My Uniformed Tiger

The feel and sounds of night life were just awakening, and several people were already milling about when she arrived. She nodded at a few familiar faces, as she milled about aimlessly. Hoping to spend an hour tops before going back. She wished Lucius was around. His presence could lighten up any scene; she thought-even a scene as boring as this town where nothing ever happened.

But something did happen that night, as she milled about hopping from one store to the next, nodding and smiling at a few familiar faces, somebody grabbed her from behind!

Somebody big and strong, maybe more than one person she thought as she was pulled into an alleyway. Yuri struggled, and tried to scream, but was silenced by a slap across the face before a cloth bag was thrown over her head, and darkness descended. She whimpered in fear, thrashed about as she felt herself tossed unto a shoulder. The hands gripping her felt unnaturally strong and difficult to fight against. She thought of biting, but the rough feel of the cloth bag against her flushed cheeks persuaded her otherwise. She could feel her left jaw swell even as it burned like ice to bare skin. She thought she felt the moisture of blood, but it was just her skin that had broken into a sweat caused by panic. She screamed again, but her scream was broken by the feeling of being roughly shoved into a car. Another set of hands, or maybe the same ones, she could not tell, but equally strong grabbed her hands behind her and bound them together with rough feeling rope. It was all rough, yet frightfully efficient, and Yuri broke tears as she broke into panic. She hung uncomfortably in the back, in the space between two sets of legs and the front seats. She did not fully understand what was happening, and much less why, but she knew she was in trouble and could see no way out. She could see nothing at all really with the bag over her head, and this only added to the feeling of blind terror that permeated every fiber of her being.

There was animated chatter in the vehicle which did not make any sense at all to Yuri. To her frightened, confused mind, they were obviously speaking in some sort of code. They might as well have been speaking in Arabic, because her mind was too confused to gather any meaning from the, nonetheless, English words they were using. She kept hearing strange, fantastic things like tiger-shifter, and bear-shifter, and protecting the young ones.

They did not drive for long before the noise of the square began to recede. The few minutes seemed like days to Yuri, and she soon passed out.

She was rudely jogged out of her sweet escape by a loud sound on the roof of the car she was in. It sounded like a tremendous weight had landed on the roof, causing the car to bounce along the highway. She screamed at the top of her voice as she heard the screeching of tires, the car swerving left and right to stay balanced. Another weight on the bonnet blew the head lights out and brought the car to an abrupt standstill. The engine rattled, growled and failed, the smoke escaping from the busted carburetor looked ghostly in the abrupt darkness.

The chatter in the car now was frantic, and doors were opened. The term tiger-shifter was thrown about a lot, as she was tossed aside in the rapidly emptying car. Yuri was tossed upon her hands, and winced at the pain. She desperately wished to know what was going on but could not. Damn this cloth bag!

In the darkness outside, Lucius stood twenty meters away, and watched the three bear-shifters file out of the truck they were driving. They were big. Bear shifters always were. At the age of sixteen, when they stated to fully communicate with their animal self, even the scrawny ones grew overnight.

“I hope for your sakes that the woman is okay.” He shouted out to them.

“You think you can take all three of us pussy cat? You better run on home back from where you came” The driver, who also happened to be the biggest, spat back.

Lucius stalked stealthily from left to right. They did not react by opening into a larger circle he smiled to himself in the darkness.

“You three are young. There is no need for us to fight. Just step aside and hand over the girl and we can separate in peace. You obviously have no fought a cat before. There has not been one of my kind here for decades.”

“And we want it to stay that way,” another one shot back. “First day you show up and one of us gets attacked by a tiger-right here in our woods! This girl is just the first; we are going to set an example so that any other shifter will know exactly what he is walking into when he comes our way.”