“What’s happening?” Sabine asked quietly, brows knitted.
“It seems the pack has spoken, Dragor,” said Kearn aloud, as the pack closed ranks around their once-Alpha. Kearn kept his gaze fixed firmly ahead. “What should have happened long ago,” he responded to her simply. “Natural order is being restored.”
The pack of shifters launched themselves in unison, a nightmarish blur of fangs, claws, and fur.
“You may want to look away,” he advised.
“No,” she said, her eyes trained upon the Usurper’s doom. “A queen must be able to observe justice be done.”
Kearn smiled down on her. “You will be a formidable queen, my love.”
Howls of pain rent the cool night air as Dragor was torn limb from limb. A final ear-piercing wail, that ended as abruptly as it began, signalled the coward’s death. The carnage that remained was in no way discernible as once having even been a wolf. It was a ruthless, macabre scene, the likes of which she had never before witnessed. The previously colourful leaf-littered earth was churned, mushy, and stained with pools of red. Tufts of fur, chunks of flesh and sinew, fragments of bone, and other internal gore were everywhere.
The pack shifted into elf form and one of them came forward, carrying Dragor’s heart. Taking a knee, head bowed, he raised his arms, presenting the trophy to the pack’s new Alpha and rightful leader.
Kearn accepted the token. “The Black Forest Pack will thrive once again, you have my word,” he announced. “Together, with my queen, our queen,” he said, gesturing to Sabine. “We will create a new age for our kind. Sabine is a dhampir witch. The joining of our bloodlines will give birth to a new race! Part mortal, vampyre, Dökkálfar, and natural wolf shifter! Our children will be born free of the constraints of either Court. Join with me, brothers, in reclaiming the enchanted forest, and in welcoming Sabine to the pack!” He turned to her, then. “Sabine? Will you partake of the heart, and join with us in blood, and kinship?” He nodded reassuringly as he offered her the heart.
Sabine took the enormous wolf heart in both hands and with a curt nod to the pack, she curled back her lips, baring her fangs, sinking them into the once beating organ. With an almighty tear, she managed to pull away a bite. Swallowing, she made a show of licking her bloody lips with a satisfied smile. She had never eaten raw flesh before. Still warm and plump with blood, it wasn’t nearly as terrible as she had first imagined; in fact, quite the opposite.
“All hail the queen!” Kearn roared.
The pack chorused in return, “Hail the queen! Long live, Sabine!”
Sabine felt their awe wash over her in waves. “My king?” she queried, offering the heart back to him.
Kearn’s broad grin promised mischief and pleasures untold. “Ride with us,” he whispered to her. “We’re going home. We have unfinished business to take care of, you and I, before we get started on meting out your justice,” he said with a wink, before shifting into his glorious black wolf form. Sabine grinned, tingles of energy running up her inner thighs at the thought of their earlier intimacy.
Throwing the heart into the air above them, Kearn snatched it up in his immense jaws, thrashing it from side to side, before swallowing it whole. Throwing his head back, he howled to the haunting Harvest Moon. With the Autumnal Equinox almost over Sabine threw her head back too, and with wild glee filling her soul she joined in the chorus of her new family.
Kearn hunched down for her. Grabbing fistfuls of her love’s fur, she hoisted herself astride him. Nuzzling into his wide, furry shoulders, she held on tight, resting her head against him momentarily, before adopting a more secure riding position.
When her shifter sensed that she was ready, he sprung forth, launching several paces in a single stride with his powerful hind legs. Sabine grinned from ear to ear, her long, ebony locks and scarlet cloak billowing after her.
No longer would she be trapped by circumstance, unwanted, ridiculed, and in danger. I am finally free, protected, and loved for who exactly who and what I am.
Leading the pack, the rightful Alpha and his Queen bounded off into the darkness of the Black Forest, and towards their new home, and destiny, the pack close behind.
* * *
The End.
Enjoyed this story? Be sure to leave a review! You can read more tales from Zoey’s The Nine Realms Saga in Dangerous Words Publishing’s upcoming collections. In the meantime, if you love dark fantasy, fairy tales, and paranormal romance then please consider picking up your copy of Zoey’s debut short story collection Darkly Ever After!
About the Author
Zoey Xolton is an Australian Speculative Fiction Author. She likes to daydream, and write stories about the beautiful and improbable, the dark and fantastical, as well as the adventurous and utterly romantic! Whether it’s fairy tales, fantasy, horror, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, or science-fiction…she dabbles in it.
She has featured in over 100 anthologies to date, and is currently working on progressively longer stories. She prays you enjoy, and fall in love with the deliciously tempting tales, and the characters that she bring into the world. Writing is her guilty pleasure…perhaps reading it will become one of yours?
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Ghost Cat
Tiegan Clyne
About Ghost Cat
Zookeeper Eliza Benson’s worst day ever starts with a mountain lion attack and ends with a head-spinning revelation. Some of the cats in her zoo are more than cats, and the world is wilder than she ever believed.
