And a large, black jungle cat ran swiftly across the parking lot. Toward the smell of blood.
* * *
Soft pads on asphalt. Asphalt. The word appeared alien to Kyrie's mind, locked in the great loping body, feeling the movement, the agility, and not quite believing it.
Strange feeling on pads. Hard, scratchy.
Muscles coiling and uncoiling like darkness flowing in moonlit patches. Bright moonlight like a river of fire and joy. Running. Smelling with sense that no human ever possessed.
And the feline stopped, alert, head thrown back, sniffing. A soft growl made its way up a throat that Kyrie could only just believe was her own.
Smell—a rich, spicy, flowing smell, like cinnamon on a cold winter night in Kyrie's human memory, like rich molten chocolate, like freshly picked apples to that dwindling part of herself who thought with human memories.
She took a deep breath and felt her mouth fill and overflow with drool, while her paws moved, step on step, toward the smell, soft pads on asphalt, growl rising from throat.
What was it? What could it be? Her human mind could not identify the smell that came at her with depth and meaning that humans did not seem capable of perceiving.
She felt drool drop through her half-open mouth, onto the concrete, as she looked around for the possible source of the wondrous scent.
There were . . . cars—she had to force herself to remember the word, to realize these were man-made and not some natural plant or animal in a jungle she'd never seen but that was all this body knew and wanted to remember.
Cars. She shook her great head. Her own small, battered Ford, and two big vans that belonged to Frank and which he used for the daily shopping.
Around the edge of the vehicles she followed the scent. It was coming from right there, behind the vans, from dark liquid flowing along the asphalt, between the wheels of the van. She padded around the vans. Liquid looked black and glistened under moonlight, and she was about to take an experimental lap when the shadow startled her.
At first it was just that. A shadow, formless, moving on the concrete. Something with wings. Something.
Her hackles rising, she jumped back, cowering, head lifted, growling. And saw it.
A . . . lizard. No. No lizard had ever been this size. A . . . creature, green and scaly and immense, with wings that stretched between the earth and the sky.
The feline Kyrie dropped to her belly, paws stretched our in front of her, a low growl rising, while her hair stood on end, trying to make the already large jungle cat look bigger.
The human Kyrie, torpid and half-dormant, a passenger in her own brain that had been taken over by this dream of moonlight and forest, looked at the beast and thought, Dragon.
Not the slender, convoluted form of the Chinese dragons with their huge, bewhiskered faces. No. Nordic. A sturdy Nordic dragon, stout of body, with the sort of wings that truly seemed like they could devour the icy blue sky of the Norsemen and not notice.
Huge, feral, it stood before Kyrie, fangs bared, both wings extended, tip to tip probably a good twelve feet. Its muzzle was stained a dark red, and—as Kyrie knit her belly to the concrete—it hissed, a threatening hiss.
It will flame me next, Kyrie thought. But she couldn't get the big cat to move. Bewildered by something that the now dominant part of her couldn't comprehend, she lay on her belly and growled.
And the Kyrie part of her mind, the human part, looked bewildered at the dragon wings, which were a fantastic construction of bones and translucent glittering skin that faded from green to gold. And she thought that dragons weren't supposed to look that beautiful. Particularly not a dragon whose muzzle was stained with blood.
And on that, on the one word, she identified the enticing smell. Blood. Fresh blood. She remembered smelling it before the shape-shift. But it smelled nothing like blood through the big cat's senses.
With the feline's sharp eyes, she could see, beneath the paws of the dragon, a dark bundle that looked like a human body.
Human blood. And she'd almost lapped it.
Shock and revulsion did what her fear couldn't. They broke the human Kyrie out of the prison at the back of her own mind. Free, she pushed the animal back.
Push and push and push, she told herself she must be Kyrie. She must be human. Kyrie was smart enough to run away before the dragon let out with fire.
And never mind that the dragon might run her down, kill her. At least she would be able to think with a human mind.
All of a sudden, the animal gave, and she felt the spasms that contorted her body back to two human legs, two human arms, the solidity of a human body, lying on the concrete, hands on the ground, toes supporting her lower body.
She started to rise to run, but the dragon made a sudden, startled movement.