"It leaves mangled corpses laying around," the barkeep answered before Bray could respond. "Some people think it's some animal that got away from one of the circuses that came for the festival. There's been a couple of city guardsmen trying to track it down, but they haven't found it yet."
"You don't sound very worried."
"It doesn't come this far," she replied. "They see it the most about a longspan east of here. That seems to be where it's made its hunting grounds."
"I'm surprised," Tarrin said. "If there's a wild animal running loose in the city, why doesn't the city guard do something serious to trap it?"
"Because it's hiding out in a slum," she shrugged. "The only people it's killing are street rats and beggars. Nobody cares about them too much." She tapped the cask they had just placed. "When it kills someone important, they'll get serious about trapping it."
"It ain't no animal," Bray said grandly, standing up. "I seen it, I have!"
"Yah, Bray, just like you saw an Aeradalla last month!" another patron said with a raspy laugh.
"I seen that too!" Bray protested. Tarrin turned from the barkeeper and looked at the man. He was an older man, with a fringe of gray hair around his bald head. He was thin and short, bony, and it was obvious from the shaking of his gnarled hand that he was a man much in love with drink. He wore a dirty tunic that hung down to his knees, leaving dirty, bony legs bare down to where his old shoes started, and he had an old walking stick sitting by his table. "Flyin' over the city as happy as ye please! But the monster, she's a true demon, she is! Twisted by evil magic!"
"She?" Tarrin asked curiously.
"Ain't no doubt it's a she," he said with a wink. "I seen it, I have! Half woman, half monster, tall as a Troll! With a luscious woman's body, but with fur, and talons for fingers, and a tail. And eyes, glowing eyes that steals away men's souls!"
A human's body, but with fur. Talons for fingers, and a tail. And tall as a Troll. Tarrin's expression turned serious for a moment, because that sounded alot like him. No wonder that woman ran screaming. If she heard the same description, she could easily mistake him for this monster. "Fur? Fur everywhere?"
"Naw, just on her arms and legs."
"Big hands?"
Bray nodded.
"Long tail, but not very thick? Very tall? And were her eyes green?"
"Aye. If you seen it, why you asking what it looks like?"
A Were-cat? What was a Were-cat doing in Yar Arak? And why was it rampaging? Was this one of the Western Were-cats, or was it native to this region. If it was a Were-cat at all. It could be some other kind of exotic creature. Sphinxes were reputed to have the heads and torsos of humans, but the limbs of lions.
There was certainly one way to find out.
"A longspan south?" Tarrin asked. "If I just walk that way, will I get there?"
"Aye. Just go down Twostep Street, and you'll be right in the middle of it."
"I think you're a bit nuts if you want to try to find this thing alone, friend," the barkeep said. "It's killed quite a few people that I heard about."
"I can take care of myself," he said seriously, putting a few coins on the bar. "For the trouble of cooking a meal I'm not going to eat," he explained.
"You should think twice, stranger," Bray said. "That thing ain't human."
"Neither am I," he replied bluntly, turning from the barkeeper. "Thanks for the information."
Outside the tavern, he found Twostep Street just down the block from the building, then turned south and started walking quickly, his mind racing the entire time. It didn't make much sense. A Were-cat shouldn't be here, at least none of the ones he knew. If it was a Were-cat native to this area, that could be an explanation, but it didn't explain this behavior. Even if they didn't adhere to the Strictures of Fae-da'Nar, a Were-cat wouldn't be going around killing people for no reason. Unless she had no control over what she was doing. She could be insane. That was a very real possibility. But that too seemed illogical. A Were-cat wouldn't bite someone, and if she did, she'd either take the victim as a bond-child, or kill her on the spot. She would have never gotten away from her sire, unless the sire either let her go, or didn't know about her. But she had gotten here somehow, and it was obvious that she wasn't just trying to blend in.
He found the area that Bray had said was her territory. It was blocked off by an unmanned barrier sitting across the street, with signs in Arakite nailed to it. Tarrin didn't read Arakite, but he had little doubt that the signs were some kind of warning to anyone who was educated enough to read them. He had to climb over the barrier to continue, and when he did so, the few people near enough to see were shocked he would be so bold. He paid them no mind, moving past the barricade and finding himself at the end of the street, turning to the left and walking into what he knew was her domain. It was an area of crumbling, abandoned buildings, some of them laying on the street. And it was deserted. There wasn't even a dog or cat to be seen milling about the abandoned neighborhood. Normally, this would be the haven for homeless and street rats, but the presence of the monster had caused them to flee the area. And he had to admit, it was the perfect place to hide. With all the empty houses and buildings and the occasional pile of debris to break up the streets and create hiding places, it was a predator's ideal hunting ground. This kind of a place was perfect. The unwary would wander in, ignorant of the dangers, and they would be ambushed. The only issue would be water, and that explained why the neighborhoods surrounding this territory were so afraid. She was leaving her hunting ground to find water, and that was why people outside this area were seeing her.
He was never going to find her by walking around. With a quick look around to make sure he was alone on the street, Tarrin shapeshifted into his humanoid form, then sank down to all fours and tested the scents laid down on the street. There were alot of them, many of them fresh. The vast majority of them were human, but there was one scent that stood out, a scent that confirmed everything. Were-cat. The scent itself teased his memory in a strange way, almost as if he had smelled this Were-cat before. But he knew the scent of every Were-cat he knew, and it was none of them. The scent was a couple of days old, too degraded to determine which direction she was moving when she passed this way. He moved deeper into the maze of abandoned buildings, his every sense open and alert, ears scanning for the slightest sound as his eyes sought out any motion, and his nose tracked the old scent on the ground even as it searched for any new scent to waft in on the still air. His nose picked up the smell of decay, or rotting flesh, and he detoured into a crumbling alley to track it back to its source.
What he found was the mauled corpse of a short human male. Either very short or rather young, dead nearly three days. What was left of it was blackened and bloating, exuding a powerful smell of rot, and from the looks of it, the entire body wasn't there. An arm was missing, as well as the lower half of one leg. The scattered condition of small bits of flesh and cloth, and the patterns of blood on the alley's cobblestone told him that the attacker ate a portion of the victim.
So that's why she was killing people. She wasn't just running around killing people, she was eating them.
He felt it was time to think like a hunter. She wouldn't be out right now. Cats were nocturnal by nature when it came to hunting, preferring to hunt at night. Nobody would be on the streets during the day anyway, with those barricades on the streets. That meant that she was laying around somewhere in the area, sleeping or resting, or possibly eating whoever she'd killed that night. So, he was looking for a Were-cat that was hiding, and that meant she would find a dark, small space with an easily defendable entrance. She would be in a basement, or the end of a narrow alley partially blocked by debris.
It came down to finding her scent trail. Tarrin roamed around the area for nearly an hour, moving in a methodical fashion both on the street and on the roofs above them, picking through her crisscrossing scent trails to find the most recent one. Her territory was a large one, he found, many blocks, and it took him a while before he finally found a fresh scent. Once he had it, he determined which direction she was moving by finding a pawprint in some dust near an alley, then turning back around to track her. He wasn't really sure why he was taking the time to do this. Now that he understood what she was doing, his curiosity was satisfied. But a part of him couldn't leave it alone. If she was eating humans and living in a hunting territory, she couldn't be sane. He did feel a little bit of duty to his people to find her and discover if she was insane or not. To uphold the laws of Fae-da'Nar if anything else, even if he had little respect for them.