Boabdil
Copyright© 2026 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 11
BOABDIL, NORTH SECOND CONTINENT
Ash awoke. She moved her eyes and ears, trying to discover what it was that had awakened her.
Smoke. She sniffed again. Definitely wood smoke.
Smoke had no place in a forest. There had been no storm; there had been no lightning to start a fire. Humans must have made the fire. There had to be humans here in these woods. They would be the local humans. The humans of the Families did not make fires in the woods.
She turned her head ever so slightly. The faintest of breezes tickled her whiskers. The sun had nearly set. That meant these humans were making a fire to cook their food. The woods to the north would offer them more protection than the hills to the south. And they had to be close, since the breeze was not strong enough in these trees to move the smoke very far.
She flowed down from her branch and stretched, two meters of supple black leopard. She stretched slowly, luxuriously, and sat for a moment gnawing at a claw. Humans, the humans of this place. They would be different than the humans she knew, the humans of the Families.
She had a cherished memory of her favorite human, one called Dor-oh-ti in their tongue. Dor-oh-ti had been thin, small, even for a human, much shorter than Ash was long. Dor-oh-ti had yellow fur on her head, and she smelled of trees and warm earth. Dor-oh-ti might have been human in her appearance, but in so many ways she was a big cat. Ash had seen that when the strangers had come from the sky bearing fire and death.
Men had come, human men. They had landed at the station, the buildings where Dor-oh-ti and her littermates lived. One of Dor-oh-ti’s littermates had been present, and the human men had taken her. Dor-oh-ti had gone after them, calling on Silver and Ash to help her. The three of them, two leopards and one human, had caught those human men before they boarded their machine. The fight had been spectacular, the three of them against all of those human men. Silver had been killed in the fight, but not before he had killed three of the human men and maimed four others. Ash had killed two more, including the human man controlling the machine.
Dor-oh-ti had been the marvel. Quick, cunning, violent, she had moved through those human men like a cat in a killing frenzy. Men died, their throats torn out. Others fell, wounded or injured. It had been all hot-copper-tasting blood and mind-clouding fury.
No one could emerge from a fight like that without wounds, and Dor-oh-ti’s wounds had bled freely. Her rescued littermate had done what she could. She had bound Dor-oh-ti’s wounds. She had tried to stop the bleeding in the human way. But it had been too little and too late. No one could survive the wounds Ash saw.
When Dor-oh-ti died, Ash temporarily lost the reason the humans had given her kind. She moved among the human men, tasting their fear, savoring it, enjoying it, then snuffing their lives one at a time, letting them mewl in fear as her jaws closed. Two had tried to run; she took them down easier than the light-horns she normally hunted. Only one did she spare, and that one only because Dor-oh-ti’s littermate asked her to.
Ash’s rage and grief were like sharp stabs of pain deep in her heart. For days she cast about, seeking to ease this unexpected ache. It was Dor-oh-ti’s mother who showed her a way she could strike back at those human men. She could take service with the humans.
Service ... it was a strange concept. At first, she was uncomfortable with it. She had to accept instruction. She had to accept training. She had to accept discipline. But this was the way the humans hunted, and to hunt with them, she had to learn their ways. It was not like the way she and her kind hunted. But she continued with it, and she saw how, for the humans, their way worked.
At the end of her training, she had been at a human place named Setosha. More human men came, carrying death in their arms. Knowing the ways of these men now, she had slipped away, biding her time, waiting until they felt safe. She hunted them, then, hunted them in the leopard way, but with all the new skills the humans had taught her.
Her hunting had never ended with indiscriminate killing. That was not the leopard way. This stalking, this hunt of hers had been for only the most important human men. She had hunted the ones in gray because anyone could kill the others, the ones in blue. The ones in gray were a challenge. The ones in gray were these human men’s own hunters. She had sought them out and killed them, carefully, selectively, and mercilessly. Only the great battle on the ground and in the sky had stopped her hunt.
The Families had asked her if she had had enough, if she wanted to go back to the great island on Home where the leopards roamed. But this hunt had settled in her blood. She felt caught up in something bigger than she was. It was a heady feeling, like nothing she had ever known before. She lifted her eyes to the night sky. She saw the flames and the lights, and realized that there were bigger things than she could taste, touch, or smell. And she had a part in these bigger things, an important part. She could do things and go places no other being in the Families could go. Wolves, coyotes, and those humans in green called Marines, she could go where they dare not travel. She could do things they would never consider. She vowed she would not end her hunt until the Families ended their own hunt.
The humans of the Families brought her to this new place, this place they called Boabdil. And they gave her a new hunt. The humans were looking for their own, their kits, and their littermates, taken many years before. And their hunt had brought them to this great, wide place with the deep forests and the open plains. In many ways, it was like the great island where she had been born. But it was different, too. Here she could jump farther, jump higher, run farther and faster than she could back home.
