Fluffy's Futures: Cara Ch. 08

I watched him go in silence, not trusting myself to speak. When the front door closed behind him, I let out a breath I'd been holding. Meele peeked into my room and looked at me with an arched eyebrow.

"Having fun, little Cara-chan?"

"Thrill an hour," I said with a wry smile. "I don't like having to lie to him… or telling him partial truths. But there's no choice really."

"Nope," Meele agreed. He held out a clawed hand to me with a smirk. "We're flying to the Council meeting tonight rather then taking a bike. It is time they remembered who Rye Meele is in truth, not what they saw last night."

"So that's why your not wearing your Sphere of Humanity," I noted, surprised. "Can you take your dragon form while wearing it?"

"Don't think so," Meele said after a moment's thought. "Never really tried- why would I want to be a humane dragon? That makes no sense at all, little Cara. Dragons are not humane, we are dragons."

"I get the point," I said with a laugh. Trust Meele to tease me into a smile by being overly yukoi. "So, how we doing this?"

"You're riding in style tonight," he answered. "I'll be in my dragon form and will fly in, you'll leap off and land prettily in a bow before the Council with a flourish. Tonight is about show, Cara. It has to be because I don't think you're up to another fight with a full yukoi."

"Tell me about it," I said, hissing as my the ache in my arm caught my attention for a moment before subsiding. "Will the cat siblings be there?"

"It is possible," Meele said, leading the way to the roof of our apartment. It was the highest building in the immediate area, the rooftop covered in satellite dishes and a couple of laundry lines but otherwise empty at this time of the night. "We'll have to wait until we arrive. They won't like that your armed, Cara."

"They can kiss my ass," I said with a wave of my hand. I kept talking as Meele shifted into his dragon form. It wasn't the violent change that some of the yukoi experienced because Meele didn't fight his dragon form. He embraced his dragon, was one with it in a way that many yukoi were not. It reminded me sharply that he was over four hundred years old and from a time when legends of dragons flying through the skies were reality. "I have to be armed tonight, Meele. I'm not going to set myself up to get killed just because some snotty bitch things I'm not worthy of a blade or weapon."

"Actually, you are worthy now," Meele said, his voice echoing in my mind instead of aloud. His dragon form was huge unless he willed otherwise. Tonight he was about half of his maximum size, about forty feet from snout to haunch with another fifteen feet of whip-like tail. Meele was more a European dragon then an Asian one. Apparently got it from his mother who was from a Latin country in Europe. His eyes were the only thing that remained the same, the only way I knew this huge silver monster before me was my friend. Well, that and the fact he wasn't trying to eat me.

"What do you mean," I asked as I got up on his back and found my seat just in front of his webbed wings.

"You belong to the Moon Clan, so are allowed weapons," Meele answered, taking to the sky, his natural magic hiding us from the eyes of others. "The Moon Clan is known for making and using weapons, both ordinary and magical. Now the guns are a new thing but not taboo. I doubt anyone will argue with you but they won't like them."

"They can argue all they like," I said, hand running along the grip of one of my guns. "Long as they don't try to take them away, we'll all walk away alive."

"That's my girl," Meele said, winging to the Council's open air dome with sure, easy flaps of his wings.

Five hours later, Meele landed in the parking lot behind the temple where Samu lived, roaring loudly, "Human get out here and help me!"

I slumped against the dragon's back, dizzy and light headed from blood loss and the flight there, black spots filling what little I had left of my vision in my right eye and all of my left as Samu raced outside into vague light of the false dawn. "Hi, Samu."

"Cara!" he shouted, eyes wide. "What happened to you?"

I tried to smile but couldn't, it hurt too much because of a quartet of already swollen lacerations running from my right eyebrow to the bottom of my jaw. "A Snow Cat challenged me to a fight and I had to answer it or give up my true reasons for being in Japan. I won but not by much."

I fell off of Meele, the world spinning around me. Samu managed to catch me before I hit the ground, swinging me easily into his arms. I didn't have enough power to keep my hanyu or yukoi form so couldn't flash heal the wounds that Shimori had caused. While lacking the ice claws of her brother, the cat yukoi more then made up for it with much longer, sharper claws. I'd only barely beaten her and that only by burying myself in her chest, face tucked against her while I ripped through her stomach, digging for her heart. Of course, Marika had stopped me before I killed the cat, saying that I didn't need a higher kill count. Couldn't argue with that, not and win. So I let her live after wrapping the last bits of my expendable magic around her heart and telling her if she ever stood against me again I'd kill her with a snap of my fingers. I'm afraid I fainted right after saying that, taking some of the scariness out of the threat… but then she fainted right after I did, or so Meele told me.

I'd awakened with Marika helping magically bind me temporarily to Meele's back and bidding us a quick flight home. At my insistence, he'd flown me to Samu's house. I had sworn to him that I'd be there after meeting the council. Wasn't his fault I was a bit anemic at the moment. Okay, a lot anemic and rapidly going into shock, but I doubted it would kill me. Hadn't before, though this was probably the worst I'd ever been torn up without putting me into a healing coma for a few days. Trust me to think such a thing too soon. Egg to chicken counting, I was.

I didn't even wince as Samu carried me inside, leaving the door open behind him for Meele to follow. He set me down on the huge island countertop in his kitchen, obviously figuring it wouldn't stain and be easier to care for me from there. I hissed in pain as I touched the countertop, pain flaring along my back, where she'd done the worst of her damage to me. My back lay in tatters, ribs exposed in some places, muscle in others. I'd managed to stop her before she caused a spinal injury but that didn't mean much to me at the moment.

No, at the moment tears flooded from my eyes, causing the claw marks on my cheeks to burn all that much more, though it was nothing compared to my back. She'd gotten all of the major muscles and a good deal of the minor ones there, leaving me writhing in pain, eventually managing to turn myself over onto my relatively unharmed stomach. I was lucky I could move at all really.

I heard Samu through the haze of pain though I could no longer see, my vision too clouded by black spots and a red haze from the pain.

"What happened to her? Why did you let someone tear her up like this, Meele? I thought you were her uncle… or was that a lie too?"

Meele, wearing his sphere once more, calmly replied, "I am her great uncle, that was not a lie. I could not protect her from this- she was challenged and had to fight this battle or she would be branded a coward and anyone's meat who wanted her. That is not a safe thing to be branded with, Samu."

"You're calmer now."

My last trickles of awareness faded away as Meele explained the Sphere of Humanity to Samu. I was safe and would be okay, that's all I needed to know.

The only thing that tipped me off that I was dreaming was the fact that there was no scent to the blood that coated everything I could see.

I stood in a room with soft blue carpet and drab gray walls, the huge bay windows lined with lurid green curtains that were shoved to one side of a hole in the glass. One of the glass shards, a makeshift blade larger then my forearm, was imbedded in the chest of a man lying next to the window, a stillness to him that only death could bring.

Pinned to the wall beside by my own claws was another man, one who was not human but hanyu, like me, only he was dying. My spare left hand held a smoking pistol, the bullet from it deep in a woman's forehead, stopping her from charging at me.

Surrounded by this death, I was not afraid, but relieved. It was over, the job was done, I was free to do as I wanted now after I added the tale-tale tokens I'd collected that would make it look like a drug hit instead of an assassination.

But, before I could do anything, the door opened as I let the mark slide from my claws and in it was the silhouette of a man. I gasped in the dream but could not see who it was.

I tried as hard as I could but was unable to see who it was only that they held a gun and it was pointed at me. I heard the click of the trigger, the thunderous cry of the round leaving the chamber, the thump as it entered my body before the world ran in colors I didn't have words for…