by Riley Moreno
But something did happen that night, as she milled about hopping from one store to the next, nodding and smiling at a few familiar faces, somebody grabbed her from behind!
Somebody big and strong, maybe more than one person she thought as she was pulled into an alleyway. Yuri struggled, and tried to scream, but was silenced by a slap across the face before a cloth bag was thrown over her head, and darkness descended. She whimpered in fear, thrashed about as she felt herself tossed unto a shoulder. The hands gripping her felt unnaturally strong and difficult to fight against. She thought of biting, but the rough feel of the cloth bag against her flushed cheeks persuaded her otherwise. She could feel her left jaw swell even as it burned like ice to bare skin. She thought she felt the moisture of blood, but it was just her skin that had broken into a sweat caused by panic. She screamed again, but her scream was broken by the feeling of being roughly shoved into a car. Another set of hands, or maybe the same ones, she could not tell, but equally strong grabbed her hands behind her and bound them together with rough feeling rope. It was all rough, yet frightfully efficient, and Yuri broke tears as she broke into panic. She hung uncomfortably in the back, in the space between two sets of legs and the front seats. She did not fully understand what was happening, and much less why, but she knew she was in trouble and could see no way out. She could see nothing at all really with the bag over her head, and this only added to the feeling of blind terror that permeated every fiber of her being.
There was animated chatter in the vehicle which did not make any sense at all to Yuri. To her frightened, confused mind, they were obviously speaking in some sort of code. They might as well have been speaking in Arabic, because her mind was too confused to gather any meaning from the, nonetheless, English words they were using. She kept hearing strange, fantastic things like tiger-shifter, and bear-shifter, and protecting the young ones.
They did not drive for long before the noise of the square began to recede. The few minutes seemed like days to Yuri, and she soon passed out.
She was rudely jogged out of her sweet escape by a loud sound on the roof of the car she was in. It sounded like a tremendous weight had landed on the roof, causing the car to bounce along the highway. She screamed at the top of her voice as she heard the screeching of tires, the car swerving left and right to stay balanced. Another weight on the bonnet blew the head lights out and brought the car to an abrupt standstill. The engine rattled, growled and failed, the smoke escaping from the busted carburetor looked ghostly in the abrupt darkness.
The chatter in the car now was frantic, and doors were opened. The term tiger-shifter was thrown about a lot, as she was tossed aside in the rapidly emptying car. Yuri was tossed upon her hands, and winced at the pain. She desperately wished to know what was going on but could not. Damn this cloth bag!
In the darkness outside, Lucius stood twenty meters away, and watched the three bear-shifters file out of the truck they were driving. They were big. Bear shifters always were. At the age of sixteen, when they stated to fully communicate with their animal self, even the scrawny ones grew overnight.
“I hope for your sakes that the woman is okay.” He shouted out to them.
“You think you can take all three of us pussy cat? You better run on home back from where you came” The driver, who also happened to be the biggest, spat back.
Lucius stalked stealthily from left to right. They did not react by opening into a larger circle he smiled to himself in the darkness.
“You three are young. There is no need for us to fight. Just step aside and hand over the girl and we can separate in peace. You obviously have no fought a cat before. There has not been one of my kind here for decades.”
“And we want it to stay that way,” another one shot back. “First day you show up and one of us gets attacked by a tiger-right here in our woods! This girl is just the first; we are going to set an example so that any other shifter will know exactly what he is walking into when he comes our way.”
“We have been watching you for weeks now. You and your lady friend; we know what she means to you. Another one of your cat trophies no doubt,” the last one finished off the ramble. “Now step aside or you are going to die with her.”
“I find that event highly unlikely.” He said, straightening up to is full height. They were directly under the shade of several tall trees, which blocked out the light of the moon. Lucius had not picked this spot lightly, and now his eyes shone like clear glass set in the air. “Can any of you see in the dark?” he asked as the three bear-shifters charged towards him.
Ordinarily this would be an uneven fight largely to his disadvantage. Bears are phenomenally strong, even among shifters. To fight three angry shifters would have been suicide. But in taking out the headlights of the car in this carefully chosen spot, he had thrown them all into darkness. It was still an unfair fight, but it now lay largely in his favor. Something these bears were too young, and inexperienced to realize.
Lucius ducked underneath the blind swerve of the first to reach him, grabbed his shirt, and heaved upwards. The bear-shifter, the biggest of the bunch flew, screaming, high up in the air to land among the branches up above. And then there were two.
All this had happened in a flash, and the others were left confounded for a moment. Lucius passed, light as wind, quick as quicksilver between their upturned heads, and bounded toward the car. He ripped the door open, sending Yuri into more panicked screams. He flipped her over, and tore away her bonds, making sure not to tear her wrists apart in the process, and then he took the cloth bag off her face. It all happened in a flash, and Yuri could only see his retreating back as he bounded back into the fray. She could not see anything clearly, but the grace of movement told her it could only be one person. She could tell there was some sort of fight going on, but she could not tell between whom. Had Lucius just rescued her? The hands that had grabbed, and abducted her were as strong as his but lacked a certain element of control. They had been rough and callous. She started when she heard a scream in pain, and cursing. Someone had broken a leg. While she desperately wished that Lucius was okay, another forceful and angry part of her wanted him to make those men pay if he could.