* * *
Can her worst day lead to the best days of her life? A group of rakshasa brothers hopes that it will…
* * *
Ghost Cat is a slow-burn Reverse Harem adventure.
Chapter One
Eliza Benson loaded her cart with the cats’ morning meal. The sun was finally shining, something that she welcomed after a long pre-dawn hour in the zoo’s prep area. The Armstrong Cat Park had 35 different big cats, and they all needed to be fed. The zoo went through over 500 pounds of meat a day, with each cat receiving 15 of those pounds. The food, which she helped to prepare every day, was a mixture of chicken, beef, and a specialty commercial zoo carnivore food that ensured the cats would get the nutrients they needed. If they were in the wild, they’d be eating their prey completely, including fur, bones and guts, and all of those things had minerals and vitamins the cats couldn’t go without. A healthy cat was a happy cat.
Today’s meal was supplemented with rabbits that had been purchased from a specialty supplier, raised carefully and killed without drugs. The carcasses were delivered fully frozen, which meant that the cats would have time to play with their food like house cats played with mice. Eliza sometimes wished they could give the rabbits to the cats when they were still alive, so the cats could hunt, but that wasn’t possible. For one, the rabbits might injure the cats, and there were endangered and threatened species among their four-legged residents. For another, visitors tended to frown on having their children see the sort of brutal carnage that nature really brought.
The cart was always heavy, but today it was especially hard to push toward the cats. They’d been having torrential rains for days, and the sky was still drooling down. Eliza had only made it halfway to the first enclosure, and she was already soaked to the skin. Her dark brown ponytail was dripping down the back of her neck, her natural waves turned into unwieldy frizz by the humidity. If she wasn’t so in love with the animals she cared for, she’d have been really annoyed.
> She had been a keeper at Armstrong for three years. She’d been fortunate that she’d landed an internship there cleaning cages while she was an undergrad, and the director was more than happy to hire her once she graduated. She knew that she should continue her schooling, but for now, she was where she wanted to be, doing what she wanted to do.
Feeding big cats.
Today was especially exciting, because it would be her first day with the zoo’s newest resident: Pangur, a snow leopard they had obtained from a private collector in Los Angeles. Snow leopards were never supposed to be pets, but some rich fool had obtained one on the black market and raised it from cubhood to young adult. The cat became too expensive to keep, and he voluntarily relinquished it to Dr. Linden Armstrong, the man who had founded the zoo, which also served as a rescue. Pangur had arrived six weeks ago, but he had been sedated for the trip and then he was kept in veterinary quarantine until he cleared all of his tests. She had been able to spend time with him in quarantine, bringing him his food and helping with his blood draws. Pangur had never been anything but gentle with her, and his past as a pet was clear in his behavior. Even if they’d wanted to, they would never have been able to release him back into the wild. He’d been put into his enclosure last night, and once he was in, they left him alone to relax and get used to the space.
Every enclosure, both the interior side where the animals slept and the habitat section where the visitors could see the animals, were observed through closed circuit security cameras, and she had spent a good part of the day yesterday watching him to make sure he hadn’t been in any distress. He’d been intensely curious about his surroundings, but he hadn’t come to any harm and seemed to be settling in nicely. He seemed to enjoy the rocky terrain they had manufactured for him, and the fallen tree and the shady den with the hidden door that led back into his nighttime shelter. His transition had gone amazingly well, and she was excited. Today, finally, she would be alone with him.
She fed the lions, the Pallas cats, the black-footed cats, the civets and the ocelots. They were all happy to see her, and she took the opportunity to interact with them while she gave them their breakfast. Eliza had a way with cats and always had; in fact, her best friend, Jen, called her “the Cat Whisperer,” and she had never met any cat, large or small, that didn’t become her friend. She was able to take more liberties than the other keepers, and she liberally dispensed kisses and scritches behind happy ears as she went on her rounds.
She reached the muddy side path between the lynxes and the tigers. The cart was lighter, but it still bogged down in the sticky mud, and she walked around it to pull instead of push. That was when she saw the prints.
Cat prints, massive and deep, were pressed into the muck. She gasped and grabbed her radio from her belt.
“There’s a cat loose,” she announced to anyone who was listening. “Tracks in zone three.”
Pete, one of the other keepers, responded. “Which cat? I’m looking at the monitors and I’m not seeing anybody missing.”
“There has to be…”
She followed the tracks to see where they led, her heart in her throat. The path led her out of the side path and onto the wider pedestrian sidewalk, where the cement clearly showed the continued muddy footprints where they crossed to the grassy area beyond. She crossed the lawn to the second bank of enclosures. The black-footed cats, jaguars and cheetahs were all where they were supposed to be, and all of them were in an uproar, pacing and irritable. The tracks re-emerged from the grass near the leopard enclosure, passed by that area and stopped at the snow leopard exhibit, where they abruptly disappeared.
