Oath Sworn - K.N. Banet Page 0,3

marked the area. Pine trees for miles, endless amounts of them going over the horizon. I nestled my bar in them so that I could hide a house out in the middle of my property. Most thought I never left the bar at all, and the few who knew my house was in the middle of my property didn’t know how to get to it.

There was a reason for that.

My skin kept itching and I rolled my shoulders, trying to loosen them up. It wasn’t a full moon, but it didn’t matter, because it was close enough to one, which made all of this a bit easier and explained the small itch I had. I stripped slowly, dropping my clothes into a gym bag. Some women kept purses. Me? I kept a gym bag on me at all times. Normally it was tucked behind the bar where the boys never saw it, but I always took it with me when I left. Once I was naked, I zipped the bag up, making sure the strap was in a good position for me to grab.

Joey and his friends, always asking me if I was a werewolf. Always wondering what the mysterious woman behind the bar could possibly be. They had no idea. If I lived my life right, they never would. Unlike the werewolves, my kind were very private.

The change flew over me the moment I asked it to, taking me down onto all fours. For less than thirty seconds, my bones broke and rearranged themselves, my muscles and tendons moving to fit over the new structure, the new body. It was over in less than a minute, amazingly fast by werewolf standards. They took nearly twenty minutes to shift, the poor mangy bastards.

See, Joey and his friends were half wrong and half right, but that wasn’t something I could ever tell them. I wasn’t a werewolf.

I was a werecat.

Now, werewolves? They looked like wolves. Big wolves, but still wolves. Werecats? I looked like something out of a prehistoric documentary with bad CGI and some scientist talking over it. I had five inch saber fangs and a strange tan and spotted pattern. Whatever cat werecats were supposed to be was long extinct. It made things very interesting when people caught us out and about, which was exactly why that could never happen. The werewolves were out to the world, but not the werecats. We couldn’t be.

And if people thought werewolves were big, they had no idea. I was just about as large as a male lion, which was to say, incredibly big. Human, I was five foot eight, weighing all of one hundred and fifty pounds, with a little bit of curve to me. Just a little, but I was proud of it, since getting any sort of curve as a werecat was practically impossible. As a werecat, I was four feet at the shoulder and roughly four hundred and fifty pounds. Massive, and roughly two hundred pounds heavier than most werewolves.

I gingerly grabbed the strap of my bag with my clothing and started to trot away, sniffing the air as I went. There were no humans anywhere near me or where I could see. I dove into the pine trees, heading straight for home. It was fun, more freeing than anything I could have ever imagined. I could really run when I wanted to, and while I sometimes hated what I was, I never hated this. There would never be a time when I hated the run.

As I went, my magic connected with the land, telling me everything I could ever want to know, like where potential prey was. I generally hunted whitetail since their population was always at risk of running amok in the region. I did my part, and it helped that even when I was human, I had a serious love for venison.

Werecats have a special magic with the land. We’re a part of it and it’s a part of us. We claim territory, which could be huge or very small depending on our strength and needs. Our connection with our territory means everything, from the day we claim it to the day we lose it. Mine was thirty miles in every direction from my home, a large circle if I ever bothered to draw it on a map. It was a sizable plot, but not the biggest I could potentially hold. I knew deep down I should have claimed a larger territory, but I never wanted