Blood & Fur

Chapter 1

Captain Alisa Lansehu, US Army Special Forces

Undisclosed location, Near the Brazil/Bolivia Boarder

Spring 2058

The air here was unlike any I'd ever smelled, so green and full of a lush sense of life, a vast difference from the cities where I had grown up and the prairies where I'd done boot camp. A sound off to my left caught my attention and I rotated my ears that direction, mouth opening slightly to better scent the air around me.

The bandana I wore to keep some kind of order to my blue and black stripped hair chaffed my ears a bit but it was negligible as I narrowed my eyes, focusing in the faint light of dusk. I flexed my paw-like hands, wondering if it was friend or foe in the bushes approaching my location.

From my perch in the lower branches of a capirona tree, I had a cat's eye view that suited my hybrid demi-human form, part tiger and part human. My tiger's ears pivoted like small radar dishes, tracking the sound as I clung to the branch, crouching to minimize my profile in the twilight. Claws on my hands and feet dug into the smooth wood and my tail curled around my thigh away from the sound.

The person's scent reached me before they did and I smiled, recognizing my top NCO, Sergeant First Class Riccardo Ibanez. He was my second in command and worth his weight in platinum, gold not coming close to his value. He scanned the area around the base of my tree with the same caution he did everything else in his life and I watched with wry approval as he knelt next to the tree and laid his hand over the paw print I had left in the loamy soil there. It was only then that he looked up and that brought a growl to my throat as I glared down at him.

"Silly humans never look up," I said in the rasping voice of my hybrid form. "You need to work on that. Intel says we aren't going to be hunting human activists but lycanthrope ones."

I'd obviously startled Ibanez by speaking but he found me quickly with his eyes. His voice was calm, quiet in the sounds of the jungle settling down for the night or waking up for the hunt. "Yeah, furball militant environmentalists determined to destroy any human touch in the region, I remember."

"Then keep an eye up," I said as I climbed down the tree. "Is base camp set?"

"Yes, and I got a report in from Reed and Bailey, the found what looks like a large predator trail about two miles north west of our current base camp. Reed shifted and identified the scent as were cat of some kind but he can't get any more specific than that."

I frowned at that. Reed was the other lycanthrope in our eight person team, a werewolf without a "normal" pack. He'd been around weretigers (like me) and werelions before; he should have been able to get more specific than just werecat. "Did he say how many different scents?"

"Three, he thinks, though he's asking for you to come confirm."

I nodded and started jogging north by north west, Ibanez at an easy lope behind me. At 5'9", I could set a pretty competitive pace for running but I kept it at one we could both keep up for hours. Tigers aren't known for running and Reed could run me into the ground if he wanted to. It took us about half an hour to reach Reed and Bailey's location with Ibanez keeping close behind me as we ran. Just because I could see in the dark didn't mean that his human eyes could.

A low pitched growl greeted us as we approached and I answered it with a deep-throated purr, identifying myself as surely as the growl had identified Reed. The wolf in questioned crawled out from under a fallen tree, eyes turned down in submission to both the larger were and to his commanding officer. I held my left hand out for him to scent and once he was done I ruffled his fur.

"What did you find, Reed?"

The wolf turned his startling blue eyes up to mine and then away before taking off at a lope, leading me on a convoluted trail through the sparse undergrowth. I followed, climbing over a couple of fallen trees that the wolf wiggled under. Ibanez muttered something about being less equipped to climb over huge accursed trees but kept up.

Reed let out a soft puppy yip and looked up into the trees above where he stopped. I had already caught Bailey's smell but looked up anyway to see my demolitions expert perched in a tree with all of Reed's equipment on a branch in front of him, neatly tucked into the wolf's backpack. Part of the reason I stayed hybrid was to avoid having to leaving my equipment behind.

"What do you have, Bailey?" I asked in my rasping voice. "Sarge mentioned something about a strange scent?"

Nodding, Bailey said, "Reed caught a trace of it on the ground but there's more of it up here plus claw marks. I moved up here after he went to go lead you in. There was some big pig thing tromping around and I didn't want to mess with it."

I looked around in the dark and leaned over the game trail that ran beneath the tree Bailey was in, taking a deep breath in. Tapir, a large rodent easily mistaken for a pig in the dark, rumored to have nasty tempters but tasty meat. I pushed down my hunger; I could wait to either hunt with Reed or take chow back at camp later.

"Good move, it was a tapir and they can be nasty," I said and started climbing the tree. Once I was up in the tree I could pick up the faint traces of a cat as I moved through the branches. I don't have the tracking instincts of a wolf or dog but I could tell something had been here a few days ago. I wrinkled my nose at the scent I'd only smelled twice before, once in a zoo and once at a cantina in Sao Paulo. "Jaguar, werejaguar to be exact. Two of them plus something else that I haven't smelled before. Something smaller, but still feline."

"Ocelot maybe?"

I shot a glance at Bailey. "I wouldn't know, never smelled an ocelot. Most felines don't like me and I can't even go into a zoo near a full moon these days without setting the place on its ear."

"I can see why," Bailey said before grabbing Reed's backpack and shimmying down the tree trunk.

Without his scent to interfere, I was able to tell more about the cats that had passed through here, but not much. One of the jaguars was female, the other male and the unknown cat was male but possibly sick. I relayed my findings down before joining the men on the ground. "All right, back to base camp. We have confirmed local lycanthropes, so I don't want any teams out without a were-critter or a mage, and since we have to of each, that shouldn't be hard. Would suck to send someone home because they were bitten or scratched."

