Chapter Two
Whisper
Another day, another explosion. Bobcats ran like rats from a burning silo as Goober’s crew abandoned the warehouse where they’d been brewing up another batch of something that sure as fuck wasn’t rock salt.
Trucker seasoning, they called it. A little sprinkle would pepper up any long-haul driver for hours.
I avoided the stuff. It was expensive, smelled bad, and made a whole lotta the other bobcats real stupid.
The acrid stench crept along as the glow of fire danced in frost on dead, curled leaves on the ground. My breath joined the smoke in the air, a wedding of two things that shouldn’t have been as my eyes stung, urging twin trails to coat my cheeks.
“Wampus!” the gnarled voice of one of my many cousins-not-cousins snapped out at me.
My parents had been from another clowder, an attempt to bring fresh blood into the mix that had failed miserably.
But all of us were cousins anyway… Well, until someone had twenty dollars and I wasn’t busy with chores. Then I was ass.
I squinted into the night as I willed the smoke away from me.
And it always listened. They said smoke always drifted toward the beautiful one, and it said a lot about me that the smoke drifted the other direction the moment I noticed it.
I raised my hand to recognize his call and jogged up, wiping at my eyes with ratty sleeves.
The stench of several days without a bath or fresh clothes made my nose burn more, and I shook my head.
“Get a shovel and get diggin’. What the pigs don’t eat, we bury tomorrow. We got two dead ones in there.” He picked his teeth and sneered as if he didn’t know I’d be the one chopping the bodies up… Again.
I made a gesture over my head with both hands, mimicking ears, and tilted my head.
“Nah, for sure humans this time.” He handwaved me off, and I nodded. When I headed out to the maintenance shed that doubled as my home, nobody followed, and I went about my business getting the kit.
The duffel bag weighed heavy on my shoulder as I marched off toward the burning shack. Brow furrowed, I waved my hand before my mouth before tucking my shirt over my nose. The smell wasn’t much better there, but the stink was preferable to the burn.
Fleeing people and bobcats swarmed around as two limp forms got dragged out into a spot where I went about unpacking my bag.
I pulled out a tarp and unfolded it beside the bodies, thinking a prayer of some kind for them, sorry it happened.
Sorry, they didn’t know better, that they didn’t have no family to care for them.
Sorry, I had to clean up the mess, mostly.
I transferred the bodies one by one and flinched when the first shout rang out.
“Burner!” Bobcats scattered, and I didn’t bother. I’d seen the critters flying above a dozen times a year since I was a kitten. As long as I wasn’t doing nothing wrong, I was good. Following orders.
The moon darkened above me as the wind whipped.
With a bugling call echoing out, like the groan of steel, the dragon announced itself and landed somewhere outside of the clutter of piecemeal buildings.
I merely had to keep my head down and do what I was told, and the mean lizards would leave little old me alone.
I liked that the best, when nobody noticed me, like my namesake, Whisper.
I reached pale fingers out, chapped pink from the cold as I tied the tarp fastidiously and carefully tugged, walking away from the burning building.
I trudged on, feet slipping in my too-big shoes over slick earth, the layer of frost enough to shake me.
Still, I carried on, accustomed to it all.
This was the way of life for me. For a bobc—a throwback.
I wasn’t technically anything if I couldn’t shift. Just some slick ass and free labor.
The biting breeze whipped by, throwing the hood of my sweatshirt off my face, and I flinched, dropping the tarp to get the fabric back over my head.
I reached for strings that had long snapped and flustered.
I didn’t get myself covered in time and glanced up to lock eyes with a beast of a man.
My heart seized in my chest as I waited for a shout, a raised hand, anything to put the blame on me.
I was a good scapegoat, couldn’t even fight back.
“What happened?” No anger, no shouting, just a question as dark eyes met mine, impossible voids amid white that sucked me in as stringy, pale hair flopped into my eyes.
I shrugged and raised my hands. I didn’t know no signing language, and even if I did, nobody round these parts knew how to read them. As long as you nodded, shrugged, or shook your head at the right times, nobody needed much else.
“Smells like a meth lab exploded.” The stranger held his chin up slightly, and I bobbed my head side to side in an approximation of probably.
“What’s in the tarp?” He gestured, and I glanced down as if I hadn’t just wrapped up two dead humans for disposal. I froze like a deer in headlights, all autonomy stolen from me like the voice I never had. Another reason my pa named me Whisper.
“Don’t pay that fool no mind. Throwback’s dumb as mud.” Goober, the clowder’s alpha in charge, came strolling out, hands in pockets. He sneered, revealing a row of crooked teeth, and I kept my head down.
With the attention taken off me, I excused myself with a little nod and tugged my load in an angle away from the path of the dragon, earning a command that made me halt in place. The dragon’s voice was hypnotic, so soft and well-spoken. Didn’t sound nothing like one of us. “Don’t move.”
“Don’t pay him no mind. I done said he’s dumb.
Ain’t gonna answer you. He’s cartin’ off the dead’ns.
” Goober approached the dragon with a wide grin and that genial posture he got when CPS came to the clowder sometimes.
With enough sweet talk and promises, they always went away. The dragon didn’t sway, though.
The beast sniffed the air and shook his head. I flicked my gaze up and elsewhere a few times, waiting for the opportunity to get away. He spoke, though, words few but meaningful. “Human or…”
“Humans. Run-of-the-mill rabble we hire out. Santa’s little helpers.
Won’t be missed.” What Goober left unsaid was the fact that the mountains ate men often.
Humans wandered in, never came out. Occasionally a piece of skull or part of a body surfaced, but they rarely earned a call to police.
