Why were her claws so damn sharp, I mean yeah she's eleven parts cat as she's told me, but that didn't explain why her claws were so damn sharp. 

She dragged me over making me slightly whine in pain as her claws dug into my skin, but I just licked the wound and it closed in a couple seconds afterwards, looking like untouched fur. The front gates opened and I looked at Shadow in shock, what did she do to make these cautious people to make them come out, but she didn't meet my gaze. She was too focused on finding someone in the crowd of people filing out of the tents, and I finally realized how young she was. I mean I knew that she was young, but seeing that hopeful glint of light in her cat-eyes, told me that she was much younger than she seemed, or acted. Her assassin skills deceived my perception of her age, but now she looked like the lost child that she probably had been. 

She was about to turn away when one of their voices caught her attention, and I looked back at the crowd to see a woman in light, beautiful armor come racing out through the crowd. What looked like the guards and the husband running after her as she looked around. Her eyes were the same as Shadows, and though Shadow's eyes were darker, probably from all of the bad stuff that had happened to her during her time in the labs, but I knew that this must've been Shadow's mother. The tear that dripped down Shadow's eye didn't tell me against, or in favor of that idea either. 

The woman had taken out something from around her shoulders and I noticed that it was a bow, a very long, thin lightweight bow that matched with her clothes perfectly, and I saw her reach back and pulled something out from behind her. My vision automatically magnified on the weapon and I saw that the woman had an arrow aimed towards us. She let it fly and it went much faster than I thought that it would, and straight towards Shadow's face, and she didn't seem to be reactant at all towards it.  Then there was a flash and she caught the arrow with a loud clap of her hands stopping the arrow and then her bow appeared in her hand. The arrow knocked in under a second and then she loosed it into the air, standing up as she aimed. Her body angled to show her true archer past, and then there was another brown flash in the dark, she pulled back the string once, more aimed up, and loosed another arrow just after the first, and I heard a loud snap as her bow broke, but she was already gone and her bow was laying against the tree with the carved part of it broken into two, hanging from the branch that we were on and I looked around for a second before deciding that I should disappear as well. 

I looked back at the woman and then the man and there was a thunk in the ground, just behind all of them, and then another along with the splitting of wood, and they all parted in shock and I saw an arrow cut in half as another arrow went perfectly through it. Both of them were in the ground, and the last thing I saw before I ran off was the ring of lines in the grass, and the arrows being in the direct center of those lines. How had I not seen it before, the darkness must've covered it up, or maybe they did, or it was trampled, but the rings looked too prominent to be trampled for years, and the woman turned and looked back into the woods in shock. Not at me, but past me, to where Shadow had disappeared to. 

I ran through the forest trying to follow Shadow's scent, but it stopped about a mile into the forest and the scent of pine covered every trace of her, and I looked around for ten minutes before I heard yelling behind me and I ran to just outside of the Pine Boundaries and climbed a tree. 

I looked northward in the opposite direction of the troops, to where the moon shown just hovering over the horizon and I saw the salute of a small shape with a twitching tail thanks to my extraordinary vision. I jumped from tree to tree, trying to be as quiet as I could, but it didn't seem to matter, because when I got to the tree the small salute was the cat-girl, just sitting there on one of the weaker branches. Sitting there with Balance perfect enough to keep it from snapping and her ear twitching was the only sign that I got that she'd heard me. I climbed as high as I dare go and stopped as the branches groaned under my weight, and I cursed the cat's grace and balance that she'd been given. 

"Look kid, you don't know if that wasn't a test" I said and her tail just continued to flick this way and that as she stare at the moon in silence "okay I don't know what you went through, but--" 

"I will tell you my story" she said and I froze

"What?" I asked and she continued as if she didn't hear me

"When I was younger, I remember playing in the water with my sister, she was so beautiful as she laughed and played in the waves" a streak of light fell from in-front of her from where I couldn't see "she was running in the water with me trailing behind her when I saw a flash of light from over the waves, and I had thought that it was just the glare of the sun glinting off of distant waves" another fell, and her claws extended as she gripped the branch that she was on so hard that it dipped slightly "my vision wasn't as good as it is now, but I still should've seen it coming, I still should've known that my hunters instincts were trying to tell me something. After all I was a warrior, but I had ignored them and so once I caught up to my sister when she was bent down looking at a shiny rock beneath the waves. I had grabbed her into a silly hug of fits and then there was a sharp crack in the air, from over the waves, and my head snapped up to see where the sound was, and then the flash came again and I tried to pick her up and run into the forest where it would be safer, when another crack went through the air. 