As we trotted back to camp, Reed in front, then Ibanez, Bailey and I, Bailey asked, "Isn't feline lycanthropy more difficult to contract?"

"It is," I agreed, "but not impossible and I don't want to take any chances. We have the antidote but it doesn't have a 100% cure rate yet and it's side effects are awful. I saw it used once after a training accident and the poor guy wanted to die, it hurt so much."

We continued on in silence, each of us scanning the jungle, though Ibanez and Bailey tripped as it got darker. The meager light of the quarter moon wasn't enough to light a path visible to human eyes and when all fours it can be difficult to remember that humans can't follow the same kind of trail. We stopped about ten yards outside of the camp, though it wasn't visible yet to allow Reed to shift back while I did the same.

Fiery pain flared through my skull, hands, backside and feet as my body partly reformed, returning me to my human form. The pain was familiar, almost comforting in this strange jungle. I crouched and slipped my socks and boots back on. Tiger paws don't work too well with combat boots, in fact they shred them, and so I tried to remove my boots before shift. They got expensive if one kept ruining them in a non-mission essential fashion.

Reed took longer to change back, being a different type of lycanthrope and in his full animal form to start with. Where I had been born a weretiger, which accounted for my smoky blue and black hair, Reed had been bitten as a teenager in an attack. Wolf lycanthrope was more contagious and more prevalent in North America than any other subtype and there were more of them in the military than any other were type as well. The army usually tried to keep them together in the same unit but my team was the only one with an opening when Reed had finished training, so we got him. On a human level, we understood and respected one another but on an animal one, I was the bigger monster and he knew it. A 250 pound wolf, while huge for the breed, had nothing on a 750 pound tiger, even on a bad day for the tiger. I'd accepted him as part of my "pack," which was easier since I had grown up with a mixed assortment of lycanthropes. It also helped with team moral, having the two of us, by virtue of we had a higher "ass-kicking capacity" (their words, not mine) than any other team currently active.

Reed finished his shift back and I turned away to keep an eye on the way we had come from while he pulled his clothes out of his backpack and dressed. Nudity didn't bother many weres but most humans would be embarrassed, so I went with the majority of my team and acted by human standards most of the time. Had my team been solely lycanthrope, I wouldn't have.

"All done, Cap, ready to move out when you are," Reed's human voice was high pitched for a man, with a lilting trace of his mother's Irish brogue.

"Chow time," I said, taking the lead into camp, where we were greeted by our mage-twins, Brant and Orinda Drake. The twins were from a family of fire witches and were powerful solo but thrice as powerful together. Orinda could act as an amplifier for the powers of others but she worked best with her twin. As I crossed the line into the camp, I felt a warm tingle from the protective circle they had placed about the site to keep unwelcome things out.

A small, smokeless camp fire was burning with three tents set up around it, one for me and Orinda, the other two for Ibanez, Reed, Bailey, Drake, Dice and Soza. Dice was coaxing the team's satellite transponder to work, his blond head bent over the machine. Soza was asleep, his soft snores audible to my sensitive ears.

"Nice set up," I told the twins and Dice, taking a seat in one of the collapsible chairs beside the small fire.

"These new tents are a breeze to set up," Orinda told me, tossing me a high-protein MRE. With the addition of lycanthropes to the military, the high-protein MRE had been developed to keep us from having to hunt by providing the extra protein and iron we needed to fuel our changes.

"This new transponder sucks," Dice grumbled, absently taking a bite out of what appeared to be a frankfurter, the worst of the MRE varieties. Made me grateful they weren't on the lycanthrope menu. "I can't get a signal unless I have Drake touch it, which overheats it before I can get the full transmission out."

"Break the transmission up and note it in the log, we'll get a different one next time we're at base," I said with a sigh. I tore into my meal and set the main dish, a chicken tetrazzini imitation, in the heat pouch to warm up. "Long as you get something through for the day, I'm happy. At least a 'we're not dead' note."

The twins looked at each other before Brent got up to play signal booster. They had this wordless form of communication that could be handy in the field but was creepy elsewhere. Siblings usually weren't placed on the same combat team, but since they were in the middle of eight children with a combat capability that exceeded the second ranked team dramatically, I'd pushed for and gotten both of them. They were both Warrant Officers, same as Reed, brought in because of their abilities but not part of the "normal" chain of command for the same reason. The rest of my team was human and enlisted, though none of them were your "normal" soldiers.

A flare of pride struck me as I watched them move around each other, making sure everyone ate, except for Soza who had the midnight watch. Trash was cleaned up and vac-packed away to be carried out with us when we left.

Before we turned in, I called everyone to me, including a sleepy-eyed Soza. "Tomorrow, Reed and I will shift over and go in for a closer look. We have about two miles between us and the game path we found earlier, plus an estimated eight from their main base, but keep things tight and frosty. You're not a hero if you don't get out alive, you're just dead."

"Copy that," my people said together and I smiled.

"Alright, hit the sack guys, wake me for the 0500 watch, I'll take that before going out with Reed at 0900."

The camp settled down for the night, with Orinda taking the first watch of the night. It was good to have people you trusted with you in the field, I mused sleepily before driving off. Otherwise, even sleeping could be a terror.