Chapter One: Skink's Luck
The morning sun shone bright over the forest, cool and tangy with the snap of early spring. Bobcat lay in the doorway of his tree stump and blinked for another moment. Then with a yawn, he stretched himself outside onto the grass along the riverbank.
The River flowed quickly here, rocks tickling the shallow water and making it trip and laugh. Bobcat smiled at the leaf shadows dancing with the morning breeze over the River's surface, at the smell of the flowers' first bloom in the woods around him, at the birds just starting to call out, wishing one another a happy equinox and wondering if they could borrow each other's brooms to start their spring-cleaning.
He took a breath and puffed it out. A nice morning to be out without a hangover.
"Well, well, well," came a familiar voice from behind him, and Bobcat turned to see Garson Rix hopping out from the trees. "Usually when I pass here in the morning, all I get is snores. What, no catnip last night?"
She settled into the grass next to him, the sunlight catching the white swirls in her black fur, dazzling from the tips of her ears to the nub of her tail, and Bobcat suddenly wasn't sure if he was breathing or not. Oh, yes, definitely a nice morning to be out without a hangover.
He realized he was staring when Garson cocked her head at him. "I don't know, though; you are looking a little glassy-eyed." She reached up a paw, pressed it to his nose. "Are you off the catnip?"
"Me?" Bobcat got ahold of himself and gave a laugh, but quietly, hoping she wouldn't pull her paw away. "Never. Though I haven't had a roll in three days, I'll have you know. You're a bad influence on me."
"Do tell." A smile spread through her whiskers, and a tingle spread over Bobcat's spine. "Well, if you're not busy tonight, I've got some more of that eggplant." She gave his nose a little tap. "I know it's not rabbit stew, but you seemed to like it last week."
He winced. "You're never gonna let me forget that stew crack, are you?"
Garson put a paw to her chin, seemed to consider for a moment, then shook her head. Bobcat gave a growl. "Shouldn't you be at work, bunny? I understand they can't run the Farms without you."
"Just on my way, kitten." She stood and stretched, her ears spread, her nose twitching, her dark eyes half-closed. "Mmmm. Lovely morning, isn't it?"
Bobcat could only nod. "Yeah," he got out. "Lovely."
She rubbed her whiskers, gave him a nod, and started down the riverbank. "I'll see you tonight, then."
"If I'm not busy!" he called after her, but she just gave her cottony tail a flick, leaped to the first stepping-stone, and scurried from one to the next till she reached the opposite bank, Bobcat watching till she was lost in the trees.
Well, this morning just kept getting better and better. He yawned again and figured the best thing to do right now would be to wade across the River; find the biggest, laciest fern leaf he could; fold it into a net; fill it with mud, rocks, moss, and maybe a little tree sap; carry it up to Ree's Meadow; pick a bright yellow daisy to lay gently on top; carry the bundle through the woods to Rat's house; sneak inside; and dump the whole mess over the rodent's head. Bobcat was sure Rat wouldn't be up yet, and it would be a real shame for him to miss such a lovely morning.
Bobcat chuckled, moved down the bank, and slid into the River. The stones in the bed slipped a little under his paws, but since the water here barely reached his chest, he just watched his step, leaned against the current, and enjoyed the coolness rushing through his fur. Out onto the other bank he waded, then shook himself, whole body first, then each paw--front, front, back, back--a quick flick of his tail, and he settled onto the warm rocks to lick his fur down.
But as he started on his left flank, he began to notice a strange little noise under the River's rushing and the leaves' rustling and the birds' warbling: a dry, whispery noise, like the wind sighing through an old and dying maple tree. Bobcat stopped, focused on the sound, and found that it was coming from a big, flat rock just down the bank.
Bobcat tapped a claw against his nose. Did he really want to know what Skink was up to this time? Sure, most of the words the lizard used went in one ear and out the other, but his weird stories were usually good for a laugh or two....
So why not? Bobcat rose, padded over to the rock, and squatted down beside the mailbox to peer under. And there lay Skink curled around a pebble, his claws stroking it, his eyes closed, the dry, rustling moan Bobcat had heard keening from his parted lips.
