way of the wolf ☾ // warrior cats

six - pursuit

     When he reached the ash that marked out his post, he marched straight past it without pausing. There was no need to scent the air and search for a place to begin his hunt; Shrew's blood made a fine trail, especially by the light of the waxing moon. What little light managed to pierce the treetops glimmered back up at Drift in each bead of blood, and he smudged out the path as he went. Shrew's death should not have left such beautiful remains.

     At least the place where Shrew died did not pretend to be glamorous. Beside a fallen log dotted with mushrooms, the grass was trampled and slick with blood, leaving no doubt in Drift's mind that the wolf had been responsible. No other creature in the Tribe's land was so vicious as to bleed a cat nearly dry. And yet there was still more blood, far more than Drift expected from Shrew's wiry frame. Even he might not bleed so much, and he was a far bigger cat.

     But that meant the wolf had suffered, and Drift purred with dark satisfaction. At least Shrew had fought for his life. He died with more than his fair share of honor, and in the process, he'd also paved the way.

     Another blood trail, this one heavier than Shrew's, led still further from camp, visible enough across the drying autumn grass that Drift barely needed his nose to follow it. He did not wipe any of it away, unlike before, because if he needed to bring back reinforcements to end the wolf once and for all, its dripping wounds had made a clear path. Hopefully, though, the wolf was so gravely wounded that Drift would not require a second trip. If it was injured and he was quick, he could tear out its throat, savage it to the point of no return.

     He had spent half a moon enthralled by the night howls and his tentative connection to the beast, but he had never truly acted on it. Fear had held him back. Now, though, he was angry. Hungry. No longer under the wolf's spell.

     Revenge was more alluring than Drift ever imagined it might be. Revenge also gave him pause, if only for a moment.

     Drift had rarely killed before. Not counting prey caught here and there, the only life he had ever taken was that of a fox, and even then, he was only tangentially responsible. On that occasion, one of the hollow-guards of old had been the one to deal the killing blow. Drift only helped to fatally wound the fox before it could get too close to the Tribe. The blood then was only on his claws, not his conscience.

     But the wolf had no conscience. It had taken eight lives counting Shrew, or nine, counting the stress it had placed on the previous Poolteller until his heart had given out, and it showed no remorse for any of those deaths. Why should Drift offer mercy to the beast when it was incapable of doing the same?

     He pushed his personal encounters out of mind, because they didn't feel like mercy anymore. They felt like a slash to the back, an underhanded blow. They made him feel guilty to have survived while so many others had not.

     So Drift followed the trail through the dead of night, drawing courage and vengeance from the same font. Even when the trail waned, he did not let it go, always clinging to the barest hints of blood. As the night wore on, the chill caused the bright drops to congeal, and the moon no longer lit the way. The metallic stench, though, was more than enough, and once a musky fear-scent entered Drift's lungs, he knew he was close.

     And he was. He hauled himself up a steep ridge, the dead leaves slick underfoot, and at the top, the wolf was waiting. It lay under the sweeping shelter of a fern, its ruddy hide crossed with wounds old and new. A gash along its belly oozed into the cold air, and Drift heard the beast whine to itself, head lolling forward even as it tried to sit upright, sensing another presence.

     There was no way Shrew could have inflicted all this damage on his own. The scars and open wounds were too wide, too deep. Only a creature a comparable size could have done this, and Drift purred with a grim sort of pleasure. The wolf was so depraved that its own kind had turned on it. Its death would be justified.

     Bloodlust almost made him a fool, though. In his eagerness to see the end of the wolf's terrible reign, he approached too quickly, and yellow teeth snapped shut a whisker's breadth from his nose. He scrambled back with a hiss to match the wolf's weak, defensive growl, and lesson learned, he considered the merits of attempting to snap its neck instead. Ultimately, that seemed unwise and difficult as well; the wolf had enough fight left in it to eye him closely, and its stark ribs suggested it was starved, even resting on the brink of death as it was.

     "If you leave, I will find you," Drift warned it as he backed away. Then, once he was at a safe distance, he ran.

     Time was of the essence. He didn't want to offer the wolf a long, bloody death as it withered under the ferns. He wanted to inflict pain on it himself, to be the ultimate agent of its death, and he knew precisely how to become such a thing.

     All manner of creatures exist in the night: those that hunt and those that are hunted make up the bulk of moonlit life in the forest. It was precarious to exist as both, but with the wolf so badly injured, Drift felt that his chances of dying with his tail between his legs were much smaller than usual for a hollow-guard on the night shift. Without fear, he scoured the forest until he crossed paths with a mouse, which he killed with a heavy blow instead of a clean bite. His hunting technique was not especially refined given how rarely he had need of it, but that night, it was good enough.

     The mouse was not a late meal for him, though. It smelled delicious, almost painfully so as he took it in his jaws, but he resisted, channeling his focus into returning to the wolf without delay. His only stop was beneath a cluster of hemlock, where he pinned down a frond with one paw and sliced of a cluster of deadly flowers with a claw on the other. These he stuffed inside the mouse, and the rest of the way back, he took great care not to allow the flowers in the mouse's slit belly to touch his tongue.

     Perhaps doing so was an impossible feat, but he returned to the wolf all the same, and the creature looked more listless than ever. Drift dropped his prize before it.

     "Go on," he muttered when the wolf didn't react. "It's a fresh, juicy mouse. It's still warm."

     In the end, the wolf only lunged for the poisoned offering when Drift kicked the mouse toward it, at which point the mouse bounced off the wolf's nose before disappearing almost whole down its gullet. When the last scrap of the tail was gone, the wolf blinked at Drift slowly, like it was thanking him.

     Drift's blood boiled. He hadn't known exactly what he would do once the mouse was gone, but that grateful glance settled it. "Don't thank me," he snarled, taking a seat a fox-length away. "I'm going to watch you die."

     Maybe the wolf understood. Maybe not. But it barely looked Drift's way after that, instead shrinking in on itself as dawn crept closer. It was withering before Drift's eyes by the time the sun arrived, shivering in its ugly pelt, limbs convulsing as the hemlock began to work its way along, inviting death to deliver the final blow.

     When the wolf cried out, throwing a strangled howl to the dawn light, Drift finally rose to his feet again. He didn't know if he felt fulfilled, or if Shrew felt particularly avenged among the Tribe of Endless Hunting, but it was time to go. The poison and wounds were doing their work well, and by sunhigh, the wolf would certainly be no more.

     Still, he waited, taking the slowest steps away. Hadn't he sworn he would watch it die? Was he not a cat of his word?

     But it wasn't honor that held him. It was sick triumph that had Drift in its grasp, that brought him delight as the wolf shuddered and shook, making furrows in the earth as it fought for survival at the very last second. And then, when the wolf seemed to collapse into itself before his eyes, it was white terror that kept him there. With his limbs in total defiance of the urge to run, Drift watched as the wolf's coat grew brighter and brighter, rivaling the leaf-fall colors overhead. Its nose grew shorter, rounded, and its body slimmed, shedding lethal muscle by the second. Before long, caught in the first light of morning, the wolf was no longer a wolf. It was instead a frail ginger tabby tom who bore all the same wounds as the beast, had all the same gravity that Drift just couldn't escape.

     The wolf was a cat. A cat was the wolf. And when the convulsions paused, he looked at Drift with disappointment in his eyes. "Oh son," he wheezed. "You have killed us both."