Teahouse
Title: Talons
Setting: AU
Characters: Kenshin, Kaoru
Type: 1/?
Genre: urban fantasy
Word Count: 2,262
Kaoru heard the rocket just as she was pulling her dinner out of the microwave, and dropped the curry to the floor as she lunged for the binoculars sitting on the desk. Hustling to the huge, wrap-around windows of the Watchhouse, she lifted them to her face and started scanning.
The rain made it hard to see exactly what was going on out there, but she did see a thin plume of smoke rising from the thick canopy a few miles out. A line of trees close to it shook with more than the wind.
Kaoru cursed and slammed the binoculars down, sprinting for her equipment.
Poachers. Oh hell, no. Not on her watch.
Kaoru yanked the door shut behind her and vaulted over the banister to the ground next to the Watchhouse's Jeep. She floored it almost as soon as the engine had growled to life.
That the poachers had used a rocket suggested they were hunting big-game. A gryphon, maybe, or a bakeneko. Possibly a jormungand, though in this weather that was somewhat unlikely. It was something big, anyway. A rocket and an angry Legend; the destruction would be… Well, they'd probably planned this to coincide with the storm, which would cover at least some of the explosions.
Kaoru veered around a sharp corner, dodging fallen branches on the rough dirt track, and tried not to think about what she would have to do if she was too late and they had already killed something.
She stomped on the brakes and froze, straining to listen. She thought she'd heard…
Yeah, there it was again, rapid gunfire. Damn, whatever they were hunting must be putting up quite a fight. Lips thinning, Kaoru switched off the Jeep's headlights and drove more carefully down the road. With any luck, the poachers would be too preoccupied with their prey to hear her approach.
At least the storm would also help her with that. Even if it was making the road nearly unbearable with mud.
All at once, Kaoru felt a shiver down her spine that had her slamming her foot down on the brakes again and ducking low in the Jeep's seat. A dark shadow burst from the forest ahead of her, streaking a short way up the road before crashing through the trees on the other side.
Damn, it was big! And she still wasn't quite sure what it was; the rain had intensified and the intermittent lightning flashes weren't doing much to light up the forest under the canopy of the trees.
She heard the poachers, shouting, whooping, cursing, crashing through the brush after the creature. Kaoru scrambled for a smoke grenade and her semi-automatic and managed to pull the pin and lob the grenade just as the first of the bastards reached the road.
With a pop and a hiss, thick acrid smoke billowed, obscuring the poachers' sight and stinging their lungs and eyes. Kaoru swung her gun around and shot off a full clip into the cloud. The rubber bullets would hurt, wherever they hit, and hopefully prevent the poachers from returning fire with their much more lethal real bullets.
Kaoru slung the gun's strap over her shoulder and pulled her bokken from its sheath across her back, leaping out of the Jeep and running—low and soft-footed—into the boiling chaos of the smoke and flailing poachers.
They got some shots off, but in the wrong direction, and Kaoru was no rookie. She laid out four of them in minutes, stretching her senses out into the dissipating smoke for any others.
Two left, unless they had a bloodwitch with them for back-up. But if she hadn't been hit with a hex yet, it was probable that they didn't.
Kaoru slid around the last two, probing, watching. One was new, and nervous, twitching around at every sound, having heard his comrades get taken down one after the other. A pistol was clutched in his hand, but he was apparently too nervous to see he'd already run out of bullets.
The other was experienced. It showed in the cold, calm way he scanned his surroundings. He also had a Kalashnikov, held level and steady. He would be dangerous; he should be her first target.
Kaoru slid her bokken back into its sheath and dropped her hand to the standard-issue pistol strapped to her thigh. The safety was thumbed silently off, but he was close enough to hear it when she chambered a bullet. So she waited, poised, and then when lightning flashed—close, so close—she took aim and—
Several things happened at once, and only afterwards could she line them up chronologically.
The lightning washed them in harsh white, just as the poacher was turning toward Kaoru. He saw her, and she saw him, and his eyes narrowed, the muzzle of his gun swinging around…
Her gun clacked, bullet chambering, as thunder rumbled. Her pistol remained steady even as her body twisted, seeing him aim toward her…
Nearly simultaneous muzzle-flashes as they fired…
Kaoru hissed as his bullet tore a trail of fire across her arm, but kept steady as she slid her aim a little lower and fired again. Her first shot hit his hand where it cupped the Kalashnikov's forestock. His gun jerked up at the impact, opening his body for her second shot, which hit him in the soft flesh of the gut. He dropped the gun, and doubled over, winded and deeply bruised by the rubber bullets. Kaoru shoved the pistol into its holster and grabbed her bokken once more. One furious, surgical strike toppled him, the arm without the bruised hand broken.
She turned on the newbie poacher, then, to find him trembling with his hands in the air. His gun lay on the forest loam beside him.
"I surrender!" he yelped as Kaoru stalked toward him.
"Good," she snapped. "Don't move."
He got cuffed first, and left shivering in a puddle on his knees. Kaoru made her rounds, jerking limbs around behind her catches' backs, entirely unsympathetic when they moaned with the pain of their broken bones. They deserved every bit of pain they got.
Even though even the smallest Legend could fetch millions on the black market for its fur, or bones, or heart, or whatever, most people never even considered hunting them. The reason was simple: Legends cursed you when you killed them. Nobody sane was going to risk hunting something that would kill you right back. But poacher cartels kept bloodwitches and Necromancers on retainer, magic-users who could twist them shields that would deflect a Death Curse. Poachers didn't have to worry about dying from a Legend's curse, not if they held one of those spells.
But the deflected curses were not powerless; they didn't just disappear. They hit other people, innocent people, instead. Poachers were killers two times over.
