Fire Summoner

Chapter Twelve: Scouted

Everyone in the truck was silent for the first five minutes of the journey. There was a strange energy that flowed through the cabin. No one really knew how to break the quiet, it was only nine in the morning but so much had happened already. Alice needed a minute to sit and absorb the events of the past couple of hours.

Nick, however, decided that he had had enough of the quiet and turned on the radio right as the song Sweet Home Alabama started to play. Immediately, he started to sing along to the guitar notes at the beginning of the song. Emily joined in right after he started, creating a horrible sounding harmony between the two of them. Alice felt the back of the truck bed shift as Missy shifted and responded to the yowling coming from inside the truck cabin.

"Careful now! You're gonna get the Hellcat in the back all excited! She's gonna think that we've got some of her friends up here with us." Connor quipped while winking at Alice.

The singing, if you could call it that even, did slightly resemble the strange sounds that Missy would sometimes let out late at night, Alice realized with a soft chuckle. Speaking of the massive "cat", who was now lounging in the early morning sunlight that flooded the bed of the truck, Alice found it to be quite ridiculous that she had been so ignorant to the fact that Missy was not an animal that could have originated from any place on Earth.

Given the unique ability that Alice had over fire, the Barlow family had just taken one look at the rate that Missy had grown and shrugged their shoulders. Missy had started off looking like a normal cat, even though she seemed to be in a far more advanced life stage than the rest of her littermates. Alice remembered looking into those big, orange eyes the day that her father had taken her down to see the barn cat's litter. Alice had not known then how strange it was for a kitten of Missy's age to fully open its eyes and be able to navigate its environment. Howard had not seemed too concerned about this either, even though he did have a tugging feeling in his gut that this kitten did not belong to this litter. So, Alice had taken all of Missy's growth spurts in stride as they grew up together.

"Sweet home Alabama! Ba ba na na na naaa-", Nick and Emily shouted from the front seats, shaking Alice from her thoughts. She felt a grin tugging at her lips at her friend's antics. Nick yelled "Guitar solo!" and recklessly let go of the steering wheel to shred on an air guitar. Emily let out a half shriek, half laugh as she lurched sideways to take a hold of the abandoned wheel, righting the vehicle as it began to drift to the side of the road.

"Nick! You idiot! Ohhh I'm gonna be sick." Connor groaned as he heaved dramatically, pressing the palm of his hand over his mouth. Nick grabbed the wheel back from Emily as he laughed.

"Em, if he hurls on my seat you're cleaning it up." Nick warned as he righted the swerving truck. They all heard Missy's annoyed chuff as the movements of the truck had caused their bags to knock into her. Her ash-gray face appeared in the back window. Orange eyes squinted in at the four passengers as Missy's muzzle pulled back to reveal glinting canine teeth as she let out a lowing noise from deep in her throat. She huffed out through her nose, causing the back window to fog up.

"Ohhhhkay," Connor nervously chuckled, "Alice, call your Hellcat back please."

Alice playfully rolled her eyes at her friend and slid the back window open a crack to reach her hand through and give Missy a scratch under her chin. Just as she was about to start heckling her friends for being afraid of the big softy in the bed of the truck, Missy launched out of the back and flew into the field of tall, untamed grass that they had been driving alongside. The force of her liftoff had given everyone inside the truck a start as none of them expected Missy to take an impromptu flight out of the bed.

The truck swerved again as Missy had used the side of it to launch off. Nick got the truck back under control and swore loudly. "Alice, my suspension is going to be wrecked if she keeps doin' that!"