Smilodon

Chapter 1-3

My arms ached. I just finished the third run-through of all the ways they say to drive away a mountain lion. On the bright side, it wasn’t snarling at me anymore, but I’d swear the thing was smiling at me. Like I was funny. Like it knew what I was doing and why… but didn’t care. I took a half-step backward while waving my arms. I knew my backpack was behind me somewhere, and Grandpa’s knife could mean the difference between being a survivor or cat chow.

Then, the scariest thing yet occurred. I watched the mountain lion shift its gaze from me to something behind me. Its eyes seemed to narrow, almost like it glared at the object of its focus, and then it shifted its eyes back up to mine. In that moment, I knew it wasn’t just looking toward me. It stared directly into my eyes. The snarl came back with more force, and it made a standing lunge.

Oh s**t.

The cat’s forepaws hit my chest, and its weight and momentum drove me to the ground. My head struck the butt of my grandpa’s knife and continued down to slam into the rock shelf. The mountain lion screamed and came in to rip out my throat, but I jammed my left forearm between its jaws. Yeah, I know… stupid move, but I could survive a broken or amputated arm. I haven’t known the human yet that could survive a ripped-out throat.

Not content with gnawing on my arm, the mountain lion shredded my jacket and shirt with its claws. It wasn’t long until those claws found my torso, and I let out a scream of my own. Panic tried to set in, and I struck the mountain lion’s neck with my right fist while it continued to maul me. I felt the claws rake across my bones, and I knew I wasn’t leaving this rock shelf alive. But that didn’t mean this cat wouldn’t earn it.

Beating the thing’s neck wasn’t making any headway, and as I tried controlling the cat’s head with my forearm it was gnawing on, I figured why not? With all the panicked force I could muster, I drove the toe of my hiking boot between the cat’s hind legs. It rewarded me with a pain-fueled scream and jumped back. Yeah… I don’t care what species of mammal you are, no male enjoys getting kicked in the balls.

The pause in the fight gave me the few necessary heartbeats to grab my grandpa’s knife, open the retaining strap, and flick the sheath into the underbrush. Since I still figured I wasn’t living through this fight, I didn’t really care what happened to the knife’s sheath… as long as I had the knife.

I brought the blade around, and the movement drew the cat’s focus. It snarled at the sight of the knife. I glanced at it myself and gaped. Those engraved runes on the knife’s blade glowed with an eerie silver radiance. Well, damn… I guess the runes were magic after all.

For what felt like the longest time, the big cat just stared at me, its eyes shifting from me to the knife and back again. I would’ve sworn it recognized the knife and was gauging its chances. As I grew weaker with blood loss, it must’ve decided its chances were still good, because it returned its eyes to mine and lunged at me.

The pain of wedging my savaged left forearm between its jaws again drowned out any remnant of the agony I felt merely lifting my arm into position. But I didn’t care. If I was going down, I wanted to do everything I could to take this cat with me.

I thrust the knife toward the cat’s side, expecting I’d have to force it through its hide and muscles and tissue. The moment the tip of the blade touched the cat, that eerie radiance flared, and the knife slipped inside with almost no resistance at all. The cat screamed around my forearm, much louder and much more anguished than when I’d kicked it, and it redoubled its efforts to kill me just as I redoubled my own.

Stab after stab. Claw swipe after claw swipe. Our reason for existing came down to ending this fight and taking the other with us. I regretted not taking Biology now. Several stabs in, and I still hadn’t found the damn cat’s heart. It breathed heavy and labored, though, so I hoped I’d at least punctured a lung. But still, it wouldn’t let go.

It wasn’t long before my strength waned. Darkness rimmed my vision. I was dying. I could feel it. The oddest part was the sudden clarity. The lack of panic. Well, damn. I had a knife, and the cat had a throat. I picked a point as close to halfway between the cat’s jaws and its shoulders as I could and raked my blade across its throat. Blood erupted from the gash and threatened to drown me in the deluge.

Now, the fight left the mountain lion. Finally. I used its collapse as its own strength waned to push it to my side. If I had to die, I didn’t want to die buried under a massive cat corpse. Something about that just seemed like adding insult to injury.

My last thought as the world faded around me was that, at least, the mountain lion would harm no one else. I heard my knife striking the rock shelf, and then there was nothing.

* * * *

Gabrielle ran at a pace she could maintain for miles; she didn’t want to face the rogue fatigued after a long sprint. She heard the cougar’s screams, and she smelled the blood in the air. She wanted to believe she might still arrive in time, but in her heart, she knew she was too late.

She broke through the foliage onto a rock shelf and almost skidded to a stop. The scene was gruesome. A cougar with multiple stab wounds to its torso and a vicious s***h across its throat lay beside a man with a shredded chest and mangled arm. Blood drenched the man, and a smaller pool formed around the cougar’s corpse.

Something about the scene felt wrong. No shifter would die of the wounds she could see on the cougar. Yes, a throat s***h would take a shifter out of the fight, but unless you followed up with a beheading or used a shifter-bane weapon, the shifter would heal. The cougar’s wounds showed no sign of healing, and the man… oh, s**t. The man’s wounds were closing. He was still alive.

Her eyes fell on the knife laying just outside the man’s right hand, and she padded closer for a better view. When she saw the runes in the blade, she hissed and almost jumped back. It was a shifter-bane blade. But the man couldn’t be Magi. Shifters couldn’t turn Magi; they were not technically human.

She moved closer, low and slow. Stalking the blade as if it were alive. Reaching a vantage point for the crossguard, she saw what she sought. The blade’s artisan stamped the family mark into the blade just below the crossguard, and for the first time in a long while, Gabrielle felt true terror. That family mark was the Magnusson Glyph. The Magnusson clan was old, old power… ancient, even. No one really knew how far back their family went. This man—whoever else he might be—was Connor Magnusson’s family.

Shit. This would not end well.