Snippet Time! Check out #02 from Shade of Honor! Coming soon!

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All that Zhanna could hear in the stunned silence was the dripping of water. Water dripping everywhere. Plunk, plunk, plunk. Her hair was plastered to her face, and she reached up a hand to clear her vision. The cavern was now decorated with dripping water, fragments of vegetation, and one very pissed off familiar.

<<Oh, oh! This is going to be bad,>> she thought to herself.

The usually elegant Russian Blue cat looked like a skinny black drowned rat. Her eyes seem to have doubled in size, glaring beams of green flame at the sodden witch. Slowly, ever so slowly, the cat raised first one front paw and shook it, and then the other. A sharp ripping sound started to emanate from its chest, and the familiar appeared to grow in size.

A nimbus of green flame had surrounded the form of the feline before a swirl of invisible wind encircled it. Instead of a 15 pound, normal-looking cat, the creature that stretched and arched its back before deliberately pacing over toward Zhanna was the size of a cat seen last on the Earth a millennium before.

If sabertooth tigers had come in black, this is what they would’ve looked like. Dascha had totally transformed into her alternate shape. Her dense coat had a subtle striping to it with blue, black, and dark gray forming stripes that ran along the body. Easily measuring 12 feet from her nose to the end of her tail, Dascha’s head now came up to Zhanna’s shoulder. What had been a very upset small cat now was a whole lot more infuriated feline.

At last, Dascha found her voice, producing a thundering roar in Zhanna’s head and an earsplitting caterwaul that echoed around the cavern.

<<What on earth were you thinking of? That was not the spell that you were going to try!>>

<<I just wanted to see if it would work. It seemed like it would be a logical thing to do after the spells we been practicing all morning.>>

<<If your goal was to translocate a large body of water up onto that walls, rip vegetation apart, and assaulted me with water, the spell worked. Otherwise, I would say it was some sort of epic failure.>>

<<I am truly sorry, Dascha. I knew I was tired and just wanted to try one more thing.>>

The cat looked around the cavern, noting broken stalactites, translocated fish that were gasping their last breath, and the continued dripping of water. Pinning her green-eyed gaze on her witch, the familiar summed up her opinion succinctly, <<I would say that this one counts as a failure.>>

Softening both her mental tone and audible snarling, the familiar continued,<<Let’s go home, Zhanna. You’re tired, and we will continue another day. After all, such learning is hard to do by yourself.>>