For a while, Bobcat just watched, but finally he clicked his tongue and asked, "There some kinda problem here, Skink?"
Skink's eyes drew open. "Ohhh..." he said. "Ohhh..."
"Ah." Bobcat nodded. "Well, that sure clears it up."
Skink was shaking his head. "Oh, Bobcat," he whispered. "It's terrible, just terrible...."
Bobcat waited, but Skink only moaned again. Bobcat blew out a breath. "Okay. Fine. Be that way. I got things to do, so I'll see you--"
"My luck, Bobcat. It's gone, just...gone...."
"Your what?"
"My luck." Skink's voice broke, and a few drops trickled from the corners of his eyes. "Look." He grasped the pebble in his claws and held it up.
Bobcat looked at it. He looked at it again. He looked at it with one eye, then with the other. Each time, he saw a pebble, a small, not quite round pebble.
"See? My luck is gone." Skink let go another moan and wrapped himself around the pebble again.
"Uh-huh." Bobcat eyed the lizard for a moment. "Skink, you been under that rock too long; why don't you just come on out and get a little spring air into you? Believe me, you'll feel a lot better."
Skink was moving his head back and forth. "No, you don't understand. My grandmother, she said...she said that to lose your luck... She said it was too terrible, too terrible to contemplate, too terrible for everyone. She said--" And Skink's eyes sprang open, his whole body stiffening. He jumped up, shot out of his cave, and jerked to a stop pointing straight at Bobcat. "Ohhh!" he cried. "Ohhh!"
Bobcat stared, the fur prickling at the back of his neck.
"Bobcat!" Skink squeaked. "Bobcat! You've got to be careful! You've got to hide! You've got to go home right now and stay in bed for...I don't know, for a long time! If I've lost my luck...oh, Bobcat, you've got to!"
"Wait a minute; I what? What're you--"
"My grandmother, Bobcat! She said! She said that when she lost her luck, something awful happened to Bobcat! And then, oh, then she said the worst thing in the world happened! The worst thing in the world!"
Bobcat rolled his eyes. "Ah. Another story."
"No, Bobcat, this comes straight from my grandmother! We've got to do something!"
"Skink, I--"
"Right now! Before it's too late!"
"Look, Skink, I've gotta--"
"No, Bobcat! You've got to listen! She said--"
"Lizard?" Bobcat let his claws spring out, crooked one till it just touched Skink's neck, and Skink froze, his eyes wide. "Now, you can have all the little fantasies you want; I don't care. But you leave me out of 'em, okay? The last thing I need is you mixing me up in some weird reptile story." Bobcat ran his claw slowly along Skink's side, but the lizard stayed just as cold and still as a stone. "Now, I got better things to do with my day than listen to some crazy lizard, so you have fun under your rock, okay? I gotta go."
Bobcat stood, turned, and padded back up the bank toward the woods, just shaking his head when Skink called to him. Then he only heard the birds singing, the River behind him splashing, the morning breeze rustling warm in the trees. And a dry sobbing now, very quiet, just underneath it all.
"Feh!" Bobcat snorted. He moved through the undergrowth and into the woods, the rushing of the River fading as he wound between the trees. It was still
a nice morning, and he was determined not to give Skink another thought.
#
The forest floor spread cool and shady around him, spots of sun dappling the loam where they'd managed to dance down through the tree canopy. Birds practiced their spring melodies in the trees above him, and Bobcat started humming along. The scents of the forest wildflowers drifted past, their pollen spicing the air just the way he liked it.
After he was finished with Rat, maybe he'd head upriver to Ottersgate. On a morning like this, Lorn Gedolkin would be setting up one of his water polo tourneys; Bobcat could spend the morning at the game, win a few bets, maybe check out the catnip at Jaybirds' Emporium. Or he could even head out to the woods around Donal's Lake, pick some of his own. Both Garson and wild catnip, what an evening that would make!
