Tigers were not pack hunters. They were solitary by nature. Apex predators.
They were not wholly tiger. Mist found it easier to remember this than most of her kindred as they ran through the wilds on silent paws. One day she would take over as the tribe’s shaman. Her white fur had marked her power upon her very first shift and she strove to live up to the expectations and responsibilities that came with her power and privilege.
She ran at the back of the group, the most conspicuous of the hunters. Not only for her white fur, but for the cloth wrap that twined about her form, twisting and flowing as if it had a life unto itself. Pale blue, it wrapped about her feline form as she ran, giving her the appearance of wings as the ends billowed out from her back, where the cloth held her staff. An heirloom of the tribe, made with the same forgotten secrets that had gone into making her cloth to protect her modesty when she shifted and signal her power.
On any normal hunt, none of this would matter. Most of the wildlife, even the mutations, that dwelled in the wilds were easy to mentally invade. It was one of the first tricks she’d learned; blocking herself from others perceptions with her mind. Not true invisibility, in some ways this was better. No scent, no sound, sometimes she could even manage to subvert the sense of touch.
That would not work on today’s prey.
Zombies did not possess true minds for her to invade. Like fungus or insects, the ravenous undead were simply immune to her influence. At least, this kind. She’d never had the opportunity to test herself against a vampire. Why would she? They kept to their feeding pens, where they kept what remained of the human population as chattel. They rarely had cause to venture into the wilds her people called home.
It wasn’t exactly a truce so much as aligned disinterest. Neither had what the other wanted. Usually. Some vampires did hunt shifters. Their blood was powerful and therefore valuable. The slaves they could be made into even more so. There were almost no free werewolves left. Their will had been suborned by the vampires generations ago. An entire population of bloodweres. Blood shifters, addicted to vampire blood and feeding, their free will surrendered in favor of power.
Mist put thoughts of vampires from her mind. Today, they hunted zombies. A horde had roamed into her tribe’s territory, slaughtering everything they came across and driving away prey. Zombies brought problems. Their bites, while not infectious to her people, could prove fatal as the virus that reanimated them met with the one already in a shapeshifters body that made them more than human.
Worse were the consequences of letting a zombie horde go unchecked. Apart from their rampant slaughter of all life around them, they could infect things other than humans. A mutant that stumbled into a zombie horde and rose as an undead was usually a special kind of abomination. Wildly savage and dangerous. Then there were the vampires they might attract. Many of the blood suckers could command zombies and so would come to harvest them, collecting them to use as shock troops.
And of course, there was always the possibility of a zombie surviving long enough, devouring enough, to eventually regain awareness and become a revenant. Intelligent and far more powerful than a regular zombie, a revenant could bring order to a horde, transforming a collection of raging mouths into a force capable of utilizing tactics and strategy to hunt. That could not be allowed to happen.
So, they hunted.
The smell grows stronger. The thought came from Pine near the front.
Tracks, added Brook from the east. They passed this way.
Circle around, Mist sent. We shall trap them against the cliffs. It was more than words she sent. The concept flowed from her as well. The very heart of her idea and plan.
This was beyond her hunting companions. It was why they needed her. Without her, they would be hunting alone, unable to communicate in their bestial forms. Even their sharings carried with them hints of growls and snarls, often accompanied by vague scents. Perfect clarity was hers alone.
I see them Rain sent, and the stench of the rotting flesh and undead sickness came with her words.
Almost hers alone. Her little sister was not powerful enough to be a shaman or even an apprentice shaman, nor was she a powerful warrior. She tried though. Mist had to respect that about her odd younger sibling.
Converge on Rain’s position, she sent, taking that position from her younger sister’s mind and sharing it with the hunters, stripping it free of the resentment that had clung to her sister’s thoughts as she’d taken them to share. Mist did not begrudge Rain’s resentment, which was born more of frustration than jealousy. She knew that more than anything else, her sister wanted to be as capable as she was. The disparity in their power was a frequent sore spot between them in an otherwise loving relationship.
The tigers raced through the forest, faster than their natural counterparts.
We should ambush them, Rain sent, followed by a blurry image of a pass. The pass faded and flickered and became a hill then a tree then Mist’s human face wearing a stern expression. An unfinished sending. She couldn’t share with the same clarity. We are hunting like wolves.
There was a rumble amidst the thoughts of the hunters, part amusement, part resentment. Wolves ran their prey to ground. Tigers were ambush predators.
If only Rain had been able to share better. There was not enough unity to make sense of. The pass hadn’t been one that Mist recognized and the sending wasn’t inclusive enough. She had no idea where everyone was supposed to be in this proposed ambush.
Focus, Mist sent. Stick to the plan.
