Chapter 30: Shades of Fear

"Darkpaw. Wake up." Voice. Familiar voice. Why can't I place it? Why does it sound slightly different. I know it's a she-cat. Let's see...what she-cats do I know? Hollystar, Nettlepaw, Sunwind, Cloudbreeze, that weird cat Terror...

Nightpaw! I thought I heard a weirdly monotone type thing to this familiar voice.

"Darkpaw." Nightpaw repeated, "You must wake up or Hollystar will be mad at you. She has ordered me to show you herbs for future references instead of a regular training."

"Interesting..." I growled, opening one eye, "And why is that?" I was actually looking forward to hunting down half of the forest.

Nightpaw hovered over me, slightly prodding my side with a paw. Her blue eyes were slightly dull, probably from being drained of energy from her recent attack, "Hollystar has said that she will be away on a journey to the moon pool. She wishes to speak with StarClan about an extremely important matter."

StarClan...the dream flooded back to me. Cloudbreeze...the fire... What did all of that even mean? What the heck did Fogstep do to me before I fell asleep? Why were my eyes blue and white, then amber again. How could Badgerpaw have been a freaking bully? Why is my whole body still tingling with a killing instinct? Why do I feel like something bad is going to happen? Why is everything falling into place, just to be broken into a gigantic puzzle again?

Great StarClan I've gone insane.

"Darkpaw." Nightpaw mewed again. Her voice gained a slight annoyed tone to it. Barely noticeable. If you were normal you wouldn't catch it at all. But with my super hearing, I heard it perfectly, "Come."

I lightly growled and got up. Nightpaw led the way to the medicine cat den. It was weird. Our last encounter, she was covered in a fear that was...special to her. With her little murder and all. Then again, she is emotionless. That could've been an act to test her theory of messing with the minds of everyone. Maybe someone just planted Nightpaw's whole backstory in Nettlepaw's eyes. That certainly makes sense. Especially with everything that's happened to me since I got here.

"So what exactly are we doing?" I asked as we approached my favorite place in the ShadowClan camp.

"I am going to show you the herbs that we use here." Nightpaw relied, as emotionless as before.

"Is this going to take long?"

"It should not. We do not require a large amount of herbs in this camp. Most of our herbs are for injuries in battle. We do not have many for plain sicknesses and..." She paused for a moment, "...other conditions." She appeared nervous. About what? Mental conditions? That's perfectly normal. All of us can get shocked beyond believe, or want to die because something went terribly wrong. It's a perfectly normal aspect of life.

I'm probably mental...now that I think about it. All of this killing...or maybe it's just a huge misunderstanding and I'm perfectly normal with just a tad bit of magical energy in my blood that would utterly destroy me if I hadn't been placed under that weird and stupid curse that makes me kill everyone.

See? Makes perfect sense.

"Let us begin." Nightpaw declared, "Tell me what herbs you already know."

I thought for a moment, "Cobwebs stop bleeding, as well as marigold." I thought for another moment, "Burdock root heals rat bites." I thought for another moment, "Juniper berries heal stomach aches...and thyme is good for shock." Another dreadful moment of thinking, "Yarrow can make you vomit, and catmint, rare from what I hear, heals whitecough and greencough."

Nightpaw stared at me with her blank face, then answered me with a blank voice, "Good. Now I will show you other herbs. We do not have a lot of herbs in stock at the moment. Cloudbreeze went out to gather some."

I stared back at her. So that's why Cloudbreeze isn't here, all I need to know now is why Hollystar just dropped our plans of killing the food source in the forest and beating each other to death just so she could cry to her dead mother. I'm pretty sure her mother's dead. I can see it in her eyes.

Nettlepaw crept into a crack in the back wall of the den. It looked natural, and not influenced at all. She returned a moment later with a stack of herbs in her jaws. She set them on the ground at my paws. There were berries and seeds and leaves of all shapes and sizes. I saw deathberries among them. I carefully picked out a single deathberry and looked at it. Nightpaw kept up her little act of no emotion, but I could sense a bit of fear. Of course, deathberries were deadly. But I knew I was immune to their poison. I wasn't that worried.

"Those are deathberries Darkpaw. You should memorize their look and texture so you can warn other cats of their lethal properties." Nightpaw mewed calmly.

I stared at the tiny red berry. If I was still the same as I was when I was a kit, then this little thing shouldn't effect me at all. So I ate it. And I swallowed. Nightpaw's eyes widened slightly, but her lack of emotions didn't really waver.

"I know what these are, Nightpaw." I mewed, "I had these memorized when I was two moons old. Surprising how your worst memory can come back to haunt you."

"What you are saying does not make sense. Explain." Nightpaw replied. Her scent gained a newfound curiosity and surprise. Hmm... What exactly should I tell her? That I ate a bush full of deathberries when I was little so I would die instead of kill more innocent cats? Being immune to deathberries is extremely rare. I don't think anyone has ever been immune to them like me.

"I used to eat these." I stated. Nightpaw's fear grew, "When I realized I couldn't help but kill everyone, I thought that I could just die. It didn't work, somehow I'm immune to these." Then I ate it. The taste of poison and death filled my mouth. Nightpaw's eyes widened.

She carefully picked out a flowering plant from the pile of herbs at my feet. Yarrow. She wanted to make me throw up. She gestured for me to put out my paw to except the yarrow flower.

I shook my head, "I already explained this." I sighed, "I've eaten deathberries before. They didn't kill me then, it's highly unlikely that they'll kill me now. So you can put down that little yarrow petal and-" All of a sudden, I found Nightpaw's paw shoved the yarrow down my throat. And then I violently puked. By the time I was done, my whole body was shaking from utter disgust. I had never thrown up in my life, much less seen another cat vomit. I made sure I was far away when that happened. I for one, even though I loved chopping up innocent cats' bodies and using them to play, hated seeing the inner body fluids of one's newly eaten food.