But first things first. The edge of the Brackens would be coming up here in a minute with its thick tangles of briers and blackberries and, most important, the best fern leaves north of the grottoes around Beaverpool. Then it'd be on to Ree's Meadow and the raw materials, up to Rat's house, and there, the start of a perfect day.
Warned by the smell of blackberry blossoms, Bobcat slowed his pace. A few more steps, and he came out from under the tree canopy; the forest floor ended in an abrupt but fairly gentle drop-off, and Bobcat was looking out over the shallow, brier-choked valley known as the Brackens.
The sharp sea of underbrush made him smile. He knew this place pretty well, had chased plenty of rabbits out here before Garson had, well, before the two of them had come to an understanding, and the ferns he had in mind were just north of where he stood. So he started along the edge of the bluff, took another lungful of blackberry scent...
And stopped, the fur along the back of his neck prickling.
He shook his head, sniffed again...
And got nothing. No smell. At all. The blackberries, the wildflowers, the tree sap, the mulch of the forest floor, even his own scent, they were all gone.
Bobcat blinked, sat down, wiped at his nose, but it didn't help. There was just nothing in the air.
A second's thought gave him the answer, though: he must have stirred up a lot of dirt on his way through the woods, and it was clogging his nose. That was it. He smiled. When he got to the ferns, he could use a few to blow the ol' sniffer clear, and then everything'd be back to normal.
That settled, he was about to stand and get on his way when he noticed how quiet it had become; the breeze wasn't rustling the leaves anymore, and in the silence, not a chirp, not a whistle, not an insect's buzz nor a lizard's scuffling. He twitched his ears back and forth, but he couldn't even hear his own breathing, the silence thick around him, heavier and deeper than the silence of those long winter midnights when he was too wasted to sleep and too tired to move and could only stare at the walls and wait for the dawn....
Bobcat shook his head. Could everyone have gone somewhere? But where? And why? He would have smelled a forest fire, and the birds would be calling alarms from every treetop. The same with a flood, and the River had seemed calm enough earlier. It just didn't make sense.
He stood and blinked, trying to think, and slowly began to notice something else. It was happening so gradually that he had to stare hard before he was sure, but...but...
Everything green, the wild grass, the leaves overhead, the sprouts and buds and every tiny berry, all were changing color, were fading to a dull, overcast gray. And as all the green seeped away, Bobcat watched the blue of the sky become a sickly white, like the white in the eyes of a boiled fish.
Panic tickled his chest, but he pushed it down with a swallow. A catnip flashback, that's what this had to be. Sudden dizzy spells, fits of uncontrollable laughter, manic twitching, he'd had them all, and this couldn't be anything but some new, weird kind. He forced another swallow. All he had to do was sit in this gray, scentless silence, breathe evenly, and it would pass after a while. It always did.
So when the leaves and sprouts and buds kept changing, their dank gray continuing to deepen, Bobcat blew out a breath, settled back, and waited for the green to return.
But it didn't. Instead of green, as Bobcat stared, the forest around him slowly turned a thick, dark red, a tide the color of blood washing through the trees and over the ground.
That was it. Heart fluttering like a sparrow's, nothing left in his mouth to swallow, he only wanted to run back to the River, run back and throw himself in and wash the silence from his ears and the redness from his eyes; he'd even leaped to his paws, ready to take off into the woods, when a sound reached him, the first he'd heard in minutes.
A smile pulled his whiskers. Was the flashback over?
But the sound was odd, a low rumbling behind him getting louder every second, getting louder and more coherent till he recognized it, his hackles rising and his pupils going wide. It wasn't a rumbling; it was a growling, a deep and angry growling. And it was coming closer.
Breath quick and shallow, fear an acid taste on his tongue, redness pouring into his eyes and growling into his ears, all thought of running vanished. He sat frozen, his whole body trembling, nothing in the world as far as he could tell but this vast, red, disembodied anger.
And it wanted him to turn around. How he knew that, he had no idea, but in a way that he had never known anything before, he knew that the thing behind him wanted him to turn, was demanding that he turn and face it.
He couldn't stop his paws. He inched around and raised his head and looked back along the edge of the bluff....
And it was there.