Deviating with that lack of clarity would get them hurt. Better to put in the extra effort to run the zombies down and slaughter them against the cliff.
She sensed her sister beginning another sending and cut her off before she could rankle the hunters further or sow confusion. No.
Yes, oh might queen of the tigers, came Rain’s sullen reply.
They came upon the zombies, shambling along the bottom of the cliffs. As soon as the tigers made themselves known, the zombies turned to charge them, shrieking with mindless hunger. They didn’t care that each tiger weighed more than three times what any of them weighed, that each tiger was stronger and faster and armed with fangs and claws. They only sensed life and the opportunity to feed.
Sister! Rain sent.
Not now! Mist sent back.
The tigers crashed into the zombies, pouncing, shredding, and then running. This was based on old cavalry tactics. They were faster than the zombies, more mobile. Stronger too, but they were far outnumbered. Trying to remain in place would find any weretiger swarmed and swallowed by the reanimated corpses. So they struck, slew what they could, and fled, circling back again.
They had an even greater advantage her because they could coordinate waves of attacks. The zombies, mindless and hungry, inevitably chased after the last wave of tigers to hit them. This meant that the next wave of tigers could predict exactly where their targets would be.
Circle. Strike. Circle. Strike.
The horde diminished.
Tiring, but safe. Impossible without a shaman to keep the hunters organized. Tigers simply did not hunt together enough to practice these tactics. Without her, they’d dissolve into a mess of fur and fangs and find themselves swarmed. So, Mist focused for them, kept them organized and moving, granting whomever she could a reprieve to catch their breath at every opportunity. A slow tiger was a dead tiger.
Circle. Strike. Circle. Strike.
The zombies were led back to the cliffs, kept pinned there, unable to scatter or get lost from the main body as the horde fruitlessly pursued her hunters and allowed themselves to be whittled down.
Sister! Rain’s sending was laced with rage and panic. Mutant!
Mist swore. Rain’s sending had been violent. Tinged with pain. Her little sister was fighting the mutant, trying to keep it away from the horde so that it wouldn’t become infected.
Pull back! Mist sent as she abandoned the fight. Rain, switch with me and takeover!
She fled the battle, unerringly knowing where to locate her sister. Rain wasn’t far away, just across a hill. How had she gotten so far away from the main group? Had she never joined in the fight?
There was no time to think of that as Mist crested the hill. Her sister, lean and orange, had leaped upon the back of the mutant, fangs sunk deep into its shoulder as her claws raked its body. It was a savage and terrifying attack. If the mutant hadn’t been more than four times her size it would have worked.
Switch! Mist ordered again. Sister, release and lead our hunters!
Rain sent a mental snarl, but obeyed, tearing free of the mutant and bolting away to rejoin the hunters.
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This let her finally get a look at the mutant. It was horrible. A mass of wrinkled, naked pink skin and muscle. Its head, though large, was too small for its body, and its teeth were too big for its mouth, so that they stuck out everywhere, yellowed and stained. Its forelegs split, like they’d been intended to be whole other legs in whatever womb this thing had crawled from. Instead, it simply had an extra set of paws, armed with curling claws that had never been ground down. A rat-like tail whipped behind its ursine body and its wrathful, bulging eyes landed upon her.
Right. How the hell had Rain thought that trying to fight this thing was a good idea?
It charged up the hill at her.
She reached out with her mind and tried to purge herself from its senses. Her efforts were rebuffed. Its mind was simple, so the subversion should have been simple. Unfortunately it was also bursting with rage and focus. As in, all of its not inconsiderable rage was now focused upon her.
She swore, changed her plans, and raced down toward the oncoming monster. This was going to need hands.
As she ran, the shift came upon her. Another thing that marked her power as greater than her peers. Her shift was fluid, deliberate, and she didn’t so much as stumble as she rose from four legs to sprinting on two, her cloth shifting about her form, twining about one arm and depositing her staff in her clawed hand. Half-form was something only a portion of shifters could attain, and then with great effort. For Mist, it was as natural to be between tiger and human as it was to be either one on its own. No matter her form, she was Mist.
She leapt as the mutant came upon her, stabbing down with the pointed end of her staff as she flipped over it, opening a cut over its head. It was a minor wound. The bare hid was so thick, the bones so tough, she doubted the thing had even felt it. But the attack had done what she’d intended.
Blood wept from the cut and down into the mutant’s face and eyes.
It bellowed and clawed at its face, twisting about and churning up the earth around it. Blinded and distracted…much better. This time her effort to purge herself from its senses met with no resistance. She wasn’t at the fore of its mind or emotions anymore.
That gave her time to work.
