A Cat's Guide to Bonding with Dragons

by Chris Behrsin

  A Cat’s Guide to Bonding with Dragons

  Dragoncat Book 1

  Chris Behrsin

  Edited by

  Wayne M. Scace

  To Lion. Betcha never expected you’d inspire a novel.

  Contents

  1. The Tower

  2. The Sprint

  3. The Castle

  4. An Unexpected Find

  5. Decisions

  6. Made of Clay

  7. Sinking

  8. Gift

  9. A Cat's Purpose

  10. Kinship

  11. Meeting the Alchemist

  12. Cat Sidhe

  13. The Council of Three

  14. A Mission

  15. Mastery of Flight

  16. Bedsheet of Light

  17. A Warlock’s Rage

  18. Cat Sandwich

  19. Midar Village

  20. A Feast Most Fine

  21. A Nightmare Most Foul

  22. A Terrible Sickness

  23. Food Is Not for Sharing

  24. Freshcat Ben

  25. Good Hydration

  26. Allergies

  27. High Prefect Lars

  28. Dormitory

  29. To Swim or Not to Swim?

  30. Roaming the Wilds

  31. Scorpions and Spiders

  32. Cocooned

  33. Aftermath

  34. An Epiphany

  35. Flight to Astravar

  36. Bone Dragon Battle

  37. Meet Thy Nemesis

  38. Out of the Portal

  39. Toss Up

  40. So Many Wasted Fish

  41. The Demon Dragon

  42. Speaking the Language

  43. Invisible Fish

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  The Tower

  My story doesn’t start, unfortunately, in the hills of South Wales where I once had a good life, dashing through the long dry summer grass chasing butterflies with the heat from the sun beating against my fur.

  It doesn’t start eating salty tuna straight out of the can every Sunday morning, and the remains of roasted chicken in the afternoon.

  Nor does it start with me propped up against a velvet cushion that was tossed onto the sofa as I watched Tom chasing Jerry on television, amazed and slightly offended at how stupid the creators made Tom.

  Instead, it starts on a muggy day, where the only way of telling the weather was the pressure on the sides of my head and the moisture I could sense in my whiskers.

  It starts in a stone tower with no windows, built of roughly hewn stones, sealed together with magic rather than mortar.

  It starts trapped under the service of an evil warlock who teleported me into a world and back to a time where humans only kept cats like me to chase mice and rats.

  I’m not a usual cat, either in these magical lands or my original home.

  I’m a Bengal, meaning I’m larger than your average house cat. But not as large as a Savannah cat, two of whom inhabited my previous neighbourhood. Nor am I as large as that beast of a cat called a Maine Coon that I saw once on television – that was the biggest domestic cat I’d ever seen. But I am a descendant of the great Asian leopard cat, which makes me special in my own right.

  My fur is a kind of amber colour, and I have these black patches on me. If you caught a leopard cub in the warm light of sunset, maybe I’d look a little similar. Except I’m not quite as lazy as a leopard, and not quite so stupid as to start a fight with a wildebeest. Also, don’t mistake me for a tabby, a calico, or a tortoiseshell – those are the three worst things you can call a Bengal. I’m proud of my heritage and the way I look.

  I have a name, but there’s no way you’ll be able to pronounce it in your language. You think Russian’s hard, then try hissing and sputtering and mewling out one of our long names. The humans called me Ben as I’m a Bengal, imaginative as they were. The younger kid had a little more imagination and decided that because of my breed I should be called Bengie.

  He was cute, that one, when he didn’t try throwing me around the room.

  I won’t tell you much more about my life back in Wales, because it’s probably uninteresting to human ears. Instead, I’ll tell you about the evil warlock who whisked me away across time and space from a nutritious breakfast of milk and salmon trimmings right into the centre of a pentagram drawn in red chalk on his floor.

  His name was Astravar, though I only learned of his name later. Like many men of misery, he liked to keep himself neat, not letting a single bobble of fluff grace his purple cloak, and always ensuring his collar kept as straight as still water. He had a long face, so gaunt you could see the bones underneath his eyes, cheeks, and chin. He had cruel grey eyes without a tint of colour in them – incredibly unnatural for a human.

  At first, I looked up at him in shock. Then I thought, might as well make the most of it. Maybe at least I could get this strange man to pet me. So, I mewled for a little comfort, and you know what he did? He slapped me in the face.

  I was quick to react, and I swiped at him with my right paw, scratching through his trousers. That was when he dragged me over to this tiny and cramped cage, and he locked me in there for two days straight without food and water. At least I think it was two days – there was no way of telling when day moved to night in that place.

  When Astravar went out, I remained there in complete darkness, so cramped I couldn’t even pace, my paws cold against the floor, without a blanket for comfort; where I could just feel the cockroaches crawling all over my paws and I couldn’t do anything about them.

  Those were the worst two days of my life.

