Elijah. Jacquelyn Frank
to find aid, a place where she would find a little assistance in his care, but it was not a logical option given the clear urgency of the situation. The ideal alternative of taking him to his own people, well, that was an even farther-fetched possibility considering they were even farther away than her people were. Besides, the most renowned Demon healer in all of the world was at her court at the moment.
The warrior was not a slim man. He was built in every way a warrior needed to be built to maintain his strength and prowess. The Captain of such warriors…well, he was of a most impressive stature, to say the least. Though Siena was tall and quite strong in her own right, his biceps could very well be larger than her muscular thighs.
The distance from help worried her most because the warrior needed medical aid and she doubted she would be able to give him anything near what he would require. He was an entirely different species and probably not as receptive to Lycanthropic ways of healing. It could very well be the equivalent of giving a human patient to the care of a veterinarian. The veterinarian medic could be at the height of his expertise, but even his best care could do more harm than good.
Her people had been at war with the warrior’s race far longer than they had been at peace with them. Their knowledge of Demon anatomy was fairly limited, and even that information was restricted to which vital organ would make for the quickest death. With peace only fourteen years old between their races, who would have thought to trade medical knowledge? As it was, they had only recently traded ambassadors.
The Queen rose to her feet, her form lengthening into a proud and Amazonian stature. Nude, as she was at present, or fully clothed, there would never be a doubt as to her sex. She was golden skinned and lushly curved in spite of the obvious cut of her muscular, fit body. She was a huntress and warrior in her own right, a proud and pure Diana, and it radiated from every inch of her. However, the contradiction of a head full of thick, golden, spiraling curls that tumbled down to the middle of her thigh, and the bold curves of her sex made her appear no less feminine than Aphrodite herself. Her enigmatic way of smiling and the natural flirtation in her stride only added to the imagery.
The Lycanthrope goddess seemed to make a decisive choice on her next course of action as her sharp, golden gaze took in all of her surroundings one last time. Soon after, she shook her head again, the long coils of her hair coming to life as she did so. They began to slip silkily over her skin, wrapping her almost lovingly in their soft length. The spreading coat of hair became fur once more, only this time the form she became was half cat, half woman.
This was the shape of the Werecat, Siena’s third and final form. Tall and beautifully shaped as the woman she was, but with the fur and claws, ears and face, and whiskers and tail of the mountain lion. Half woman, half cat, with the best of both worlds at her disposal. And that included the strength that would be required for her to lift the warrior into her arms.
The warrior, she noted to herself as she began to gather up his dead weight into her cradling grasp, was brawny and well muscled, weighing in significantly for his height of over six feet, even if he had not been completely unconscious. He had remarkably broad shoulders, almost too wide for her to encompass with her arm. There wasn’t an ounce of lighter fat marring his trim waist and thighs. It was all the heavy thickness of a finely honed physique, muscled from head to toe, no part wasted, nothing of his structure resembling softness.
In spite of this impressive mass, she lifted him in her arms almost easily, drawing him close to herself as she began to stride across the field. Her sight was made for darkness, everything lighting up in sharp contrasting shades of black and white. It was bright as day for her as she carried her burden into the trees.
They might have presented quite a sight had anyone been close enough to see them, but a quick scent of the air assured the Queen that all enemies had retreated to places unknown, and all other living creatures had pretty much followed suit. They wouldn’t even know that the mountain lion’s scream came with a fear compulsion that was so powerful, it would force almost anything within its range to run in terror—even some of the more powerful Nightwalkers.
As the Werecat moved through the forest, picking her way with purpose of direction and leaving as little a trail as possible, she recalled that there had been more than humans in the party that had ambushed this warrior. She was aware of the renegade Demon females, mother and daughter, who had chosen to align themselves with their race’s enemies out of a disproportioned sense of revenge, all for a tragic mistake no one could have prevented, not even the powerful Demons.
It had been nearly half a year ago, the eve of last Beltane, that the Demons’ usually festive holiday had been shadowed by the aftermath of the war these traitorous females had begun. Siena was part of the Demon forces the day they had been forced into a massive battle in order to protect their own from a slaughter directed by the warped will of those females. It was this battle that had given her a glimpse into the capabilities of the great Warrior Captain. He had impressed her. So much so that finding him in this predicament was somewhat baffling.
Besides his fighting prowess, she had noted the Demon had been particularly affected by the fact that the female Druid who had been targeted had been pregnant at the time. The child she had carried was just as much the focus of retribution as she and her Demon mate were, and the warrior had been incensed to a personal level, though the child was not his, nor did he have any of his own.
Lycanthrope males did not usually feel this sort of empathy with children until they were fathers themselves, and even then it was just as common as not for males to go about their business and leave the rearing of children to the women. It was an instinct that was often determined by the natural behaviors of the animal the male transformed into. Changelings were a female-dominant society in any event. The females outnumbered the males almost eight to one. They had always been the dominant populating sex, but war had made them even more so. The male ambition for battle had driven their numbers down.
There were powerful matriarchal morals in a society of such proportions, and they were quite proud of that. As a whole, they rarely had motivation to seek out a battle other than the hunt for food or in self-defense. But even in the senselessness of war, the idea of setting out to hurt a defenseless and innocent child was completely abhorrent to her people. The vengeful behavior of the renegade females from the Demon warrior’s race was a perverted form of a mother’s protectiveness when her offspring was threatened.
Siena stopped abruptly, her ears twitching as she took in short whiffs of breath, scenting the area for danger. She felt animals scurrying beneath the remnants of deciduous vegetation on the forest floor, but other than that, there was nothing out of the ordinary. The silence was understandable, considering she was crossing the territory in this form, but the blood spoor trail the Demon was leaving behind could attract another predator.
They were over a mile away from the original battle site and there was a stream nearby. She could take the time to bathe and dress the rest of the wounds and cover their trail more efficiently, as was her instinct, to prevent them from being tracked. But the sun was already breaking through the trees, and once it began to touch her, she would become too sick and too weak to get them to shelter. Though a day lying in the shaded forest under the sun would not kill her, it would take her some time to recover from the resulting illness. It would certainly mean the death of the man who needed her to be in top shape in order to save his life.
Siena decided to risk being tracked. There would be water where they were headed and she was quickly running out of time. As she moved with remarkable speed for one so burdened, she continued to consider the Demon women who had perpetrated this crime against their former comrade. She knew about Ruth and her unhealthy relationship with her child. Siena had been part of those who had initially discovered the betrayal.
There was no animal on earth that stagnated its child’s growth by denying it the liberty of leaving the den or nest to discover how to fend for itself. Somewhere in evolution there had been a mutation in bipedal humanoid societies that had allowed this to become possible and, sometimes, even the norm. Though evolution was a natural process, Siena had always felt this to be an unnatural mutation. But who could be completely sure? Humanoids were capable of a great deal of aberrant behavior that conflicted with the natural order of living in harmony with one’s surroundings.