She hefted her staff and focused her will into it. Through it into the sky above. \
In moments, the clouds turned dark. Thunder rolled across the hill. A drizzle started up, dampening the fur of her half-form. The smell of ozone filled the air.
The mutant spun about in place, trying to find her. It sniffed, scented the blood from the fight nearby and took a step toward her hunters.
A bolt of lightning dropped from the darkened sky and lit the mutant up.
“Nothing likes getting hit by lightning,” she said through her fangs.
The mutant stood for a moment, then toppled over. Its momentum carried it down the hill and she deftly hopped over it. She took a moment to watch its smoking corpse tumble the rest of the way down the hill to make sure it wouldn’t get back up. After a few heartbeats and flashes of lightning overhead, she took off.
They’d lost two hunters while she’d been busy with the mutant.
Immediately she took over coordinating the group. Circle and strike. Circle and strike. It took several more minutes, but the zombies were culled, caught between the wrath of tigers and the cliffs, grinded down and shredded until none remained moving.
That didn’t mean that her job was done. The zombies were down, not dead. It fell to her to finish them off. And tend to their own dead.
Pine was among them. He’d been a veteran hunter. Powerful. He’d been a friend. Once a lover. His loss hurt her and the tribe both.
With a sending, she dismissed her hunters, to rest, to celebrate, and to grieve. They didn’t need to remain her for this gristly part of the work.
Mist strode among the corpses, staff in hand, and ran her staff with a tiger’s strength down through each and every skull. Severed vertebrae and tendons were enough to stop a zombie from moving, but not to end it. This way nothing else would accidentally be exposed to a bite and none of them would sit here, rotting for who knew how many years before raising as a revenant.
It took her several moments of breaking heads to realize that she wasn’t alone. She blamed it on the weather she’d called with her staff, with its stirring winds and drizzle combined with the reek of all the zombies. Otherwise, she would have scented her sister.
Rain was crouched in human form when Mist came upon her, rummaging through the rags that had once been clothes upon a zombie.
“What are you doing? Mist asked, her voice like the thunder made silk. Human for was good for conserving energy and work that required precision. It was not good for out here, where mutants and zombies could come upon you at any minute. It was vulnerable, the senses dulled, and had no natural weapons. What was Rain thinking?
Rain jerked her head up and looked at her over her shoulder. “The clothes on these zombies don’t match the town nearby. They’re from somewhere else. I’m checking to see if they have any tools or…”
Or things they didn’t have names for anymore.
“We don’t need whatever toys the vampires let their livestock keep,” Mist said, stepping over to crush the head of the zombie her sister had been looting. “They can track some of those.”
“They know where we are anyway,” Rain said with a certainty that made Mist uncomfortable. She looked at her sister and found her gaze turned up at the sky. Was she looking at the clouds? Or did she think that the vampires somehow had eyes up there looking down on them?
“What would we do with those things?” Mist asked, smashing another zombie head. “We have all we need here in the wild.”
“All we need?” her sister asked, giving her a look Mist didn’t completely understand. Was that disbelief in her gaze. “You honestly believe that? Sister, we’re living day to day, dependent on our shamans and our hunters. We are one bad season away from ruin.”
Mist rumbled in exasperation. Smash. Smash. “If you’re going to be a scavenger, at least make yourself useful.”
She regrated her words as soon as she said them. Scavenger was an intolerable insult among her tribe.
Rain glared at her, but said nothing. At least she started smashing the zombie’s heads in with rocks before scrounging through what remained of their clothes. If she found anything useful, Mist didn’t ask or care. Her sister was skilled enough in the mental and spiritual arts to bar her from her mind so that when she tried to reach out to her to give her a sending, to convey in a way more powerful than words that she was sorry, she encountered a buzzing like an angry swarm of bees. Agitated and impenetrable.
She should have told her sister to leave her findings behind. She didn’t. As soon as she’d finished smashing the heads, she ran back to camp, leaving Rain behind to her gristly rummaging.
What was wrong with her sister anyway? What she’d been doing had been necessary. That? Stealing from the dead, hoping to find some vampire’s scraps? It was pathetic…wasn’t it? Did Rain have a point?
She shifted into human form as she returned to the tribe, white fur receding, replaced with golden-bronze flesh and chopped black hair, muscle melting away to a lean, hard physique. No claws, no fangs, smaller…she wondered why so many of her people were more comfortable with this form. It was so much weaker and vulnerable than either of the others. Maybe it had to do with the nimbler hands. Or the clothes. Garbed in her shifting cloth, they weren’t something she ever had to worry about. She knew her place in the tribe, understood who she was and her own capabilities. Others…seemed to crave the means of expressing their identities.
