Outcast

His blue eyes glowed. “One battle should be all it takes. After that, these newcomers will either go away for good, or they’ll stay well away from us.”

To Jaypaw’s surprise, Brook stepped forward to stand beside her mate. In the hollow by the lake, she was always quiet, but now her eyes shone and she held her tail high as she looked around at her Tribemates.

“Stormfur will teach us what to do,” she meowed. “He knows battle moves these strangers can’t even imagine.”

“He’ll likely get us all killed,” the elder called Rain grumbled.

“The Tribe has lived in these mountains for seasons upon seasons,” Brook insisted. “Are we going to leave, just like that?”

Several cries of “No!” came from around the cave. Almost every cat in the Tribe had risen to its paws, its pelt bristling and its teeth bared. Only a few, like the gray elder, stayed where they were, glaring at their Tribemates. Amid the uproar, Stoneteller sat unmoving on his rock. Jaypaw could not read his expression or sense anything of what he felt.

Suddenly Jaypaw realized the moonlight was fading. The enthusiastic yowls of the Tribe changed to screeches of terror and fury. Icy wind ruffled his fur and he was knocked off his paws as another cat charged past him. The air was filled with the reek of blood.

Blinking, Jaypaw found himself out on the bare mountain-side again. The faint light of dawn drizzled into the sky; clouds hung low over the peaks. He lay on his side on the very edge of a stream, his tail dangling in the gushing water. With a hiss of annoyance he scrambled to his paws, shaking off the icy droplets and struggling to keep his balance on the slick, wet rock.

Around him the narrow valley heaved with the bodies of fighting cats. Close by he spotted Talon, rolling over and over in the grip of a powerful silver tom, battering at the intruder’s belly with his hind paws. For a heartbeat the intruder’s throat was exposed, but Talon was too slow to sink his teeth in.

An apprentice could do better than that! Jaypaw thought.

A few fox-lengths farther down the valley, Stormfur jumped onto a boulder. “Leap onto their shoulders!” he yowled. “Don’t let them pin you down!”

He flung himself back into the battle, raking his claws across the pelt of a tabby she-cat, then whirling to confront a muscular black tom who was shaking a small Tribe cat in his jaws as if she were a piece of prey.

Brook was close by, with Night a paw step behind her, stalking around the side of a boulder to creep up on a couple of the attackers as they would have crept up on their prey.

Jaypaw gritted his teeth. The slender she-cats had never been trained to fight. They sprang bravely at their enemies, but the two invaders were almost twice their size and fought back with slashing claws.

Jaypaw was jostled aside by another pair of fighting cats, snagging his pelt on a thorny bush that grew in the crevice between two rocks. One cat fell on top of him; pushing vainly at the weight of fur and muscle, his jaws flooding with the stench of blood, Jaypaw thought at first that it was dead.

Then it jerked convulsively, pulled itself to its paws, and dragged itself into the shadows behind a boulder.

Jaypaw staggered to his paws, ripping his fur as he tore himself free of the bush. Another Tribe cat fled past him, a powerful gray-black tom, his fur ripped and one shoulder soaked in blood. A black-and-white cat caught up with him, crashing into his side and flinging him to the ground.

“Slit its belly open!” Jaypaw hissed.

The Tribe cat didn’t hear him. He fought with courage, refusing to give up even when the invader slashed open a wound down the length of his flank, but he had none of the skills that would let him throw off his attacker. The invading tom bit down hard on his throat, then sprang away, leaving the limp body of the Tribe cat half in and half out of the water. His gray fur darkened as blood soaked into it.

Jaypaw caught sight of Stormfur again, at the center of a group of Tribe cats, including Talon. The gray warrior was yowling encouragement, trying to force a way through the crowd of intruders and drive them back, but the attackers flowed over them like floodwater.

“Knock them off balance!” Stormfur yowled. “Don’t let them—” Whatever orders he was trying to give were lost as two of the attackers leaped at him from opposite sides; Stormfur vanished in a whirl of teeth and claws.

One by one the Tribe cats broke away, fleeing upstream toward the steeper slopes. One of them halted beside the body of the gray tom and let out a wail of grief and despair, before pelting onward and disappearing into the shadows.

“That’s right, run!” The silver tabby tom bounded to the top of a boulder, jeering at the Tribe cats as they fled. “Run and don’t come back!”

“Rabbits!” a brown-and-white she-cat added, leaping up to the silver tom’s side. “This is our place now!”

“No—stop!” Stormfur screeched, shaking off his attackers with a spatter of blood. “We can still drive them back!”