She had had to learn new things about this place; the most important was that there were two kinds of human men here, the ones who hunted and scratched at the ground, and the others, like the ones in gray she remembered from Setosha. The ones who hunted and scratched at the ground had their own female humans with them, people like the Families. Ash had learned that some of those the Families wanted were in the middle of all the others and had to be found and rescued. The others, the ones in gray, were here to stop the Families’ Hunt. She could hunt those just for the pleasure of the hunt.
She took another sniff of the breeze before heading north. There were humans in that direction. They might be the humans of the Families, or they might be the ones who scratched in the ground. They might even be the ones in gray she could hunt for sport.
The night was still young when Ash heard noises that had to come from a human. Nothing else in the woods ever sounded like a human. She froze, then sank belly to the ground. The noise came from up ahead, a quiet step as if someone was trying to move with care. Nothing else seemed near, no human, no animal, not even the birds that lived at night. The silence would have told her a human was present even if she had not heard that noise. Curious, she followed the sound.
It was a human man, close-cropped fur on top, gun in a holster, another gun--a rifle--in his hands. He was moving from tree to tree, following the smoke just as she was. In the darkness, she could not make out what he was wearing, but he did not have that unwashed human smell the people from this place had. Her pulse quickened. This could be one of those she hunted.
The human man stopped, raising an instrument to his eyes. Ash faded under cover, a log, brush, part of a still-standing tree. The man slowly turned, facing in all directions with the instrument. Satisfied, he crept behind a tree, put down his gun, and began talking. Ash’s ears perked up. Radio. That meant he was one of those she hunted.
Almost too easy, she thought as she rose and crept up on him. But he had a gun, two guns. And he would bring others with his radio.
She had her own way of contacting the Families. She thought about calling them. After I kill him, she concluded.
When she was almost close enough to touch him, she stopped, looking around. As a kit, she had learned her lesson well from her littermates; always check around you, someone else may be creeping up on you from behind. Satisfied, she pounced.
She hit him once in the side of the head, stunning him. Her jaws went to his neck, biting cleanly through, severing his spinal cord. His blood tasted hot on her tongue as he dropped lifeless at her feet. Almost too easy, she thought as she nosed at him to make sure he was dead.
Satisfied, she pulled his radio from his lifeless fingers. She ran back the way she had come. There was a stream near where she had rested. She wedged the radio in a piece of wood that she nosed into the stream. She watched it drift away. During training, they had told her that radios had something in them that told the listener where it was. She wouldn’t hunt whoever tracked his radio, not tonight. But whoever tracked his radio wouldn’t interrupt her while she investigated the smoke.
She returned to her own radio, a small box on a harness she hated wearing. She rested her paw on top of it and triggered it the way she’d been taught. Two heartbeats later, she “heard” the voice she had trained with.
“This is Lishe.”
“Ash. I just killed a man with two guns. He had a radio.”
“Are you being chased?”
Ash had learned the tongue-lolling laugh from an all-black wolf she knew. She used that now, though she knew Li-she could not see it. “No. But others with guns will come.”
“Are you near his radio?”
“No. I sent it away.”
“I will send a team just in case.”
“I smelled smoke in the trees. I am hunting that.”
“Take your radio, Ash.”
Li-she sounded just like Ash’s mother when she said that. Ash swallowed that thought. She knew she was supposed to carry her radio with her all the time. But she didn’t like the way the harness felt when she wore it, and she left it behind whenever she could. “I will. I will go now.”
“I will have someone there before the sun comes up.”
Ash broke the connection and slipped into the harness. That done, she headed north, hunting the smoke, hunting whoever tended the fires beneath the smoke.
She caught the whiff of a human female and followed the spoor. When she found the wall of brambles, she stopped. The spoor led through the brambles. The smoke came from the other side. In the faint light, she could see scuff marks; the brambles had to be pulled aside in some way. She began following them to see if there was some other opening. She didn’t expect one, but somebody may have slipped.
By the time she completed the circuit, she had made two discoveries, one curious, one unpleasant. The curious one was that she could not smell any human men inside the brambles. The place inside the brambles was alive with the smell of human females, but there were no human men present. That was a puzzle.
The unpleasant discovery was the stream. She had dropped that radio on a piece of wood floating in the stream. How was she to know the stream curved around and passed beneath the brambles? And the radio was now inside the brambles. She had seen it floating just out of reach as the stream carried it under the thicket. Rather than carrying the radio away and luring away whoever would come after it, she had drawn them to the place she wanted to investigate.
She slipped back from the brambles and crouched down in a thicket where she could see the stream. “Li-she, this is Ash.”
“Yes, Ash. What is it?”
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