  You can probably imagine the rest of my life there wasn’t easy, either. Astravar eventually let me out of the cage, but he never let me outside, and he kept the room so pitch black when he went out during the day, that I couldn’t see a thing, even with cat vision.

  Meanwhile, I would lie there on the thin mattress on the bedstead in this circular room, mewling away, hoping someone would pass by this tower, take pity, and knock down the door and steal me away. All the dust in here just made me sneeze all the time. Astravar didn’t leave food in a bowl on the floor. Not even that cheap processed meat stuff – not that they had it in his day – and I couldn’t help but long for the tuna, salmon, and roasted chicken and other delicious feasts that my previous owners would spoil me with every day. He didn’t even leave proper water down, just some algae infested swill from the bottom of some dirty pond.

  In all honesty, I don’t know where he got the water from. Maybe it had magical properties. Maybe if I drank enough of it, I’d be able to grow wings and fly. But where would I go? Like I said, this tower didn’t have any windows, so I couldn’t even sit on the sill and gaze out at the wilderness.

  Astravar often went out foraging during this time, and he’d come back with a bag full of things like mandrake roots, deadly nightshade, and all kinds of other plants you wouldn’t dare touch with a paw, let alone a whisker.

  Other days he’d bring back heavy shiny rocks like the one that hung above his enchantment table. Each time, he’d bring home all this stuff for who knows what nefarious intention, and he didn’t even think to throw in a sprig of catnip.

  Then, he’d work under the light of a transparent crystal above a stone table, engraved with red, yellow, and purple runes. This crystal hung too far out of reach for me to access, unfortunately. It would shine bright white, allowing him to get to work grinding his herbs with a mortar and pestle, etching more runes into the table, and hammering at shiny rocks; making a racket far too intense for my sensitive ears.

  It wasn’t ter
rible living in Astravar’s tower for the first week or so. There were mice here, lots of them. Mind you, with the way this place had been put together, with stones thrown one on top of the other, there were plenty of places for mice to hide.

  They hid in holes underneath the spinning wheel, behind the cold obsidian stone of the enchantment table, underneath the bed frame – full of nasty splinters, that one. There was even one in the pantry, which is the worst place to have a mouse hole, if you ask me. Particularly in a world where they haven’t yet invented tin cans.

  That’s probably why Astravar summoned me here and, being a good cat, I got rid of them pretty quickly. I even ate a few of them, because I was hungry. Mouse tastes okay, but I can’t stand all those sharp bones in awkward places. To be honest, I also prefer my meat cooked.

  You would have thought a wizard would be selective about who he brought into his abode. Well, he was really, other than the mice, and the cockroaches, and the single rat who made it up there one morning. The rat didn’t find his way through a hole, a window – because I already told you there weren’t any – or even the front door. It found its way through a portal that Astravar summoned in that same pentagram he’d brought me through, bang in the centre of the tower.

  Oh, and I didn’t tell you it was a demon rat. That’s right, a demon rat that I had to kill nine times. But that demon rat was only the first of them. After I had killed it, Astravar seemed to think it a good idea to summon more of them from his portals. Each day, after returning from his foraging, he’d enter his pentagram and mutter some strange words. Then the portal would open up, only for a few seconds mind, but it was enough for those infernal rats to swarm out of them. Then, I’d have to go chasing after them, and beating them down. It was exhausting, I tell you. By the end of it all, I just wanted to collapse on the bed.

  Then, Astravar would sweep them all into some kind of open closet that he never let me anywhere near. Really, he must have picked up thousands of those demon rats after a while, and their bodies never seemed to decay.

  I got no rewards for my efforts, no extra smoked salmon or chicken liver or anything like that. Trust me, I really didn’t want to be eating any of those demon rats.

  Anyway, here I am rabbiting on – don’t you just love rabbits? – about the terrible life I had in the tower, when I have so much else to tell.

  My story really starts one day when Astravar came home from his foraging. He’d just been picking some kind of mushrooms from a nearby cave, and the spores must have made him a little drowsy. So, he neglected to close the door properly.

  I admit it, I thought twice about sneaking out the door, as I wasn’t sure how long the mushrooms’ spell would last on Astravar. If he woke up and saw that his prized Bengal was missing, he might hunt me down and turn me into a mouse or a frog, and then feed me to another cat.

  Perhaps even one he teleported across time and space to hunt the demon rats he accidentally let through his portals. He’d probably pick an even bigger cat, just because Astravar liked to be ironic. I’m guessing he’d choose a Maine Coon.

  But then it would be an equally fitting end to die of starvation in some conceited warlock’s tower, and that thought made me bat open the heavy wooden door with my paw, slide out the gap, and make my way down the cold, stone, spiral staircase. I squeezed through the cold iron bars of the gate at the bottom of the tower, and I sprinted out into a cruel and unfamiliar world.