Kaoru winched the cuffs tight around the last poacher's wrists and straightened. Six criminals of the lowest sort, and a pile of the equipment she'd stripped off them. Not bad for a night's work.
After making sure none of them would be moving even an inch from where she'd put them, Kaoru went to the Jeep to grab her radio. Propping her hip on the passenger seat, she reached across to turn the keys and flip on the headlights again. The high-beams cut through the darkness, slashing light across the very-much-worse-for-wear poachers and the road.
Hand hovering over the Jeep's built-in radio, Kaoru cursed.
Whatever they had been hunting… they'd injured it, maybe even fatally. There was a bloodtrail where it had crashed through the forest and across the road—dark crimson spattered and mixing with rainwater in the puddles.
"Dammit," Kaoru said again, angry. She stabbed her finger at the controls of the radio.
"Base, this is Warden Zulu Tango Niner, come in Base, over."
The radio crackled to life. "This is Base, go ahead Warden, over."
"Base I need pick up, six cuffed for a Three-One-One, over."
"Roger, Warden Zulu Tango Niner, sending in a team for pick up, six cuffed for a Three-One-One. We have your position marked, over."
"Roger that, Base. Perpetrators have injured their target, request permission to track and recover, over." Kaoru stared at the blood, startlingly red in the Jeep's headlights. It took longer for Base to reply this time.
"Permission granted, Warden Zulu Tango Niner. Be careful. Base out."
Kaoru hung the mike back onto its peg and turned to wrestle the first aid kit out of its storage console. Depending on what kind of Legend it was, there was a chance she could persuade it to let her treat its wounds.
…If it was still alive…
And as long as she left her guns here. Legends tended to respond violently to the sight of the things. But at least she could keep her bokken, which the smarter Legends recognized as non-lethal, and the stupider ones merely saw as a big stick.
Kaoru locked her pistol and semi-automatic into the locker fixed above the Jeep's back bumper. Then she slung the first aid kit over her shoulder, grabbed a flashlight, and started following the bloodtrail.
It was dangerous to go after an injured Legend like this. While Legends generally could read intent, and knew to not maim or kill Wardens that only wanted to help, sometimes the pain of their wounds was too much and they…
Well, it wouldn't help anybody to dwell on such things. She wasn't going to die; boss would be pissed if she died before writing her report.
There were very few broken branches along the Legend's trail, which surprised her. It had looked fairly large when it had zipped in front of her Jeep, but she would have expected more damage to the trees and underbrush for something that size. Maybe she'd overestimated… Or maybe it was very agile. A snake-formed Legend might have been able to wind itself around the trees without much collateral…
Kaoru froze as something nearby gave a great warning huff of breath, like an angry horse. She hadn't sensed it, and she'd been wide open, trying to find it. Could it hide itself?
Slowly inching forward, she paused as something behind the brush to her left shifted, rustling leaves.
"Hey there," she said in her best soothing voice. "Hey there, easy; I'm not going to hurt you…"
Easing a branch out of the way, she lifted her flashlight and swept the light over—
Kaoru went rigid and nearly dropped the flashlight.
—a long sinuous body, red as blood with an opalescent sheen to every scale, a wild mane of hair that drifted in the air as if with a life of its own, huge golden eyes… even huger claws, dangerously curved and tipped in gold…
"Holy shit," said Kaoru.
It was a goddamned dragon. A dragon. Nobody had ever seen a dragon before. Well, outside of drawings of them in books. Everyone had assumed they were extinct, or had never even existed. Which, all things considered, was a little foolish maybe, but if there were dragons out there flying about and eating dragon-sized dinners and… and doing dragon-y things, wouldn't somebody have noticed?
"Holy shit," Kaoru said again, dazed. "You're a fucking dragon."
Then she blanched. "Oh my god, they were trying to kill a dragon." Her eyes widened. "Oh my god, you're bleeding."
There was a gash down the side of the dragon's wolf-like muzzle, and the end of its tail was tipped with the sad, charred remains of a lion-like plume—the rocket, Kaoru realized, it only just missed him. A deep wound marred the smooth beauty of its left shoulder.
She looked nervously from the dragon's gleaming eyes to its claws, to the tips of its fangs, just peeking out from its upper lip. "Um," she said. Her voice cracked, so she coughed a little and tried again: "Um. Excuse me, honored sir. I apologize greatly on behalf of my race for the actions of the men who hurt you. I have apprehended them and they will face judgment for their crimes. Though it is but a small gesture, please, permit me to treat your wounds."
Speech finished, Kaoru gingerly held out the first aid kit for inspection and bowed low, as she had been trained. With any luck, dragons were of the intelligent faction of Legends.
There was a long silence, as Kaoru tried not to think about how vulnerable she was, tender neck bared and unable to see what the dragon was doing. Her arms started trembling a little from holding out the kit.
Finally, there was a soft, slithering sort of sound, and Kaoru peeked up through her bangs—
—and jack-knifed upright, because the dragon was twisting and… and shifting and…
And there was a man, suddenly, where a dragon had been. A slim man, not too tall, with hair as red as the dragon's scales had been, a simple, elegant katana clasped in one hand… Blood trickled down his chin and the pale skin of his left arm. Kaoru's eyes flicked down without her consent, and nope, no more tail, but oh jeez, he was very naked… She jerked her gaze back up to his face just in time to watch his golden eyes melt into deep purple.
"Agh-g-g-gawha?" Kaoru said. Kaoru-dot-exe has stopped responding.
The dragon… man… thing tilted his head, and said carefully: "This one would be grateful for your aid, so I would."
He's a dragon. I saw a dragon. Dragons exist. A dragon turned into a man.
"Holy shit," Kaoru said.