"My sister was shot through the chest and the bullet kept on going through her and into my waist, and I'm pretty sure that it hit something important, but I was too worried about an attack that I didn't notice that my sister had died in my arms as I ran, or that I had been shot until I fell to my side in the middle of the camp" the tears were more frequent now and the forest stopped making sound, completely "my mother had come out and cried over us both, and I barely told her that we were under attack before I fell unconscious. I saw flashes of people ding around me, of my mother trying to bring me with her, but being pulled back by our warriors, and the black soldier boots, clothes, and then the blue sky before I woke up in a dark room with a bandage around me waist, my memory had come to me then, and I had tried to count the days since my capture, but through the drugged hazes of dreams, the pain of them injecting me with modified cat DNA, and then the burning pain of changing at such a young stage. Then they taught me how to kill, how to fight, and they put me into arenas, unfair battles, and dangerous places, but in all of them I came out victorious. 

"So they made me their assassin, their weapon, and then you came with the emperor wanting to buy me like I'm an object, and I'm pretty sure that you don't like being seen as different either do you" Shadow looked down at me and then the branch that she was on snapped and fell to the mess of needles and lines below and I was about to catch her from falling to her death. But Shadow had already swing herself to another branch and was standing there crouched on the branch and I was slightly shocked at her agility and readiness for anything that happened. 

Then she jumped backwards and I stood up in shock and tore through the tree to the other side of it and onto another branch as I looked to where she'd landed, and there was a tap on my leg and I looked down to see her smiling at me from below. 

"Thanks for caring" she said " and listening to my story" and then I blinked and she was once again, gone. 

"You have got to stop doing that to me" I growled into the empty air and I swear that I heard snickering, but when I looked to where I thought that I heard it I just saw a flash of claws in the moonlight beneath me and my branch slipped from it's place on the tree. I yelped out of pure shock and looked over to the end and saw that the tree had been cut clean through by something, Shadow was messing with me and it was very, very creepy. Especially since it was dark out and then something grabbed my hand and the familiar pain of claws going into my wrist reached my mind as I was pulled up and set onto a thick branch near the bottom of the tree. 

"You've got to have a sense of humor sometimes" she said and I licked my second wound made by her and it closed like last time, but I growled and glared at her. 

"How exactly am I supposed to have fun with a deadly teenager that could run me in circles and slit my throat in the blink of an eye" I said and she smiled

"By realizing that if I wanted to kill you then you wouldn't have had an arm" she disappeared once again, "or a leg". Something sharp ran along my leg, "or a head", something sharp softly ran along my neck, and I whirled around each one trying to find how she was touching me like that but she was moving too fast for even me to see in the darkness. Then finally a hand, or paw placed itself on my waist, and I looked down to see her smiling up at me touching the right side of my waist. 

"And you would have a big chunk of meat out of your waist" she said and I shuddered at her deathly tone, and then it turned all chirpy and teen-like once again "so why don't you show me around the forest" she jumped out of sight, and disappeared with me knowing the direction that she went instead of being gone in the blink of an eye like she had all of those other times. And I growled before making my way down the tree, glancing around me to make sure I wasn't being stalked or sabotaged as I made my way down carefully and slowly. 

"How am I supposed to show you around a forest that I don't even know" I hissed and looked over to see her sitting on a branch next to me making me lose my balance and fall off of the branch that I was getting off of with a yelp of shock. Then the cutting feeling went onto my right wrist once again and I was dropped after being steadied and I had hit the ground right where there seemed to be a large pile of leaves. 

"You are too easy to startle in the dark" she said as she jumped down in-front of me after I had torn my way from the pile of leaves, and even though I knew who it was, my wolf side still caused me to lash out in freight, but she disappeared from my view again and I saw her legs kicking out from around my shoulders. 

"And that is why I am going to be showing you around the forest that I called my home for a long, long while" she said and I grabbed her feet and tossed her off of me making her flip backwards and land on her feet. Then she was in-front of me growling at the darkness in-front of us and there was another arrow in-between both of her paws once again, and there was a small roll of paper attached to it. Shadow's eyes seemed to gleam with hope as she opened the note and I hoped to find English in it, but there were just a jumble of random letters and symbols all over the note. She tossed the arrow aside and turned to look at me, and I saw the hope in her eyes gleaming brightly in the moon-light. 

"My parents want to see me again, after my mother saw what I did as proof that I was their daughter" she said and then her bones seemed to shift and change and she got on all fours and tore through the forest at a pace that I could barely see through the moonlight, and I growled in annoyance before setting off after her, tracing her by her scent. Which she didn't even bother to hide. 

Thanks for reading and I'll have another chapter out soon...hopefully.