Hide and leather made from the skins of various animals and mutants were the most common. Some were woven of various materials. Often bright colors were added. If you were clothed, you weren’t shifting, and therefore it didn’t matter what attention your bright colors grabbed. All of it was loose and easy to slip free of though, just in case. No self-expression or modesty was worth leaving yourself and the tribe vulnerable.
She was relieved to find that her hunters had already given the news of those they’d lost to their families. Technically that was her duty. That they’d done so had been a kindness to the loved ones left behind and a favor to her, perhaps because she’d stayed behind alone to finish off the zombies.
Either way, it freed her to go talk to her father. She needed his wisdom.
Unfortunately, she found him deep in conversation with the tribe’s chief.
Sun possessed a powerful build no matter his form. He wore a kilt of scaled mutant hide and left his broad chest bare. He was one of those shifters whose eyes were inverse to their forms, always human in beat form, and bestial when he stood as a man. Those eyes turned from her father to take her in as she approached, and he gave a nod of greeting.
“You did well,” he said. “The losses were not your fault.”
Whose fault they were or might be went unsaid.
She nodded. “Thank you, Chieftain.”
“The vampires have been making a fuss at the edge of our territory,” he said.
She stiffened and bared her teeth. “They have? Why have we done nothing?” Then she realized how aggressive her words were. “Forgive me, Chieftain Sun.”
“They have kept their work to themselves,” he said. “The humans in that feeding pen to the west of us had a mining operation going into the cliffs. Their masters have taken it over and begun expanding…they are looking for something.”
“What?” she asked.
“If I knew, I’d be less concerned,” Sun replied.
“I’ll set off at once to scout it,” she said. “I can hide from the vampires better than anyone else.”
Sun smiled. “I had hoped to give you a night to recover, but if you say you are ready…”
She nodded. “I am. A moment to rest and eat and I’ll be gone.”
“Very well,” Sun said. “Tigers run with you.”
He left her and she stood alone with her father.
“You are agitated,” her father said.
He was old. Truly old. A rarity among their people. The virus that made them more than human kept them fit and hale, it also lengthened their lives. So long as a shifter remained well fed, they could live for many, many years in good health. Her father, Breeze, had reached an age where his back had begun to stoop and his sight to fail him. Not that he needed his eyes to see. As the tribe’s shaman he was possessed of far more skills than her. Seeing with his spirit’s eye was simply another thing she hadn’t managed to learn yet.
Power she had. Patience and finesse, not so much. Would Rain have made a better shaman than she would if she’d had Mist’s gifts?
“You don’t usually pass up celebrating your hunter’s victories,” he said by way of explanation.
“I had…harsh words with Rain,” she admitted. “She is back where I left her. I’d hoped for your council but…”
He chuckled. “But. Very well, here is my abbreviated council. Talk to your sister. Take her with you. She’s not unskilled. It is a good opportunity for you both to overcome whatever wounds you have inflicted on each other.”
“I doubt she wants my company now,” Mist replied.
“You wanted me advice, you got my advice,” he said, grunting in a way that said he thought she was being stupid or stubborn or both.
She ate at the fire with her hunters, smiling at their jokes and stories, and keeping an eye out for Rain. It would be best to catch her before she went to her tent.
Except that Rain never came.
Night came on.
Mist set off, resuming tiger form so that she could run faster through the trees, back to the cliffs and the zombies, stopping occasionally to scent for her sister.
Nothing. Rain had not come back this way.
Eventually she returned. The zombies’ remains littered the grounds, heads opened. Rain was not among them.
Where had she gone? She reached out with her senses, trying to find her, and encountered…a barrier. A darkness. Sleep but not sleep.
She ran, sprinting for all she was worth in the vague direction she’d detected Rain’s unconscious and warded mind. A roar sounded ahead, around a hill.
She crested it in time to see a…vehicle. Metal and blocky with thick, dark wheels and lights at either end. Those wheels turned through the mud her shower had created, carrying the vehicle forward with impossible speed. The roar tore through the night and the stink of burning fumes was left in its wake.
She ran after it.
The vehicle sped up.
So did she.
It held its pace.
She…couldn’t. It was just as fast as her, if not faster, and it was tireless. A machine. One her sister had been taken by.
Mist slowed, melding her shape into half form to bring herself up as tall as she could. Striking it with lightning wasn’t an option. It was moving too fast and besides which, her sister was inside.
She took stock.
The vehicle was headed toward the vampire’s feeding pen, the one with the mining operation Chief Sun had just asked her to look into. That set her course then.
She resumed her tigress shape and gave pursuit. If she couldn’t chase them down, she’d run them to ground and she’d find out what the leaches who’d stolen her sister were up to at the same time.