She looked at their newest resident, and unlike his fellows, Pangur was calm. He was lying on the big log that they had put into his enclosure, his beautiful coat glistening from the rain. His big blue eyes blinked at her, and the tip of his tail swayed calmly.
“Hey, baby,” she greeted. “What happened here, huh? I wish you could tell me.”
Pete’s voice came through the radio again. “There are no missing cats. What the hell?”
She reversed direction and went back to the first prints she’d seen. This time, she followed them to see where they began. The trail led to one of the exterior fences near the parking lot. Just on the inside of the fence, she could see the deep imprints from where a huge cat had landed after jumping the fence. She stared in disbelief. No cat could jump a fence that high, which was why it had been built the way it was. Not only was it too high, it was too wide, with a hot wire at the top to shock any enterprising feline.
Eliza muttered to herself, “This is not possible.” She put the radio to her mouth again. “Pete, check cameras on the south fence. It looks like this cat came in from the outside.”
“What?” He sounded as confused as she felt.
“It jumped the fence.”
“That fence is…”
“...too tall. I know. And the hot wire and the distance from any trees or rocks. There’s no way that a cat could go from ground level and over the fence in one jump.”
“Could it have climbed the fence?”
“I suppose.”
She could hear his fingers clattering over the keyboard in the office, and he said, “I’m calling up the video from last night. I’ll let you know what I see.”
“Good. I’m going to finish feeding the cats and I’ll come in.”
Eliza stowed her radio and went back to her rounds. The tigers, especially their big male Raja, were annoyed that their breakfast was late, and she chose to just feed and go because he was in such a mood. Normally Raja liked belly rubs with his breakfast, but today he was too agitated. She wondered if it was because of the cat that had jumped the fence.
She still didn’t know how that could have happened.
When her cart was empty and her charges had all been fed, she returned to the office and grabbed a towel to dry off. Pete was sitting in front of the monitors, his chin in his hand. His eyes were wide, and she thought he looked a little panicky.
“Pete, what’s wrong? What did you find?”
“Come here. Close the door.”
After closing the door, Eliza put the towel down on the other chair in the security room and pulled it over to sit beside him. He glanced at her.
“Jesus, you’re soaked.”
“Yeah. What is it?”
His hand hesitated above the mouse. “I… I’m going to show this to you to see if you see what I see. And I don’t know if I want you to or if I want you not to.”
Eliza frowned. “Well, just show me, already.”
“Okay. Here goes nothing.”
At first there was nothing to see in the grainy night-vision video. After several moments a shadow moved on the other side of the fence, its form strangely indistinct. Whatever it was, it was large and four-footed.
“What is that?”
“Keep watching.”
The shadow changed and moved, and then a naked man with straight black hair to the middle of his back appeared, climbing over the fence and carefully avoiding the hot wire on the top. He paused and looked around, standing like a magnificent Greek statue on the top of the fence. He looked like a Native American.
“Who the hell is that?” she asked.
“Keep watching.”
The man dropped down toward the ground on the inside of the fence, but as he descended from the top of the fence, his body changed, its form moving like quicksilver. She gaped at the recording. On top of the fence, he’d been a man. By the time he reached the ground, she was looking at a puma.
“Back that up.”
Pete did. They watched the video again.
“What…?” she breathed.
“I know. That can’t be real. Can it?”
She straightened, feeling like the world was spinning around her.
“No. It can’t. But it is.” Pete ran his hands over his face. “I don’t even… We can’t tell anybody this. We can’t show this to anybody.”
Eliza was speechl
ess. She had never seen anything like this. “Could someone have done something to this video? I mean, is that…”
“This footage hasn’t been altered. I’m telling you, the only person with access to it is me, and I’d have no reason - and no fucking idea how - to screw with it.”
“I…” She swallowed hard. “Pete, I never saw the tracks leave.”
“Do you think he’s still in the zoo?” Pete sounded frightened, and that made her afraid, too.
“I don’t know.”
He wiped his upper lip nervously. “Okay. I’m going to take another look through the cameras.”
She stood and watched as he carefully scanned the enclosures through the closed circuit cameras. Eliza saw nothing, but she didn’t expect to. Pumas were brilliant at hiding. They were ambush predators, and they counted on their powers of camouflage to keep their prey from seeing them until it was too late. She wondered if the puma was still by the snow leopard cage, watching. She wondered with a chill if their strange visitor had been watching her.
Finally, Pete said, “I don’t see anything.”
She took a steadying breath. “Right. I’ll get rid of those prints. You get rid of the video.”
“I’m going to make a copy, but I’ll set the cameras to record over last night when I’m done.” He shook his head and started working. “Eliza, I’m telling you, this is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Me, too.”
Her mind was whirling with theories, desperately trying to make what she had seen make some form of logical sense. With a rake, she returned to the grounds and obliterated the tracks, and she scuffed the prints on the cement with her boot. She ended her task by Pangur’s cage, and when she was done, she looked at him where he was still lounging on the trunk.
Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection Page 32