Misty took a deep breath and shifted.
She was ready, immediately, to clamp down on her doe’s instincts. It was much harder to stay calm around large predators in deer form—the doe’s instinct was to run, as far and as fast as possible, and it had taken Misty and her father a lot of years to slowly train her mind to master the desire to flee.
So she was ready to breathe, to calm the inevitable surge of fear, to coax the deer’s mind into friendliness again.
But she didn’t have to.
She waited, sure that it was coming.
Nothing.
Hello, cat, her doe thought. She took a step towards him. Look how beautiful he is.
He is, Misty agreed dazedly. Why aren’t you afraid?
Why would we be afraid of him? He would never, ever hurt us.
Misty had to agree, but she wouldn’t have
thought her doe would be the one saying it first.
Bewildered, she took a few more tentative steps towards Ty. He stayed absolutely motionless, watching her move but not even twitching a whisker.
Misty leaned forward and almost touched their noses together, inhaling. He smelled like a cat. Like a big, scary, predatory cat.
He’ll protect us, her doe thought, satisfied.
We don’t need protection, Misty responded automatically—and only then realized that she’d frozen in place with her nose a hairsbreadth from Ty’s.
Almost a kiss.
That startled her as nothing else had, and she leapt back abruptly. At least her deer form always landed gracefully.
She recovered her dignity after a second, and decided it was best to ignore...whatever had just happened. Instead, she went a few steps further into the woods, then looked back over her shoulder, waiting.
Ty understood immediately, and stood up, padding after her. In her deer form, the low light didn’t matter as much, so she could see the way his muscles moved under his fur, the beautiful patterns of spots, the graceful curve of his tail. His paws were absolutely silent on the forest floor.
Rather than let herself get mesmerized again, Misty turned around and led the way, trotting forth into the woods.
Ty made no sound behind her, but she knew he was there.
Testing, she picked up speed. Ty loped along behind her without any trouble, leaping stumps and fallen logs. She sped up again, and he paced her.
Soon they were both running flat-out. Ty caught up, pulling ahead for a minute, and she had a chance to see him run, powerful hindquarters propelling his body forward in startling bursts of speed, front paws landing unerringly in the rough terrain.
Misty felt like she could watch him forever.
The crisp night air invigorated her like it always did. She went for runs like this almost every day...but they were never quite like this. The thrill of the chase flushed through her, the exhilarating charge of matching Ty’s pace, ignoring everything else in favor of the big cat streaking through the forest in front of her.
They reached the first steep upward slope, where rocks started to break through the pine needles and underbrush. Snow dusted them, shining white in the moonlight.
Ty leapt up on one of the rocks and paused, his tongue exposed as he panted for breath. Misty jumped delicately up to join him, snow crunching under her hooves. It didn’t feel cold to her—Misty was a mule deer, hardy and suited to the Rocky Mountain weather—but she wondered if they should head back down for Ty’s sake. Jaguars were tropical animals, weren’t they?
But he didn’t look uncomfortable. He’d sat down on his haunches and was surveying the landscape they’d just run through. Then he shivered, blurred, and shifted back to human.
Misty followed suit, wondering what he wanted to say.
“That,” Ty said on a long exhale, “was amazing.”