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I’d just reached the main floor, having descended six flights of stairs, grumbling the entire way down, when a roar shook the floor and rattled the windows. This wasn’t necessarily unusual at the academy, I’d discovered. Beasting-out was kind of a thing among the monsters at Blackthorn, but no other beast had instantly consumed my attention the way he did.
He exploded from a room not far from where I stood, let out another roar and started hunting.
There was no other word to describe it.
He lifted his snout to the air and inhaled, then whipped around to face me.
That was when I discovered the shadows were my safety zone.
They’d reached out the moment my adrenaline spiked and had wrapped around me, pulling me back into their comforting embrace.
I stared at the giant beast.
He stood upright on two legs, but that was where his humanity ended. He was covered in black fur with pointy, wolf-like ears on top of his head and eyes that glowed a brilliant blue.
He stared straight into the shadows and I stared back at him.
He scented the air several more times, before finally turning and loping away, stopping every few feet to turn around and stare down the corridor toward the shadows still wrapped around me.
It wasn’t until later, after many such encounters like this one, that I finally realized the shadows were not only hiding me, but also masking my scent.
Despite the fact that he was a year ahead of me, and therefore, wasn’t in any of my classes, I was always watching for him, trying to catch a glimpse of his beast.
Whenever it happened, he seemed able to sense that I was near and would go hunting while I watched from the shadows, wondering if he would ever figure out where I was hiding and slide into the shadows with me.
So far, it hadn’t happened.
That first year, the shadows were always empty, a reminder that I was the last of my kind and completely alone in the world.
Then, one day, not too long into my second year, I slid into the shadows and found a cat waiting there for me.
Not one of those house cats humans have deluded themselves into thinking they’ve domesticated.
No. This cat was feral and made entirely of darkness. She blended so well in the shadows that I didn’t even notice her at first.
Then she let out a yowl of welcome and launched herself at me.
Though I hadn’t expected her and didn’t even really know what she was, I caught her in my arms and laughed softly, joy filling all the empty spaces where loneliness had lived for so long.
She nuzzled my neck, climbed up and over my shoulder, scrabbled down my back, around my waist and back up my torso to my opposite shoulder.
She then draped herself from my shoulder all the way down my right arm, wrapping herself around it, then settling deep, slowly fading from smoke to solid, inky lines until she lay dormant upon my skin.
From that moment on, she traveled with me everywhere, either somewhere on my body as an incredibly detailed tattoo or slinking from shadow to shadow as I walked in the real world.
And of course, whenever I slid into the shadows to travel or to watch Jahrdran, she was right there by my side.
Over time, I learned how to communicate with her.
In the beginning, she would send images to me, ones that arrived fully formed in my mind. Later, as I chatted with her more and more, those images began to be accompanied by a single word or phrase.
This was how I eventually learned her name.
She sent me an image of herself along with two words: Shadow Cat.
I don’t know if that was the name of her species or her actual name, but I began calling her Shadow for short and she seemed to like the sound of it, letting out a roaring purr every time I said her name.
So, that was how I spent the first semester of my second year: bonding with Shadow, attending classes (still unnoticed by the other students), taking individual lessons from my professors (who now tended to freak out anytime they caught sight of Shadow), and occasionally being hunted by Jahrdran Vilnik.