  2

  The Sprint

  I didn’t just run; I sprinted like a jaguar. I let my two hind legs carry me across the ground, imagining myself back in the jungles my ancestors came from, or dashing across the plains like the cheetahs the Savannah cats from my South Wales clowder claimed inhabited their ancestral lands. I didn’t halt once to look over my shoulder, mind. There’s no better way to kill momentum than to stop looking where you’re going and then tumble into a rock or trip over a lump in the ground.

  A strange purple mist enveloped the land, smelling more of death and decay than anything natural. The air here felt almost choking, and I found it difficult to breathe. But still, I soldiered on.

  The ground beneath me wasn’t great for running. It was marshy and cold. The water came up to my knees in places. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t go near such a place, even if I knew a vast field of catnip lay on the other side of it. But then, anywhere was better than that tower.

  My legs got tired after a while, but I didn’t stop. I doubted that the mage could outrun me, but he might send something after me that could – a demon cheetah, perhaps. Or he could even use that portal to cross time and space and materialise right in front of me. I didn’t know which possibility I feared more.

  Fortunately, nothing came, and soon enough I managed to get out of the terrifying place. The sun also broke out of a thick grey layer of clouds. The sensation of warmth against my fur and naked nose, after so long without it, caused me to slow a little. I found myself on much firmer ground, thick with long dry grass and rich in pollen. Dragonflies buzzed around overhead, and I spent a little while chasing some of them. But, after running for so long, I tired quickly, and so I lay down to have a little snooze in the sun.

  It was then that I noticed something wheeling by overhead. Now, back in South Wales, our little clowder had a rule. Everything that flew was good for hunting as soon as it landed. We didn’t have eagles or hawks or anything like that in South Wales, so nothing in the sky would get us into any danger, except perhaps an occasional aggressive seagull.

  But the thing that cast a shadow over me was enormous, to say the least. Even being whiskers knows how many miles up in the sky, it still looked bigger than me.

  It had these long wings like those of a goose, but much broader and webbed rather than feathered. As it passed by, it let off a roar that cut apart the sky. The creature had come from a snow-capped mountain range in the distance, much more impressive than the Brecon Beacons back in Wales.

  I yawned, deciding that as long as that creature didn’t mind me, I wouldn’t mind it either. So, I closed my eyes, and I slept fitfully, occasionally waking from nightmares of Astravar dropping out of a portal and putting me in that horrible cage again. But after a while, the dreams also faded away, and I awoke underneath the amber glow of the setting sun, which caused the high strands of grass around me to cast long shadows.

  That was when I decided it was a good idea to go hunting. I wasn’t sure what I was in the mood for then. But regardless, there was no running water nearby so I wouldn’t have a chance of catching any fish. Unless I went back to the marshland, of course, which I wasn’t going to do for obvious reasons. I tried chasing some starlings, but they lifted themselves up from the ground whenever I got within a few yards of them. Instead, I scouted around for voles or mice.

  That’s the thing though – small rodents are easy to hunt indoors. You just trap them inside their holes and scoop them out with a paw. But outside, they had places to run to, so the tiny critters would just scramble away.

  After a while of stalking across the land looking for food, I came across a rock over what looked like moist ground, just next to an oak tree. I was desperate, so I turned it over, to find it crawling with earthworms and woodlice. They didn’t make for a particularly appetizing meal – I hated eating creepy crawlies. But they satisfied the hunger pangs somewhat.

  That was how I lived for the next several days or so. Eating insects and worms from underneath the earth, carrying on across the land hungry and tired, but at least grateful to once again be able to see the sun rise and set. I tried to travel and hunt at night. But the night didn’t reward my hunting. I could swear there was something about the mice and rabbits here – they just knew to stay well away from me, as if they had greater dangers to deal with than a mere cat. They dug deeper into their burrows and curved their holes down into the ground so I couldn’t reach into them successfully.

  During the day, I slept in the long grass. Occasionally, one of those strange and massive beasts fl
ying overhead would wake me from my slumber – always either going to or coming from the mountains, and always flying in the same direction.

  When I saw them from the right angle, I would imagine something was sitting on top of them. Perhaps a human in bright clothing. But I thought it must be my imagination. I was hallucinating, and it wouldn’t do me any good.

  After a while of living this way, and the intense hunger pang in my stomach, I could literally feel my ribs pressing out against my chest. I realised my problem then. I needed to be around humans, and I’d lived without them for far, far too long.

  It was ridiculous, I know. A great beast like me – a Bengal – not being able to hunt for himself. But I had to face the facts. I was domesticated, not bred to live in such a wild world.

  Yet there was no way I would turn back to the marshlands to live with Astravar. Whiskers, if I returned there asking for food and a ticket back to my owners in South Wales, he’d probably skin me alive. Still I had no idea where I would find a town, or a city, or any place where I could find a nice family to feed me. I only had one lead – the massive creatures that flew overhead, always coming from one direction towards the mountains in the morning and returning the other way in the evening.