The bear shifter in the trees had jumped down, hoping to land on Lucius, in a bid to knock him out. The plan had back-fired. Lucius had seen him coming, and gingerly stepped aside. The bears realized to their dismay that they were easily losing the battle. But bears are nothing if not brave, and they kept on with the fight. The driver, and the biggest, being injured, was shunted to the back, shielded by the other two. It was here that Lucius saw how the fight was going to end. He allowed them to come close, stepped aside from a direct kick to the torso, but held on to the foot nonetheless. Heaving, he tossed another up to the branches screaming.
The final one was faced with a dilemma. He had the fight before him, which every bone in his body wanted to finish despite the fact that he was now alone, but coupled to that he had to protect the injured behind him. The renowned empathy of the bears won out as he retreated back towards his fallen comrade.
“There is no need to continue fighting,” Lucius said, almost invisible in the darkness. “You know your friend’s leg will be healed in a few hours. I just want what is mine.” Lucius was sidling now towards the car, but facing the seething bear always.
He ran to the car, and grabbed Yuri, mounted her on his back, and sped off at what she was sure was close to a hundred miles per hour, maybe more. Whether because of the calm after the storm, or the fantastic nature of some of the things she had heard, she passed out again on his back, the air, by now cool because of the late hour, easing her passage to oblivion.
Chapter 7
Yuri awoke with a start. Her jaw throbbed terribly in pain, and she felt feverish all over. She had a headache that would have sent two people screaming to the aspirin bottle. Plus, she had just had the strangest dream. One look around the room she was in however, told her that she had not been dreaming at all. Lucius s
at lightly on a chair in the corner. Her eyesight slowly adjusted, and his features slowly came into focus across the room.
“You should rest,” He said gently, his face holding no expression.
“Who are you?” Yuri asked, still trying to understand. “My head feels like somebody opened it up and dropped hot lead in it. How did I…?”
Lucius crossed the ten meters in a flash to gently catch her head before it hit the floor. He placed the head of his peri gently on the pillow of his king-sized bed. Her breathing felt even against his wrist as he did so.
Yuri woke the next morning, Sunday, in her grandfather’s house with more questions than answers.
“Who were those people?!” she asked, through the pain in her swollen, left jaw.
“Bear shifters,” her grandfather said nonchalantly as he applied medicine to her injured wrists and jaws. “Luckily you had a tiger shifter watching over you. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened to you?”
“Ouch,” she said as she tried to bend her head to look into his light-skinned face, and inadvertently pressed her jaw against his hand. “Did you just say shifters? You mean like in the movies? You mean like vampires and werewolves?”
“Hold still young’un,” he admonished gently as he resumed his treatment. “Now I have never seen a vampire. Don’t know if they exist but I do know those are no wolf shifters or werewolves like you call’em in these parts. The bears won’t allow it. They’ll probably chase’em out the first week they show up here.” He chuckled at his own remark.
Yuri’s head, for the first time in hours, was not spinning because of the headache. “You mean Lucius is a tiger shifter?” she asked incredulously. She almost stammered on the word shifter. It sounded fantastic.
Old man Joe shook his head in gruntlement, “Can’t you see that walk, like he is gliding. I don’t think I have ever seen him stumble before. Always looking regal and self-sufficient…” he trailed away.
“Like a cat!” Yuri finished it for him, “Ouch!”
“Hold still.”
“How come you and papa never talked about this none?” Yuri asked, the childish pout on her lips causing her grandfather to chuckle.
“I don’t think your papa has ever seen one before. We certainly did not talk about it with him; your late grandma and me. The bears keep pretty much to themselves, and the tigers, restless spirits had started leaving town to search for excitement elsewhere. I am talking maybe fifty years ago; your papa was still a wee toddler back then”
“It’s not only papa-the whole town seems clueless about this whole other community within their community. I mean there is a tiger walking around in human skin, and they don’t even know!”
“Well not everybody is oblivious,” Old man Jacob’s eyes glinted with soft laughter, “The really old folk know. I mean we know about the bears. We know enough to stay away from their paths, and to shut up about them. Their ways are simple; you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.”
“And Lucius? What about his kind?”
“Well, all of us old folk in this community grew up with him around. He was already a young man then. I mean he looks a bit older now, but he is still the guy we remember: the cat who could not find his peri!”
“Peri? You mean as in Peri heights?”
“Well yes and not exactly. You see for tiger shifters, and I am sure this goes too for other cat shifters, there exists that one person, for whom they are willing to go any lengths to protect. That person is a peri. It means shiny, and you know how cats love shiny. This town is so named because it was founded by a bunch of tiger shifter couples-a bunch of peries!” So that is why he went all out to save you that night. He would have died trying!”
It was all so fantastic to Yuri. She had a thousand questions all struggling to reach the tip of her tongue, she wanted to know more, but she could feel sleep coming over her quickly. She only had time to mutter one before she passed out again.
