Shooing the Cats Away
Toronto | Lester B. Pearson International Airport
Danny groans beside her.
"Babe. Leg bouncing. Stop."
Laura hadn't noticed she was but sure enough, the bottled water Danny's clutching to her sweaty head is going full Jurassic Park right now.
"Sorry," she mumbles.
"Just...easy on your poor sick wife, you cretin. M'bout to shift."
The airport isn't innocent; especially the Shadow Airlines terminal where there's a ghost struggling with her improperly-magicked luggage and swearing each time her hand goes right through. A middle-aged witch wearing a conference lanyard is chatting with her simply massive dracofeminine friend, laughing and reminding her to duck the twenty-foot ceilings and suspending a bag of chocolate covered pretzels between them on cords of lightning, perhaps complimenting her on finding a suit that fit that torso and still looked professional. A dark-skinned cambion with entirely crimson eyes and rust-red skin greeting his pale, almost human, ordinary-pink teenage daughter and scolding her for the human boyfriend's she brought with and his hollow, half drained gaze. She wrings her tail, ignoring the angry flicks of he spade-shaped tip and shifts foot to foot anxiously. The welcome back sign is perched between her curly-cue horns, written on a small piece of white cardboard. Her wings flutter in irritation as the people parts -- hands, feet, big words -- try to hold back the demon-y parts that want that boy for a snack.
Laura can practically hear her whiny, glamoured voice. Sex with the volume dial turned up to eleven.
'but daddy!'
'but nothing, young lady!'
The boy will be lucky to make it through their next date without smelling salts and if she really can't keep her tail in her pants, he may spend a night in the hospital. Then again, Laura supposes that the existence of an entire race of female cambions suggests that some men are happy to make that trade just as the father's existence proves more than a few human women will skirt death for a wild ride.
Then the girl's mother comes out and oh Laura understands now. Cherry-red skin, dressed to kill, shiny black horns and cheekbones sharp as knives. This girl isn't a hybrid. She was hoping that her father would be more forgiving, perhaps because he doesn't know what it feels like and she wanted the matter settled before her mother came around. Her mother who probably knows exactly what it feels like -- horns like that grow over centuries -- and has had to hold back or simply taken the last drop of a mans life herself in the past. Sure enough, her mother pinches one knife-sharp ear between her fingers and says something, no more than a few words, Just like that, the would-be sex demon is sniffling and melting into a hug.
"You're people watching," Danny teases. "S'cute. Demonic family values in the corner?"
"Yeah."
"It's just so Disney when you have context," Danny agrees.
"Trying to distract myself from seeing you hurting, Danny. You could, you know...shift. New laws and all."
Laura glances at the 'Come to Canada' initiative posters from the Ministry of the Interior with their World War II poster stylings and the menagerie of ordinary, magical and hybrid people crossing a street together on their way to work..
Danny shakes her head.
"Self-control. Not that simple. Everyone's welcome but weres and vamps."
Laura sighs.
"It's really rude," she complains. "You guys came out first."
Danny chuckles.
"Yeah. That's why they're afraid. When we did it, it was scary. Lockdowns. Quarantines. Calling up the army and all that. By the time pink, horny, and winged over there told her teacher it was scary as filling out school paperwork. The world hadn't ended. The nightmare part was over. Carm and I give people flashbacks."
Laura pats Danny's knee. Now she's the one twitching.
"Now disembarking Shadow Airlines flight 208 from Graz, Austria."
Passengers spill out, perhaps two dozen. It's a small plane and the airline only goes direct from Toronto to Graz in the first place because of the founding sisters.
Mattie has blown past ages ago, probably that gust of wind Laura felt. Off to lighten some clubgoers a pint or two each.
Carmilla shakes the captain's hand, looking exactly as disgusted to be making nice as she always does. Her burgundy slacks are tailored, no doubt at Matties insistence and her blouse looks like whipped cream, it's so shiny and moves so easily as she shakes hands. A pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses rest on her face. Since it's indoors, night, and she's standing in the lights-off safe space of Shadow's terminal, she's hiding her eyes. No doubt the smell of human blood and post-flight body odor combined with the stress of travel and the anticipation of seeing her girls has pushed them past their usual chocolate-brown to their full, terrifying, vamped-out state. Gold and bright, simmering like a hot brand.
Laura's been pinned by that gaze so often it's almost to the point where chocolate coins with gold wrappers send her panties sliding to the floor.
"That's our girl," Danny coughs.
"Yeah," Laura coos. "There's our girl."
Carmilla detaches from the employees, sharing a laugh with either a dracofem or a minotauress flight attendant, then beelines for Laura and Danny. Walking. Then running. Then blurring.
Laura is bundled up in arms and hands like steel and Carm is huffing her nose in her hair.
"I'm so sorry. To both of you."
"Just tell us you didn't eat the VP of Finance and we forgive you," Danny jokes.
Danny's body is fighting. The curse in her must be screaming, like it knows it's being purged. Doctor Sathya was right. Danny could lose some of the vampire but not all. Surgery was the only option, to put an anchor in. All that magic had been going to bloodlust and glamour and pyrokinetic is now funneled only into her shift, trading the vampire for her cat shape.
Her shift is pressing hard now. Her coppery mane is growing so fast it's visible to the naked eye and her white-knuckled grip on the armrest is quickly furring up. Her cat shape is nothing like Carmilla's sleek, black panther. Danny hulks out into a massive Siberian tigress with a glossy, thick coat of white and black except for the head and neck. With the bulk and the fluffy coat Laura can't get her hands out of comes a single-minded set of goals. Eat. Sleep. Fuck.
"Ugh, I should have. Making me miss your last treatment, Danny. Laura's article."
"It's a blog, babe. You read it over there."
"No, I didn't."
"You didn't?"
"Figured it's only half the story. See the sausage being made if I asked you to read it to me."
"I want to go home," Danny groans.
"Help me with her, cupcake."
"Always."
Laura gets under one side of Danny and Carm gets the other. They stop long enough for Laura to fumble a phone out and call for an Uber, flicking through a couple drivers before she finds a scruffy young man with a electric SUV and a 4.9 from what the app calls 'gothic' passengers.
"I swear she already weighs what the tiger does."
"Asshole," Danny groans.
"Maybe later. I did buy a new harness."
Finally, after an awful day of clinics, antiseptics and heartache, Laura gets to watch something perk Danny up.
-----
Laura's phone chirps not long after the driver winds off the airport's ramp.
"Shoot."
"Something wrong?" Danny rumbles.
"Down, tigger," Carmilla teases. "You could sense if she was hurt. It's confusing right now. But you could hear or see or smell if she was in real trouble, remember?"
"Calendar reminder," Laura tells them. "The gaming group."
"Tonight?"
"Want me to cancel?" Laura asks Danny.
"No," Danny chuckles. "You were looking forward. It's a couple of days, right? Tomorrow will be better."
Carmilla groans.
"You want me to play Dungeons and Dragons."
"Yes."
"With space pirates, one of whom's an alien."
"Pretty sure she's more a space commando but yeah."
"And a curse-bearer, like it's no big deal that it was a Biblical curse. And a Superhero."
"She promised to not wear spandex!"
"And a vampire hunter."
"Best behavior, the witches she's coming with promised."
"And some blonde I've never heard of."
"Well, the group chat has her as the MotherOfDragons and her wife's handle was RedWolfOfWinter so how lame could they be?"
"Lame," Carmilla and Danny agree.