Chapter 19: Cassie: The Tiger
"It's fine, Jake," I said to him, he was offering to walk me home. "I can just fly home, plus, I need some time to think."
"Well, if that's what you want, then I'm fine with it."
I turned away from Jake and headed into the woods on the outskirts of town to morph into osprey and fly home. I walked for a few minutes to make sure I was far enough away from the road as I could so no one would see me morph.
I stopped in a clearing and started imagining the osprey in my mind. Morphing is always unpredictable, this time the first things that changed were my feet. They slowly started turning into deadly talons. I always love flying, it's one of the best feelings in the world, the feeling of absolute freedom. My legs and chest were beginning to form next when I saw something out of the corner of my eye that almost made me scream. It was a fully grown Bengal tiger crouched several yards away in the bushes.
"Jake? Is that you?" I yelled. "What are you doing, you scared me half to-"
The tiger lunged at me before I could finish. It's definitely not Jake, he'd never attack me, so was this an actual tiger, did it escape from the gardens and escaped into the woods and attacked me because it saw me morph?
"Grrrooowwww!" The tiger roared. I was almost morphed, the only things yet to morph were my wings. I tried to run but the tiger swatted me to the ground with one massive paw.
It's strength is insane, it hit my left wing as it was forming and it immediately snapped in two. I was helpless now, I was a bird who couldn't fly, I was dead.
The tiger rolled me around on the ground for a few minutes with it's paws, breaking my other wing and knocking me half conscious. It was weird, the tiger was not killing me, even if it had escaped from the Gardens and had never hunted before in it's life, it's instincts would have kicked in and it would have killed me, not just rolling me around.
A few minutes passed when the tiger stopped rolling me around and it walked a few feet away and turned towards me. Then it did something that almost made my heart stop, it started to morph.