A blinding yellow-orange it blazed, a solid mass of fire brighter than the sun standing at midday but spotted all over with black rings as charred and dead as burned tree branches. Mind spinning, he heard the growling deepen, and the flames flowed into the shape of a huge cat, towering over him, its tail lashing the bloody undergrowth and its eyes, oh, its eyes, searing down with the deep and raging reds of an onrushing forest fire.
The fire of those eyes swept over him, and with a roar like thunder, the thing sprang. Ebon claws flashed from a paw bigger than his whole head and slapped him aside with a force that knocked the wind out of him, sent him tumbling and gasping, and pitched him over the edge of the bluff down into the brambles, thorns snagging and tearing his fur, till he hit the ground under the bushes with a splintering crash.
A stink of blood and singed fur filled his nose, made him sneeze, and shocked him to awareness, the afterglow of fire and claws and terrible burning eyes flashing before him every time he blinked. He was lying on his side, and when he moved to drag himself into a sitting position, the dirt rubbing into what felt like hundreds of cuts made him grit his teeth almost as much as the pinpricks of circulation returning to his paws. He forced several shaky breaths, then raised his head and traced the path of his descent back up the slope through the litter of broken branches to the top of the incline.
Birds sang in the trees, he could hear, the leaves green and rustling in the morning breeze once more. The sky shone blue, the air again sweet with blackberry scent, but mixed now with the sour stench of his own fear.
Most important, though, that impossible, horrible cat thing was gone.
Bobcat wanted to go home. He wanted to go home, pile all the furniture against the door, and stuff his nose with any scrap of catnip he could find, just turn his mind off, not have to think, and go far, far away for a very long time.
But he stayed crouched under the brambles. That thing could be hiding somewhere, waiting for him. It could even be waiting back home, waiting because it knew he would want to get all catnipped up. He would be completely defenseless then, and it would tear him to tiny shreds.
That was it, Bobcat was sure; those eyes still burning at the back of his head made him feel certain that the monster was playing with him. And here he was, cowering like a rabbit in the brier patch.
He almost laughed at that, but the sound caught in his throat, those eyes boiling it away to nothing and fear locking his mind up again. What could it have b
een?
No. He shook his head, tried to clear his thoughts. He needed to think, needed a plan, but the pain in his sides made those eyes blaze up, made the shaking start; it was out there waiting, waiting for him....
"Stop it!" he hissed, pounding his paws against the ground. He had to get ahold of himself, had to think about something else, anything else: about the trees, which might turn red again; about the breeze, which might disappear at any moment; about the flashing claws, the horrible eyes, the angry growling of that fiery monster--
"No! No! No!" he shouted, grasping for anything in his head that wasn't that giant cat,...and there he found another giant cat, someone he hadn't thought about in years. He grabbed at the memories, pounced and held them fast, pushed out every other thought, forced himself to be there, two decades ago, slogging through the snow....
#
The snow of his first winter after running away from home, a winter that had turned into the worst in generations. Pushing through the drifts, soaked to the skin, knowing that the dark clouds creeping up the valley behind him held another storm, he had staggered on, and just as the wind began to grow wet, he had stumbled into a cave, sprawled onto the floor, not even seeing the huge paws in front of his nose for a minute or two. But when he had and had raised his head, had found himself staring up at a tawny cat ten times his size...
He had cowered there while the old lioness muttered about throwing him out, but she'd finally picked him up and set him beside the fire. Shemka Harr she had called herself--it meant "ancient teacher," Bobcat later learned--and she had dubbed him Ghareen, the word for snow where she came from.
During that whole long winter, they had played riddle games, caught cave fish, and foraged whenever the storms let up. She had taught him some of the language of her homeland, the great southern Savannah, and had filled the cave with stories of the Twelve Curials and the heroic folk of earlier times. Everything flooded back to Bobcat crouched there under the brambles: her rumbling voice, her musky scent, the way she would cock her head as she told him about the Lady Raven and the phases of the moon, about the Lord Lion's mane shining down over the earth by day, all the stories she had spun by the fire.
The Blood Jaguar Page 1