If we buried them by a farm, they weren’t dug up till next season, and no farmer in their right mind would close off a field mid-planting season just to report a body.
Rule of the land—“if you seen a body, no you ain’t. ”
The dragon approached me, waving his hand for me to step back and I glanced to Goober for confirmation.
He waved me off, and I stepped back with a cower.
Don’t make eye contact. I chanted to myself.
Dragons could read minds or some shit, couldn’t they?
He smelled nice, though. I liked the smell above the rankness of bodies in our village. Above the sour chemicals of drugs.
He stepped forward and twitched the tarp to the side, staring them down. He rifled their pockets and pulled out two phones and wallets before pocketing them. “I’ll be back.”
In a flash and twist of flesh, he flew off, whisking into the skyline, and I glanced around, ready to flee.
“Keep your ass right there, Wampus.” That nickname. They never used my real name. They called me Wampus, the old legend of the half cat that attacked people, cursed for meddling in affairs that weren’t its business. I hadn’t done none of that.
I cowered under Goober’s gaze as he watched the sky until the dragon returned, shifting midair to land on the ground with a thud that seemed more like a show than necessary. “Phones are off in a lake with the wallets. If the authorities track them, they won’t find anything.”
Not like anyone got signal up the hill this way, anyway. Pointless to track any of them satellite doohickeys with phones and the like. Goober said the things made your mind turn to mush and leak out your ears. I didn’t believe it, but then again, humans weren’t that damn bright.
With a sharp inhale of breath, the dragon threw his head back, rounded out his cheeks, and leaned down, belching fire down upon the corpses in a thunderous display that sent the first kiss of warmth I’d had in days over me, and it was all I could do not to step into it and bathe in the fire.
Wouldn’t burn me none. All shifters had their gifts, and mine?
Mine was fire. I couldn’t make it, but I couldn’t get burned, and embers died when I wanted.
I held onto the gift like a precious thing, the only connection I had to prove I wasn’t one of the monkeys. Human.
Charred skeletal remains lay in place over the melted remnants of the very edges of my tarp.
I’d have to get another one, and that’d cost me eleven dollars and twenty-two cents I didn’t have.
But I didn’t make a stink about it. Saved me a day’s work of chopping up bodies for the pigs.
He stared at the skeletons and gave me a gesture.
“Should be very brittle. Break it up as much as you can and toss it in the reserve. Fish need calcium.”
I’d do just that.
“I’m Marcus from the Flame’s Sovereign clan.
You are?” The dragon gestured toward Goober, who introduced himself by a kinder name than what we knew him by, Gordon.
The dragon’s tone grew haughty as he spoke, telling our alpha off about what he was doing, like bobcats were good at much else.
Truckers, druggies, and poverty. All we were good at.
I took the lull in conversation and used it as an excuse to sidestep and go get my cleaning gear.
I returned with a few trash bags, a shovel, and gloves that I used to gather the bones, kick the dirt around, and move on, my goal to recover any locked boxes in the building.
Bring those to Goober, make sure all the glassware that survived got moved off to be cleaned, the broken stuff needed to be smashed, and any chemicals moved or destroyed as needed.
With all the excitement dying down, I went about my duties, my skin prickling at the presence of the dragon who eventually made his way to my area again and kicked around the ashes.
When I found the lockboxes, I kicked them gently, the sides of them dented in and contents melted.
Fireproof my ass! The plastic inside seeped out in a slow bubble from the seams, and I winced.
I prayed to anyone that could hear my mute thoughts that there wasn’t much in them because that would make Goober mad.
And a mad Goober left me the target of his ire.
When he eventually joined the dragon and saw what my shovel unearthed, he swore under his breath and used my real name. It was then I knew I was in trouble. “G-d fucking dammit, Whisper!”
I flinched as he drew back, claws shining at the tips of his hand.
“Stop that stupid-ass hunkerin’ up like a dog shitting a peach seed. Take your licks, idjit!” Goober had that hiss in his voice that told me he was growing madder by the second, and I closed my eyes and stood up to my full, but still shorter than him, height.
It wasn’t claws I got at first but a fist that sent my head spinning. A foot sent me tumbling through the ash. The well-placed kick made my inner core spasm, and I knew I’d wet myself a little.
“Enough,” the cool voice of the dragon said. Marcus, was it? “I don’t need to witness you beating this young man over your own stupidity.”
“If he’d done moved fast enough, my cash might not be burnt to shit right here!” Goober hauled back as if he were going to kick me again, and I waited for the bruising force that didn’t come.
A scuffle filled the silence, and Goober’s strained voice told me to go back to my cabin and sleep. I still had chores to do, and I made a hand-up gesture, but he waved me off. “Git on! You can do the rest t’morrow night.”
I sagged and dragged myself up and slipped away. I’d get it worse when the dragon wasn’t around, certainly.
As I made my way back to the shack, I opened the door and glanced up at the foreign scent in my space.
Goober’s son, one of them, anyway, raised his head from his place lounging on my nest. Foster, they called him.
Like the banana ice cream. “Kitty wampus,” he nearly purred.
“Daddy’s had a hard night and needs a little stress relief. ”
He waved a twenty-dollar bill at me, and I lit my kerosene lantern, pulled out a jar of Vaseline, and dropped my pants out of habit.
I just had to remind myself it was only a few minutes, and I’d have sweet cash.
My growling stomach reminded me that I’d not eaten, and I could almost taste the hot food off the gas station grill, one of them tortilla things with meat inside that rolled around on the machine.
I’d heard some woman telling her daughter to just lay there and think about the queen when she was getting married. Didn’t know what that was all about, but I could bend over and think about them taquitos for a spell and be much happier.
Just another Tuesday.