."

(Her wounds appear to have healed, although her clothes didn't recover.)

"Why," he wonders, "do so many people travel without consulting local rumours? That is how you end up stumbling into local dangers all unwarned."

"Local rumors about monsters in the woods are usually false."

"But if you had listened to them," he says reasonably, "you would know what I want."

"Were they telling the truth about that part too? I didn't want to assume, it seemed very plausibly the kind of thing a bunch of think-with-their dicks men with nothing better to do would have come up with."

He laughs.

"Have you ever considered asking nicely first?"

He idly runs a claw down one of the bars of her blood-cage.

"That sounds very unlikely to get me what I want."

"I mean, it's not like propositioning someone magically makes you unable to rape them if they say no," she points out reasonably. "And you never know, there's people into all kinds of things."

"Are you trying to tell me you want to be raped to death by the monster in the woods?"

"One, it's not rape if I say yes, two, I really doubt you could actually fuck me to death. Did you notice how I am no longer bleeding from several major blood vessels?"

"I did notice that."

Since she's no longer trying to run, he folds his wings and shifts down to a more reasonable size, ten feet tall instead of twenty. His skin turns blood-red to match her cage. He has a mane and tail like a lion's but is otherwise mostly human, claws and fangs excepted.

"You look very nice when you bleed."

"Oh, I know. Trust me, if I were as trivial to kill as a normal person, I would not have survived puberty."

"That sounds like a story I'd enjoy hearing."

"It is less sexy than it sounds," she admits. "Puberty was when I started being able to rip the blood from my own body and make it do what I wanted, and my control--wasn't perfect, to start. If I hadn't been a masochist the story would be more unpleasant for me but not, like, actually much less dangerous absent the healing factor that came with it."

"I fail to see how that's supposed to sound unattractive."

"Well, I said less sexy than it sounds, not zero sexy, it's just the story had less masturbation and more laundry than I originally implied."

He laughs. He wraps his hands around the bars of her cage and leans on them.

"I'd offer to take you to dinner, but I eat what I hunt, and raw at that. Hardly the thing to charm a lady."

"That's sweet. I dunno, I've got a lighter, there's wood around, we could probably finagle something if we really wanted to."

"Shall I hunt you a deer, then?" He grins. "What's your name?"