"Well, so long as it makes you happy, then I say congratulations," he said with a smile.
"It's not like we're betrothed, Dar," Tarrin chuckled.
"I know," he said. "But in its own way, it's just as profound, I think."
"More or less, yes," he agreed. "I did more than profess love for her. I promised to be like her own brother in every way. And family can be just as close as married couples."
"And in such a short time," he said. "What will your mother say?"
Tarrin gave him a look, then laughed. "We said the same thing," he admitted. "We don't understand why we took to each other so quickly either. Maybe it was fate."
"I don't believe in fate," Dar said with a smile. "It may have been the Gods."
"I doubt that," Tarrin chuckled. "Like me being friends with Allia was so important that it was demanded by the Gods. Get real."
Again there was that same sound, like the stamping of a foot. Tarrin sat up and looked around, and so did Dar. "See?" he said after a moment. "One of them is talking to us now."
Tarrin gave Dar a look, then he laughed again. "Give one knock for no, two knocks for yes," Tarrin said in a spooky, melodramatic voice. He shifted the ice against his shoulder, wincing. "These should be healed by tomorrow," he said. "I really hope that the brands don't heal over. I don't like the idea of being charbroiled every time Allia wants to prove to someone I'm an adult."
"At least you'd get used to it," Dar grinned.
"Not that, I won't," he grunted. "I've never felt pain like that before in my life. Not even my transformation into this shape was half as painful, and that was so painful I blocked most of the memory of it from my mind."
"That may be why the brands seem to be more painful," Dar said with surprising insight.
"Perhaps," he said, putting the melting ice in the wet kerchief back in the little bowl. "In any case, I'm tired, and I think I'll go to sleep."
"I'll turn down the lights."
"Don't bother. I want to sleep the other way tonight, and the light won't bother me at all."
Tarrin had an ulterior motive, of course. He didn't know if he'd have the same pain in the cat shape, and he was willing to try it and see. He undressed and changed form quickly, and, to his dismay, he discovered that the pain was just as present. He hobbled a bit, for he now had to support his weight on the branded limbs, but managed to curl up in a dark place under his bed and go to sleep.
Wake up, something seemed to whisper to him. You have to wake up.
Tarrin opened his eyes. It was dark in the room, and the sounds of Dar's breathing told him that his friend was sleeping. That was the only sound he heard. From outside the door, he could hear faint scraping noises, and then the sounds of a man breathing. Breathing that was a bit fast, Tarrin noted as he got up and padded out from under the bed, the pain in his forelimbs more or less shunted aside. He sat beside the door and hunkered down, smelling at the air drifting in from the other side. There were two human smells, both human men that smelled slightly of ale and prostitutes. And Tarrin could smell clearly the presence of steel, and of one other metal that took him a moment to identify.
Silver. The only non-magical substance other than fire or acid that could do him real injury.
His ears laying back, Tarrin listened intently as the two began to whisper.
"Is this the right room?" one asked.
"I'z be certain o' that," the other whispered back in a bizarre accent Tarrin had never heard before. "This'n be the right room, rightly so. Remember now, we'z can't kill the critter with nothing but this here sword," he instructed his companion. "It don't like silver, none at all. Now you'z be getting that magic trinket out and ready, so's the critter don't be a' hearin' us open the door. The boss done say that if we wake it up, it'll right fast send parts of us'n all over the room."
Tarrin changed form silently, his eyes flat and his ears laid back. They were here to kill him. But they didn't know that he was already awake. The thought that they were there to try to kill him filled Tarrin with a sudden rage, a rage that he fought desperately to control. For the first time in a very long time, the Cat in him rose up and tried to take control. He knew it was futile to try to outright resist it, for when it was his life in jeopardy the Cat called in a voice too powerful to deny. He had to try to channel the rage, focus it, to keep from totally snapping and going into a berzerking rage that would put innocents in danger.
"Are you's ready with the trinket?" the man whispered. Tarrin's sensitive ears pinpointed exactly where that voice had come from. And that was the man with the silver weapon, the weapon that represent the threat to his life.
Tarrin took stock in the door, measuring it carefully. Then he balled up a fist, reared back, and punched his paw through the door.
His paw opened the instant it was through, and his aim had been true, for the palm of his paw came into contact with a nose. His fingers closed around that head, wrapping more than well enough around it to get an unbreakable grip, and then he yanked the man back through the door. Tarrin noted that where his hand going through the door curiously made no noise at all, there was a sudden, loud tearing snap as the door was shattered from the force of Tarrin's pull, a sound accentuated by the shriek of the man in Tarrin's clutches. It was a small man, thin and wiry, wearing dirty townsman's clothing and with a silvered sword in his hand. The sight and smell of that weapon made Tarrin's eyes go totally flat.
Grabbing hold of his wrist with his other paw, Tarrin closed his fist.
The man's scream was cut off with horrifying abruptness, for he had no mouth with which to use, and no brain with which to direct the mouth that was not there. Tarrin's fingers drove into the skull and the brain, his inhuman strength digging down and under and then crushing everything that had been below the man's forehead, shattering bone and liquifying flesh. Blood and worse spurted out from between Tarrin's fingers as his fingers closed inside the man's head, literally tearing off the man's face. The other man looked into the door in shock as the dead man fell away from Tarrin, a hideous gaping hole where the front of his head had been, and blood and bits of flesh dripped and oozed from between Tarrin' fingers as he watched the body fall to the floor.
The man shrieked in abject horror and turned to flee, but Tarrin was on him before he could take a single step. He tackled the man and sent him sprawling to the floor, quickly getting on top of him and putting a paw on his chest to hold him down, and then opening his other paw, allowing what was left of the other man's face to drop from his grip. The man stared in desperate terror at the bloody paw raised over his head, claws out, with bits of flesh, bone, and brain dangling from the fur and from the claws. Tarrin's eyes glowed from within with an unholy greenish radiance that made the man squeak once he beheld them, and his face was twisted into a snarl of fury that almost made him like a raging beast. Tarrin very nearly killed him out of rage, but he managed to maintain at least some semblence of sanity. This man had been hired to kill him. Tarrin wanted to know who had done it. "Who sent you?" Tarrin asked in a hissing voice that made the man go very still. "Who sent you?"
"I-I can't say!" he wailed. "They'll kill me!"
"If you don't, I'll make you beg to die," Tarrin told him in a voice so evil that the man tried to sink through the floor to get away from him. "I'll gut you like a pig and drag you around by your entrails until you feel like talking." Tarrin lowered his paw, driving the tips of his claws into the skin of the man's belly. He squealed and writhed, then screamed in pain as Tarrin sank a bit more of his claws into the man's flesh.