Page 53 of Scarred Resolve

Iwoke up to a gentle shake, blinking to clear my vision as I tried to focus on Davor, who was hovering over me.

“Morning. Time for your watch. I’ll stay up an extra thirty minutes or so for you, just like Niko did for me,” he said, stepping back as I sat up.

“Thanks,” I said with a large yawn before rubbing my eyes.

“Yeah. I’ll meet you in the main room,” he said, leaving me as I swung my legs off the bed and pulled my boots back on. When I walked out, he was poking the fire, which seemed to be dying off.

“Do you mind if we let this die for when we leave, or would you like me to throw another log on?” he asked, looking over his shoulder as I rounded the busted couch.

“Let it die. It was never really cold in here,” I said, dropping down onto the couch. “So, you were supposed to talk to Niko about your theories about the werecat. You have any working theories on that yet?”

“There’s a couple, but one is more likely than the other,” Davor said, sitting on the far end of the couch, fire poker still in hand. “I’ll go with more likely first. It needed a den and decided this was familiar to its mind and would work. The destruction…could have just been it in a mood at any given point while it stayed here. The second is that this place was something personal, and it both destroyed what it lost but wanted to stay in it. Far less likely. There’s nothing to indicate that a werecat had lived here at all before this werecat had come in and stayed in it.”

“Neither of those seem… good enough,” I said, watching Davor’s face in the low light of the dim cabin.

“I don’t like them, but I can’t explain this without thinking something out of the ordinary is going on. How far out of the ordinary is what I’m trying to put my finger on.” Davor sighed. “I hate not having answers, but while I forced us to stay here, I have to admit the answers aren’t here.”

“Well, we got to sleep in beds, so that's nice,” I said, shrugging. “While this only added to the mystery, it’s something we needed to know. No harm in it.”

“Thank you for being so reasonable,” he said. He held out the poker, and I put it against my side of the couch just in case I needed it. “It’s a pity your first time dealing with this isn’t a more standard Last Change werecat.”

“Nothing, and I do mean nothing, I ever deal with for the family isstandard.” I leaned further back into the couch, staring at the ceiling. “Apparently, I can’t be the good standard werecat the family needs me to be.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. If you consider it, none of the family is standard or do standard things when compared to any of our own kind,” he said, chuckling. It was sad, that little laugh. It took me a moment to catch how he was being self-deprecating with it. It made my head roll to look at him again.

“Yeah, that’s a good point,” I said softly, staring at his profile. “Not every werecat does this, huh?”

“None of them do this,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re not like the werewolves. We don’t have systems in place for local werecats to deal with events near them. We have our family, andwe control everything. We do everything.” Davor looked toward me. “Have you ever noticed that we don’t spend too much time with other werecats? Mischa is the most talkative with our own kind, and it’s purely because she’s almost always on the move. She goes through their territories and sees them, but I wouldn’t really say she’s friends with any of them. Sometimes drinking buddies, but being a rogue, she’s able to really monitor them, and they know that.

“Zuri and Jabari? They don’t associate with any werecats outside the family unless it’s required by their duties. Neither does Hisao. Niko and I never have, either. He would do business with the fae before another werecat. You had a friend once. That was refreshing to hear about, in hindsight.”

“Up until she learned what family I was part of,” I muttered.

“Exactly.”

I lowered my head, understanding his point.

“We all have our own reasons for staying out of it… or being kept out of the community our people have, but in the end, we’re all outsiders to a world we rule. We’re not standard, Jacky. That’s not just you. It’s all of us.”

“Has it always been this way?”

“Yeah. There were no recorded or spoken of cases of werecats being born before Zuri and Jabari. It immediately made them different from the older group Mother and Father were a part of, or any of their Changed children. Mischa was the first non-biological child of our family, which clearly marked her in some way, but perhaps I’ve been in too much therapy, and I’m seeing things there that I shouldn’t. Hisao has been an assassin since before he became a werecat. I’m an introvert at heart, and I was always too interested in other things. Niko was raised by werewolves…” Davor trailed off. “See where I’m going here?”

“Yeah, I do. We’re a family of weirdos.”

“I think the only time we haven’t been was when Hasan was alone,” Davor said softly. “When he was a new werecat, following the lead, like the others, of the original werecat. Subira was always an outcast, though. That I know for certain.”

“Because she was a witch.” I figured that much.

“Because she was a woman,” Davor corrected. “Being a witch was why she was Changed.”

“That’s right,” I said, sighing heavily. “Because her mother died.”

“Yeah.” Davor nodded, sinking onto the busted couch.

It was a sad story, the origin of the Subira I knew. She was the biological daughter of the original werecat with a witch he had claimed as his own. When her mother died, he had wanted to keep his daughter alive, immune to the sands of time and more durable against the violent world they lived in. He needed a witch, she had told me, so he risked her life by Changing her against her will. If she had died, he knew he needed to find a new one at that point instead of later. She had survived, and one day, she thrived. She met Hasan somewhere in there, a man Changed by the original werecat, and they became mates, bonded through magic and everything.

I opened my mouth to ask something, but my mind went blank, and the question was lost.

---