"Your body heat was rising." Nightpaw stated, walking over to a small pool in the corner of the den to wash my vomit off her paws, "That is the first sign of deathberry poisoning. Your body will fight its hardest when deathberries are involved. Whatever immunity you had does not exist now. If it ever existed in the first place. You had probably just eaten a similar liking berry."

I just stared. How could I not? Really, What else was my little Nightpaw friend holding back on me? Was she secretly a demon too? Or did she have a secret lair that held all of her most precious secrets that only a select few cats know about because they are the only ones who didn't tease her when she murdered that one cat she had serious feelings for?

What was that serious feeling called again? L-lo-love? I'm sure I've heard it before, but I can't exactly remember what it means. I guess it's another word like 'cute' or 'romantic'. Nonsensical. Strange. Made up for cats to spread their weird thoughts and actions.

"Nightpaw!"

We both turned our heads to the entrance. Pinefrost was there. I had almost forgotten about him. His green eyes were troubled. Fear surrounded him. A fear I had never seen or scented before. It was different than the fear that I brought. Weird, there was only one type of fear...

"Nightpaw!" Pinefrost repeated. He was panting, out of exhaustion and his weird different fear.

"Pinefrost." Nightpaw greeted, "I am assuming Shadefeather is having her kits now."

Pinefrost nodded, "The first kits in a while." He sighed, smiled, then the fear came back, "But Lilypool said something was wrong! I need your help."

Nightpaw nodded, then disappeared into her little backroom. She came back with several herbs in her jaws, "Come." She ordered, "You will need to see this. For future references."

I followed her to the nursery. There, a dark gray she-cat kept screaming at a cream-colored she-cat.

"Calm down, Shadefeather." The cream she-cat soothed.

"Don't tell me to calm down, Lilypool. You tell me to calm down, and these kits are going to come out disfigured and lacking several body parts because I will be too busy killing you!" Now there's a she-cat who knows she's in ShadowClan, am I right?

"Shadefrost." Nightpaw half mewed half growled, "You will do well to listen to Lilypool. You forget that she had trained as a medicine cat before she was a warrior."

"Of course I haven't forgotten about that!" She yowled with a sudden burst of pain, "Just please get this to stop hurting so much!"

Nightpaw slowly walked over to her, "I suggest you listen to your friend. Something is going seriously wrong and if you don't shut up right now I might just have to cut you open to get those kits out." My eyes widened. Who knew Nightpaw could give threats like that? Who knew that Nightpaw could growl?

"O-okay..." Shadefeather squeaked. Well, I guess Nightpaw's threats are taken seriously around here. Amazing. I'm learning more than I ever could from a training session from Hollystar.

At the end, there were five kits. Five. How do all of those little furballs fit into one cat's stomach? Really, it's beyond belief. After watching a she-cat give birth for the first time, you can tell that I'm scared for life. And the fact that Nightpaw made me lick a newborn tom to rejuvenate its life, well, I don't plan on ever joining a she-cat's labor again. Disgusting. Utterly disgusting. I didn't really understand what was wrong with her, though. All I heard was that the kits were coming out feet first, which was bad? I didn't understand. I probably won't ever understand.

"Darkpaw." Shadefeather mewed softly, "Come here." For a minute, I was afraid that she was going to attack me. Pinefrost, Lilypool, and Nightpaw watched me, "I want you to pick a name for one of them." My eyes widened. Really? Me, who did pretty much nothing? Well, I guess I helped give a kit life, but that wasn't really nothing. Nothing compared to the countless lives I had taken.

I studied the kits. Two of them had light brown fur. One of them had gray fur, with black spots. Another looked just like Pinefrost. Though he had white paws. The last one, the one I licked to give him life, was ginger. There were small black speck of fur that covered his pelt. He ad black paws and a black tail-tip too. He coddled up to Shadefeather for milk. I watched him do this. He was strong, fierce. Not worried about injuring his littermates. Like a relentless storm. Like a hawk swopping down to catch his prey. Like...me.

Now, I wouldn't know what to name someone like me. I barely know me myself. But I would describe myself as a killer storm. A killer storm that hardly let anything escape it. That's what he looked like to me. A storm.

So... "Stormkit. For the ginger and black one."

Shadefeather nodded, "He does look like a storm, doesn't he?"

And it was then, that I realized maybe I wasn't such a demon after all. Just a slightly morbid killer.

It gave me a really large headache.

Shademoon - I once had a dream where my and my friends were adopted by a serial killer and then was killed by said serial killer... Crazy how our minds can just create the weirdest things, right?

Itachi'sFangirl818 - It will make sense soon. Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. Although you do make a great point. I will consider you're suggestion.

So sorry for not uploading this sooner. I had this almost completely finished the day after I uploaded the previous chapter, but then my mind quit on me. I've been having a serious bout of writer's block for the past week now. I tried reading and looking at really cool artwork to get my mind working again, but that didn't work either. But, you know, with school, homework, drama programs, art programs, applying for a high school for really smart people, having parents that expect you to be able to handle everything, you can't really expect inspiration to com quickly. Oh well, you can't really control everything in your life. I'm simply another face trying to survive in this messed up thing we call life.

-Moon

P.S. I'm also trying to animate a sort of book trailer thingy for Life of Cat...maybe. I'm not that good at digital art yet, so we'll see how far I get. I will let you know soon if I'll continue to inspire myself in the world of animating Cat's tale in short segments of video.