Page 4 of Blade

If they’d kill someone they could have coffee with, they’d kill me.

Nothing.

Had they gotten closer?

“Hello?”

Did they not know how to use their phone?

Was my rescuer unable to talk?

Oh.

For fuck’s sake.

How did my day keep getting worse?

Was it one of those stupid monster hunters from that fucking podcast everyone was listening to lately?

God. Had one of my cousins shown up here too?

“What the fuck are you?” Well, I could knock having coffee with it off my worry list. It was some kind of weird big cat and vampire wolf hybrid that looked slightly rabid. Nothing nature made was that ugly unless Australia was involved somehow. “You’re not even a zoo animal.”

Maybe one of its monstrous ancestors had slept with one?

If humans would sleep with anything, some animals must too, and it’d supposedly been killing things since the early 1950s, so it couldn’t be the same animal.

“God. I’m going to get eaten by some kind of rabid zoo animal wannabe.” I couldn’t even get eaten by something normal like an alligator like cousin Micky.

That definitely would’ve been less creepy considering the weird big cat thing was circling under me and looked like he was measuring the distance between us.

How tall could cats jump?

Wait. High.

How high could they jump?

No. We didn’t need to figure that out.

“Um, you really don’t want to try to reach me. Magic ropes. Sorry. No. Not sorry in this case.” Which was a worse way to die, dehydration or rabid cat creature?

Oh dear.

Was he stretching?

Did cats need to stretch before they tried to eat a monster hunter that didn’t have enough common sense?

“I really need to figure out what you are before you eat me.” How long was that going to be? “Oh. That was. You were.”

Fucking with me.

It’d been fucking with me.

“Good jump, murder kitty. Good jump.” If people could teach cats to use those buttons, maybe I could teach him not to eat me? “No touching but good jump.”

Considering he’d come within inches of my ass without much effort, I was pretty sure we’d answered the “how high” question.

Too high.