The Weretiger and Werewolf

twisting emotions

Winter

I can feel Cleo near me as I lie in the boot of the car, Anger and fear coil inside me as I try to think of a way out of this mess. Nothing comes to mind; Cleo won’t dare to attack anyone because as soon as she does they’ll kill me. I’m no fool, Demons’ make a normal person strong but if they inhabit a shifter than they’re virtually unstoppable. Cleo would be able to take one dark shifter but I know that not even she could take on more than two.

A single question keeps swirling around in my head, it has nothing to do with how to escape or how to avoid being killed, it’s a much simpler question with an answer that I can’t figure out. I don’t believe that they just happened to find us, they knew where we would be and they knew how to make sure Cleo wouldn’t fight. The question is, how did they know?

Cleo

We leave the city far behind as we drive. The man begins talking to me as if we’ve been best friends our entire lives. I ignore his questions but he doesn’t seem to care. In fact he seems to enjoy my silence and instead fills the conversation with his own answers. Each answer is more extreme and vulgar and he begins laughing as he talks.

I ignore him and try to think about Winter who is lying in the boot behind me. As the demon’s chatter fades to the background I try to think about a plan to get away. All my plans involve things I don’t have such as a grenade or a gun, and in the end I begin going around in circles not getting anywhere with an idea of escape.

As my mind begins to fill with useless plans I latch onto a new train of thought. The demon man said I was stronger against Ruka because I had my mate, what I wanted to know was that if there had been dark shifters before why hadn’t any of them had a mate before? The question burns into my mind and before I can stop it, it slips out of my mouth “why did you say I was stronger against Ruka because I had a mate? Haven’t any of the other dark shifters ever had a mate?”

The demon glances in the rear view mirror and I notice that his fake eyes have melted away again leaving nothing but liquid streaks that run down his face. He watches me for a second before shrugging “When the body that the demon sleeps in is a shifter we find it and track down the mate of the shifter. We kill the mate before they can even meet. It’s happened before that the dark shifter has found their mate before and it didn’t end well, for shifter or demon. We couldn’t find you and so we couldn’t track down your mate and kill him. Don’t worry though we’ll sort this out before it gets out of hand.”

Hearing him talk of killing Winter as if he’s commenting on how nice the day is makes me feel sick with anger. Knowing that the feeling won’t help me I push through it and say, “How do you track down our mates? Not even we can do that and we’re the ones with the connection to the other shifter that you look for.”

The man’s laugh is as hollow as his soul “ Shifters’ souls are funny things, think of each soul as a light show. Some souls are simple lights that don’t do much more than glow while others are like flames. Other souls are multi-coloured and some even have textures. We’re demons, our essence is just a soul we don’t have a body like you do, we’re purer than any human or shifter. You are all mixed up, you have evil inside you but you also have goodness. Demons’ are made up of only one thing, we’re the evil you run from and the evil you find a bittersweet glory in.”

He pauses for a while as if making sure I’m actually listening. Seeing that I’m watching him through the rear view mirror he continues, “We can read other souls, and it’s not just a saying that shifters have a soul mate, you literally have another soul that completes your own, each soul looks like the same light show. All we do is read the dark shifter’s soul and search for its partner. We can read entire cities of souls at a time. It doesn’t take long to zone in on the soul we’re searching for. “