Man-Eater

1 - Leaving

It was looking bad for Becca Stone, cramped into the back of a truck with twenty other girls. Bodies so close that the stench of sweat, urine and waste merged into a thick miasma that threatened to engulf her.

It wouldn't be as bad for the others, whose human noses would not pick up the undertone of death that signalled that the end was near. It was close now, for all of them.

In truth, she had never known a time when life didn't give her the rough end of the stick. Before, when her name was Bhadra, the only black kit in a litter of spotted leopard shifters, her life had been under threat from the very beginning.

It wasn't unheard of. This wasn't the dark ages. Everybody knew that the melanism was recessive. But even though she was definitely the biological daughter of both her spotted parents, and the sibling of her spotted littermates, it didn't seem to matter. It was a cloud in her father's eyes. The lingering gaze of her mother, which always remained on her a second longer than was necessary.

They looked at her differently.

With suspicion.

With fear.

And then there was the bullying from her brother and sister, which went unchecked. It wasn't their fault at such a young age. They were unable to resist the instinct to target her obvious difference. But she had to find a way to live with it.

So she did. She fought back.

But no matter how hard she fought, and how many times she won, she was an intruder in her own family, an alien, and an outsider.

And so she left Madhya Pradesh, and became what she had always felt like anyway. An immigrant.

First she travelled to areas with other known leopard populations. It seemed sensible. There would be places to shift, places to hunt.

Deep down, she wondered if she might meet other leopards like herself, black leopards. It was unlikely. They were rare, and they didn't advertise themselves, for reasons that Becca already understood.

She'd been traveling for a year when she thought that she'd found what she was looking for. Through Uttar Pradesh, there'd been only spotted leopards. They welcomed her to join their hunts.

Mostly.

But the lurking suspicion remained. No one trusted a black leopard. Not really. Even if said cat was a sixteen-year-old female, fertile and in good health. Black kits in a litter were bad luck. The risk was too great.

That was fine with her. She wasn't looking to mate anyway. She hadn't got where she was going yet.

There'd been rumours of others like her in Nepal, so that's where she headed. Chitwan National Park was where it was at for the big cats. But she wouldn't be so stupid as to forge straight in. Tigers ruled the were-animals there, and they had a brutal welcome for outsiders.

You had to fight for your place in the pack.

Hey, thanks for reading. Please ⭐️ if you liked it!