“How is he?”
Old man Jansen put the medication away, as she slept. He knew Lucius was out trying to find out who the second tiger was so that peace could be maintained with the bears.
Chapter 8
Yuri resumed her duties the following Wednesday, she had healed remarkably quickly, and that day bore no marks on her body of her previous struggle. She went head first into the school milieu, taking her classes with added vigor, happy to be alive. She told nobody of her debacle. It would have been too hard to explain anyway.
She tried to act normal, but a part of her mind would not let her forget that some of those seated in her classes were part of a different breed altogether. Generally benign they were, as they had shown over the years, but also capable of great violence as she had experienced first-hand during the previous week.
There were surprised stares and whispers in the yard of the school campus after school. Lucius stood in the middle of the yard waiting for her after school. The kids swooned, and adult jaws dropped when he grabbed her by the waist and kissed her full on the mouth in front of everybody. They completely ignored everybody.
Yuri raised her eyes at the Porsche situated behind him.
“I had to have a way to transport the bear leader over to your school.”
Anger flashed dark, and hard across Yuri’s face as she tried to push him aside to have a go at whoever was in the black Porsche.
“Hold on a sec,” Lucius said, restraining her. “He is here for peace. He did not sanction whatever happened that other night and the culprits have been punished.”
“And you trust him?!” Yuri asked still struggling against his restraint. “You trust those wood hugging maniacs?”
“Hey, hey he is a friend-I knew him when I just got into the navy seals eighteen years ago. He was about to get out. Back then I knew he was a bear, but I never knew he was one of those form around here. His presence has really shaped the last few days for me. Two seals on his tail, that hidden tiger could not stay hidden very long.”
“You are a Navy Seal?” Yuri asked skeptically.
“Ex-seal.”
“Ever killed in combat?” she asked marveling at how childlike she became every time she encountered Lucius.
“I have fought my own wars,” was all he said.
At that point another man stepped out of the Porsche. He was shorter than Lucius, but had a similar confident air which she was sure had to do with the leadership role he occupied in his community. He strode over to meet them. Yuri was aware of having seen and heard talk about alphas in books and movies, but all she had seen did not do justice to the quiet, assured authority of the man now beside.
Power is the most powerful aphrodisiac, and despite herself Yuri felt a thrill run through her all the way down to the pit of her stomach.
The outside yard was deserted now, and the wind whistled in the distance. The two shifters nodded to each other, and started making for the door to the school.
“Wait, where are you guys going?” Yuri asked as they by-passed her.
“The unknown tiger works here,” the bear man answered. “We want to ask him nicely to leave town.”
“There is another tiger in the school? Who?” She asked, shocked. At that point the double doors that led into the school burst open, both pieces flying in different directions. A huge tiger, in the flesh burst through. It was white, not orange as you would expect. It stood its ground poised to pounce.
“Get back!” Lucius barked at Yuri, who by that time was too stunned to move.
In a flash, the space where the bear shifter had stood was now occupied by a bear, again larger than normal. Almost double the size of a regular bear. Yuri was backing away, and saw Lucius himself metamorphose into and orange tiger, just as large as the other one who was poised to attack.
The three of them cast a frightening vision standing there in the yard. The whole fabric of the space about them was antagonistic. Something dreadful was about to happen, and the whole atmosphere around them seemed to reflect it.
> All the animals roared, showing off their teeth and claws. It was terrible to behold. Then a strange thing happened. What should have been animal babble and meaningless roars to humans, sounded completely sane and rational to Yuri.
She could understand what they were saying. She could hear them clearly as if they spoke plain ordinary English. The animal-speak, though sounding primitive to outsiders, expressed feelings she could not put into words if she had tried. It was our human language that was unintelligible and primitive.
She stepped forth in boldness. Roaring all the way herself. She realized she sounded like a tiger, but she was sure the bear understood her perfectly. She was between Lucius and his friend, fearlessly standing between them, roaring out as fiercely as the next beast.
A few minutes later, things had quieted down. The bargain was struck, Mr. Slater the new history teacher was leaving town. All three men stood unabashedly naked before the lone woman.
“What?” Yuri asked. The curious look on both Lucius and the Bear man’s face were amusing. “I might as well know your name now.”
“Marcus”
“Well Lucius and Marcus. Nice ring on it.”
“You do know are pregnant right?” Lucius said smiling, “That is why you can understand us on such profound level. You are carrying my child!”
Yuri felt she already suspected this. She could feel an enlarging of her life, of herself deep within her being.
“So are you guys going to do this or what?” Mr. Slater asked from behind, all manner of shyness gone from him that afternoon. “The ménage is supposed to be the bond that seals our deal.”
“You talk like you plan on watching!” Marcus said slyly, “You can count on us keeping our end of the bargain, now we would like to see your back and be assured that you have kept yours.”
Mr. Slater said nothing. He just turned and started walking away, the finality of his previously suppressed graceful movements suggested she would not see him around this parts again, not until all those who took part in the sharing of the founder’s peri had passed away. A cat did not share his toys lightly.