Free Hunting the She-Cat by Jacki Bentley Page A

the woods for days, lonely and
frightened -- hungry – I could not even kill squirrels to eat them
but I had killed a man. I wandered lost until the other cats, the
bobcats, found me.”
    “Uncle Joe and his pride.”
    “No, no. They’re not, you’re mistaken.”
She shook her head violently. So violently, he folded her head to
his chest to stop her.
    “Doesn’t matter, baby. You needed to
feel you were the only one in existence. So you didn’t have to face
the death of your mother she-cat. Or that you had to kill to
protect yourself and others to avenge her from an evil
male.”
    A part of him was awed that a child had
ended an evil man that so many good males had died trying to
stop.
    “You’re a psychologist then?” Pulling
back a bit, her expression challenged him.
    He grinned. She’d stopped sobbing so
pitifully and her sass was returning. Good. “There was much
speculation about the outcome of your landing here. No one on the
mission sent a report. For years we thought you’d died too. The
signal from your locator was weak. Some thought you lost to us
because of where you lived. That the influences were known to be
great, the risk of searching for you and bringing you back to live
among your kind too great.”
    “They thought I would contaminate
them?”
    “Not precisely contaminate.”
    “Bull. I’m not sure I want to see your
Eliava.”
    “Leadership has changed. We no longer
leave our people behind anywhere.”
    “Why come for me now?”
    “Recently our detection equipment has
become more advanced and we heard your damaged beacon. Perhaps it
repaired itself over time as well. The old senders were not
reliable over space distances either.” He lifted the locket into
his fingers, caressing it.
    “Take it off me. I want it off.” Her
eyes were wild with remembered pain sand disgust for the
locator.
    “This has been sending a message as
long as I’ve had it on?”
    “Yes.” He took her hand and placed the
oval of the necklace in her fingers. He pressed a hidden key and it
popped open.
    She gasped in shock. “I never knew it
opened. I’ve tried and tried.” She looked briefly to him as if he’d
just given her a great gift. She pulled the long chain outward so
she could see better. “My mother. This is an image of my mother.
Who is the man with her?”
    “Your real father.”
    “They look younger than I am
now.”
    “Yes. They would’ve been. They mated
young.”
    “Mated.”
    “Yes. Perhaps too young, some would
say. Before they had full control of their feline
natures.”
    “They look like they loved each other.
That’s all that really matters.”
    “True.”
    “How did Tryth come to have my
mother?”
    “She’d been promised to him as his
mate. By prior arrangement with her adopted parents. She was an
orphan -- with less protections and rights.”
    “No. So her lack of blood family meant
that she should be grateful for crumbs.”
    “Yes.”
    “How sad.” She was rubbing the images
with her delicate fingers. He followed the motion.
    She turned to look into his eyes.
“Thank you. Thank you for opening it. I’ll treasure
that.”
    “You have one?”
    “I do. It’s a more modern version,
lighter, stores more data.”
    “I see it now that you’ve touched it
but I didn’t know you had this.” She touched it, pulling him to her
gently.
    “It becomes invisible.” He watched her.
“Safer. They’re worth quite a lot for the jewelry value
alone.”
    “It’s not a good thing to
kill.”
    “You had no choice, my
megisha.”
    Her eyes pooled with tears. “I could
have run like hell.”
    “He would have found you and killed you
to destroy the witness to his murder.”
    “I didn’t know that at the time. I
sought revenge.”
    “You were a baby, with the instincts of
a full grown she-cat. The trauma of your mother’s murder matured
you too fast. Leave it. I’m so sorry I made you remember. I had no
idea. We assumed they were killed in the crash.”
    “No, instead my