Collins’s hand moves from the holstered handgun on her hip and shifts toward the tranquilizer rifle slung over her back. Dressed in camouflage, carrying a backpack and armed like a guerrilla, she looks like she should be in a Red Dawn reboot. I’m dressed the same, but right now, with me all hunched over and uncomfortable, she’s the only one who really looks the part. “Or maybe another big cat,” she says.
The realization causes me to stand up straight and ignore the molten lava between my legs. Like Collins, I reach for my rifle. But while hers contains a tranquilizer dart, mine contains a tracking device. We’re not exterminators. We’re only here to find out what people are seeing. In this case, the creature of choice is a black, cat-woman. Over the past year, Collins and I have investigated scads of creature reports, including chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, a handful of ghost sightings, poltergeists, UFO sightings, alien abductions and natural phenomena. If you don’t count the 300-foot tall monster that laid waste to Boston—and Bigfoot, which we found and tagged a few months later—the FC-P department of the DHS has once again become a black hole of wasted time. That’s if you’re only looking at our investigations into the strange. We’ve also been busy building cases against several people involved in the debacle that led to thousands of deaths at the hands, and feet—that’s awful—of an ancient vengeance goddess genetically merged with a murdered little girl named Maigo. I shake my head at the thought. Nemesis. That a laboratory could take the DNA of a girl and merge it with something probably long dead, and horrible, to create a gigantic, city-destroying monster, still sounds impossible. Yet, that’s what happened. And she stomped her way south, from Maine to Boston, eating people, whales and everything else with a heartbeat. With each meal, she grew, every pound of flesh eaten transferred to her own mass. But she wasn’t just eating. She decimated everything in her path—homes, ships, entire cities and everything the military threw at her—until her thirst for vengeance was sated by the dramatic slaying of Maigo’s father.
But whatever is hunting us now, it isn’t Nemesis. She’s hard to miss. Whatever this is...it’s good at hiding. I spin around, taking in every tree, searching every shadow.
Very good at hiding.
Rustling brush spins me and Collins around, rifles raised. We won’t kill whatever is there, but if Collins’s aim is true—and it usually is—her target shouldn’t make it more than a couple of steps.
The brush shifts again. Low to the ground. Something small and black flits in and out of view.
I lower my rifle. “Was that a skunk?”
Collins sighs and lowers her weapon. “Looked more like a house cat to me.”
“Was walking kind of funny for a house cat.” The hair on my arms springs up as I speak, and my subconscious tightens my grip on the rifle. Before I fully comprehend the small creature I saw, or respond to the fresh wave of panic coursing through my body, a breeze blows past.
Moving with the breeze is a shadow that smells like roses.
I react on instinct, raising the rifle as I spin toward the shadow. The rifle, armed with a tracking device, will do little. My attacker doesn’t know that, though, and reacts to the pointed weapon with violence and intelligence. The barrel is thrust into the air. The fired dart is sent sailing into the forest.
I don’t care. My gaze is held by a pair of yellow eyes, both feline and human at the same time. They’re framed by a feminine face, again human, but with a small nose and whiskers. The cat-woman. She’s real.
And pissed.
The rifle barrel bends in her hands. An amazing feat of strength that I would applaud, if I wasn’t concerned about the same technique being used on my arms.
Collins takes aim with the tranq rifle, but never gets to fire. The cat-woman spins and kicks out a clawed foot, knocking the rifle to the tall grass around us. Continuing her fluid spin, the cat-woman slams her foot into my chest, knocking me back against a tree and knocking every molecule of oxygen from my lungs.
Collins goes for her sidearm. She’s a quick draw, but the cat-woman has leapt into the air—twenty feet into the air—flipping up and over Collins. The creature lands behind her. Collins spins around to fire, but her weapon is yanked up. A single shot tears into the air, garnering several small squeaks of fright from the nearby brush. Collins shouts in pain as she’s forcefully disarmed. But she’s a warrior. She gives up the weapon so she can use another. Her fists.
The cat-woman doesn’t see the first blow coming. Collins’s fist connects solidly with the side of the furry head. I recognize the strike. She was aiming for a knockout blow, to end the fight without having to kill the creature. But the cat-woman doesn’t go down. The creature staggers for two steps, shakes it off and lunges, tackling Collins to the ground.