998 PRETEND YOU NEVER SAW ME!

Fluffy was using his knives to chasing the creature out from under the thick hedge of brambles for us.

I held my breath… the moment it shot out of the cover of bramble, I gasped. I wasn't the only one who realized what it was.

"Ah!"

"Stop!"

"NOOOO!"

A gunshot rang out.

{Shit.} Thought my good beta quite by reflex because he was the one who had shot.

My hair zinged into its blade form and shot out, but I knew it was too late to block the bullet.

"It's a cat?" Ki stopped short.

It wasn't just any cat either, it was our lost packhouse kitchen cat. The one that had disappeared years ago. The one that I was sure could talk - at least I had been 100% certain when I was a puppy.

What did it say its name was again?

"Pony?" I asked. The cat ignored me and proceeded to lick its paw, which should have indicated that it was just an ordinary cat, except that we had just zig zagged through the forest more than 10 minutes straight at full speed to catch up with it. AND hadn't it just been shot?

Noisy footsteps and Neil and Jax stumbled out to the clearing to join us. Neil's face was red from the run, Jax was drenched with sweat.

I mean, we all had a work out. Even me. I used my sleeve to wipe the sweat off my face.

"It's just a cat." Neil realized.

"I missed?" Harvey was totally shocked. He looked at the gun in his hand as if trying to figure out exactly how that could've happened.

"Happens to the best of us, Beta." Jax shrugged.

But Harvey wasn't convinced. You'd think he had never missed a shot before in his life. Hahaha.

"I was sure I hit it." Harvey still hadn't gotten over it.

"Me too." Ki admitted. It was the only reason why he didn't shoot.

"How strange." Said Wolfgang, the third person who had been sure the cat had been shot.

By now, I felt quite sure it was Pony.

"You're Pony, aren't you?" I asked it.

The cat paused, looked at me, and then resumed licking its paw.

Fluffy had gone around to check for any traces of Harv's misfired bullet, "It should have hit the dirt around here."

But if it had hit the dirt, wouldn't we all have seen it kick up the pieces just a bit. But the ground was perfectly untouched… Fluffy went to check further back.

And then he was suddenly back on mindlink, {There's somebody here. Footprint.}

{What?} More than one wolf answered.

Naturally, we all had to go over to where Fluffy was to check it out.

{Somebody pick up the cat.} Harvey decided. In hindsight, it was good that there was someone in our group that didn't leave lose ends behind.

The cat was very suspicious.

What kind of cat could zip through the woods, withstand a bullet shot, and then just sit there licking its paw calmly. It hadn't even broke sweat.

Could it be that it hadn't run at all? Maybe Pony was here all along… for all these years, just living in the woods on its own. Maybe we had been chasing the owner of that single footprint that Fluffy had found.

But that didn't explain where the bullet had gone.

Neil bent over to scoop it up, but the cat hissed at the large man.

{You're scaring him, Big Guy.} Jax waved a hand to brush the Big Guy away, {Here, let me do it. I have a way with cats.}

{Is it the same way you have with women?} Fluffy asked innocently.

{Focus Fluff.} Harvey pointed a short distance away, {Go check the perimeters.}

I decided to leave Neil and Jax to deal with the cat's capture and joined the others to look at the footprint. It was only half a print. The front half, so it was like whoever it was had to exert a bit more force against the ground with the front ball of his foot. I tried to think of what movement that would be. The foot print pointed to where Harvey had sent Fluffy to check.

{Looks like a man's boot.} Wolfgang observed.

{Salomen probably.} Harvey said, and before anyone thought he was some kind of super detective, he quickly added, {They are the same lug marks as mine.}

And again, before anyone could jump to the wrong conclusion, {It isn't my footprint. It's a size larger.}

And also, we had come from the other side - Harvey couldn't possibly have stepped there yet.

{There's a dent in the dirt here too… maybe his knee.} Harvey postulated, proving that he wasn't that far from a good detective after all.

{He was probably crouching.} Wolfgang looked very serious, he rubbed his chin and frowned in thought - even though he was cleanly shaven this morning, {Perhaps to stay hidden behind this hedge.}

Now they looked around for more tracks, but the owner of the boot was rather stealthy. He left us almost nothing to work with.

But if there was another wolf in our woods, why didn't Boo (or Dad's wolf) register the trespass? I scanned the surrounding area, but there were no trespassers.

{Fun, there!} Boo did find someone though. Someone "fun."

{Follow me.} I said, and just in case I added, {Don't shoot and…}

"Arugghhh… MY FACE!!!!" We all spun around at Jax's tortured cry to find him kneeling on the ground.

{Shhhh… shut up Jax!} Neil reminded him.

{My face!!!!} Jax repeated on the mindlink, {My beautiful face!!!!}

The cat had scratched Jax.

The cat made a run for it, in quite the opposite direction as the mysterious fun person up ahead.

I krakened and let my hair catch hold of it. It yowled and hissed like something possessed, but my hair was currently made of metal, and while, thank goddess, my hair had sense to not use its blade form, it was still a metal grip around poor Pony. I couldn't tell if Pony was more angry or terrified, but we had no time to waste, the mysterious fun person was moving rather quickly away from us.

I pulled off my betaman cloak - the cut proof, wind proof, bullet proof… that one, and threw it over the cat like a sack, and then quickly wrapped the large cat up. It was much heavier than I expected. Like I had carried lots of stuffed toy animals of similar size before, and they weighed like marshmallow in comparison.

I'm not sure why I thought the cat would weigh the same as a polyfibre filled toy cat of the same size. Obviously, I wasn't thinking properly about it.

Anyway, I caught the bundle and shoved it to the nearest pair of arms - which turned out to be Fluffy's.

{Hold this for me.} I said.

And I was off. My wolves immediately taking off to follow.

It was really hard to keep up the chase, but I had my lucky sense of direction, and quickly got my break when the mysterious fun person tried to make a turn… I guessed his next move and dashed to meet him.

We collided for a second time.

I was very sure this was the same person I collided with earlier. He made the same sound, "Ooofff"

And my hair poofed back from its blade from into a hair shampoo ad.

But this time, my wolves dived in too.

{Pin him.} Harvey decided.

So now I was sitting on top of a grown man, fully dressed in black, his hair was black and tied back in a low pony tail. He was missing an eye, it was covered with a black eye patch, and I felt quite sure it wasn't just for show, unless the thin white scar line down the same side of his face was also just for show.

His other eye was the most familiar emerald green. No wonder my wolf hadn't registered an intrusion.

"Ben?" I asked. I could barely believe my eyes, "What happened to you?"

"I… I'm not Ben." Ben lied in deadpan. I'm not sure who he thought he was going to fool.

"Don't lie! You even smell like Ben!" On a bad day too, "When was the last time you bathed?"

I had wondered who was leaking Ben's scent! Like maybe someone was wearing Ben's jacket… suddenly I realized his scent was floating around because we were chasing him all this while.

"That can't be Ben, Princess." Wolfgang, who had pinned down his right arm, was less convinced.

I got off Ben's mid drift to get a better look.

"Although it would explain the Salomen boots." Harvey allowed wryly. Apparently, Harvey had been the one to introduce the brand to Ben and it had been Ben's preferred brand of boots since.

The only problem was that this Ben had only one eye, a pony tail, dark shadows across his jaw (and dark rings under his eyes too). This Ben was taller and broader than Harvey, and looked older than Ki too.

"Sam, you're going to break the space time continuum." Ben said, and then he sighed, "Sam, this is bad. Let me go. Pretend you never saw me."