Valley Cats: Of Sky and Stone 3- Golden Fire

Chapter Twenty-Six

 It flooded through her nostrils. Warm and uninvited. But not in an unwelcome way. Pansypool had taken a deep breath of exasperation. She had passed where Chili used to live and now she was so close to where Pumpkinpelt and Marigoldheart resided. Or rather, Pumpkin and Mango. Pansypool had sniffed once and the smell worked its way in.

 It was the smell of a soft bed of moss. The kind that was slightly damp, but in a lush and comforting way. Deep green, with a well-woven base of bracken underneath. Fluffy coils of moss spilled over the side. The forest den had the smell of fresh rain and a quiet stillness all around it. 

 Pansypool was so tired. She was old, too. She had been traveling for days, guided only by memory, instinct, and a gut feeling. Even she sometimes couldn't tell whether it was spiritual or not. She was crazy, but at least she knew she was guided by spirits. She was on high alert as she made her way through the dog-infested neighborhood.

 But she was a little sidetracked. The smell was wonderful. It was what she needed most. It was coming from the forest. Pansypool had been under the bushes on the front side of a house. She slipped out from under her cover and darted across the cold dirt. She pressed herself into the mulch of the next house.

 Then she peered around the corner of the massive pinkish-grayish stone structure. This was the only alleyway in which there was no fence between the houses. At eye level, the naked trees swayed slightly. Here, they called. Come back. You're safe, Pansy. You're so close to home.

 Pansy had come this way only twice before. Her nearly twenty-year-old body flung itself the distance of one corner of the house to another. She stopped at the edge of the house where its fence began.

 As she skidded to a halt, she scared a pair of cardinals from the ground. They flapped off, sounding a loud warning call. Pansypool flattened herself to the wall. But this wall was different. It had a strange mesh on it. Behind it was a grayish-black sheen that reflected the warrior.

 "James."

 Pansypool's ears went flat. Humans.

 "James, it's one of those damn cats!"

 Pansypool flattened her small body to the ground, hoping the humans couldn't see her behind the bricks.

 "You think it's another rabid one? It's pretty skinny. No. What? It looks sick or something. James?"

 Pansypool was off again. She leaped a few steps until she was staring at the drop. Here it was a shorter drop than the one behind Mango's territory. Pansypool hopped down the rocks. Then she landed in the pine needles. 

 She smelled the forest. There was wind and water in the mountains and in the neighborhood, but these smells hit different in her home. Among them she could smell the moss-bed smell, and even though it smelled similarly to the forest, it stuck out.

 For some odd reason.

 "Oh?" Pansypool turned to her right. Her dead sister Poppystar had just murmured something in her ear.

 "Over there? What about it?" Pansypool had been staring at the space where the dead leader would have been if she were really there, welcoming the healer back to her birthplace. 

 Distracted, Pansypool didn't catch all of what the spirit said. It brought her attention to an oddly gray-patched place in the dead grass and leaves, but the warning didn't register. Pansypool sniffed at the strange gray structure. Then she realized it was above her. She froze.

 "What the f-"

 The whole cage jumped a paw-length off the ground with the sudden force of the trap door closing. It kept jumping as Pansypool flipped out. She could see the grass underneath and the forest stretching away, but she couldn't reach it. She was trapped. Even more frightening, she had no one around to rescue her.