t's killed quite a few people that I heard about."
	"I can take care of myself," he said seriously, putting a few coins on the bar.  "For the trouble of cooking a meal I'm not going to eat," he explained.
	"You should think twice, stranger," Bray said.  "That thing ain't human."
	"Neither am I," he replied bluntly, turning from the barkeeper.  "Thanks for the information."
	Outside the tavern, he found Twostep Street just down the block from the building, then turned south and started walking quickly, his mind racing the entire time.  It didn't make much sense.  A Were-cat shouldn't be here, at least none of the ones he knew.  If it was a Were-cat native to this area, that could be an explanation, but it didn't explain this behavior.  Even if they didn't adhere to the Strictures of Fae-da'Nar, a Were-cat wouldn't be going around killing people for no reason.  Unless she had no control over what she was doing.  She could be insane.  That was a very real possibility.  But that too seemed illogical.  A Were-cat wouldn't bite someone, and if she did, she'd either take the victim as a bond-child, or kill her on the spot.  She would have never gotten away from her sire, unless the sire either let her go, or didn't know about her.  But she had gotten here somehow, and it was obvious that she wasn't just trying to blend in.
	He found the area that Bray had said was her territory.  It was blocked off by an unmanned barrier sitting across the street, with signs in Arakite nailed to it.  Tarrin didn't read Arakite, but he had little doubt that the signs were some kind of warning to anyone who was educated enough to read them.  He had to climb over the barrier to continue, and when he did so, the few people near enough to see were shocked he would be so bold.  He paid them no mind, moving past the barricade and finding himself at the end of the street, turning to the left and walking into what he knew was her domain.  It was an area of crumbling, abandoned buildings, some of them laying on the street.  And it was deserted.  There wasn't even a dog or cat to be seen milling about the abandoned neighborhood.  Normally, this would be the haven for homeless and street rats, but the presence of the monster had caused them to flee the area.  And he had to admit, it was the perfect place to hide.  With all the empty houses and buildings and the occasional pile of debris to break up the streets and create hiding places, it was a predator's ideal hunting ground.  This kind of a place was perfect.  The unwary would wander in, ignorant of the dangers, and they would be ambushed.  The only issue would be water, and that explained why the neighborhoods surrounding this territory were so afraid.  She was leaving her hunting ground to find water, and that was why people outside this area were seeing her.
	He was never going to find her by walking around.  With a quick look around to make sure he was alone on the street, Tarrin shapeshifted into his humanoid form, then sank down to all fours and tested the scents laid down on the street.  There were alot of them, many of them fresh.  The vast majority of them were human, but there was one scent that stood out, a scent that confirmed everything.  Were-cat.  The scent itself teased his memory in a strange way, almost as if he had smelled this Were-cat before.  But he knew the scent of every Were-cat he knew, and it was none of them.  The scent was a couple of days old, too degraded to determine which direction she was moving when she passed this way.  He moved deeper into the maze of abandoned buildings, his every sense open and alert, ears scanning for the slightest sound as his eyes sought out any motion, and his nose tracked the old scent on the ground even as it searched for any new scent to waft in on the still air.  His nose picked up the smell of decay, or rotting flesh, and he detoured into a crumbling alley to track it back to its source.
	What he found was the mauled corpse of a short human male.  Either very short or rather young, dead nearly three days.  What was left of it was blackened and bloating, exuding a powerful smell of rot, and from the looks of it, the entire body wasn't there.  An arm was missing, as well as the lower half of one leg.  The scattered condition of small bits of flesh and cloth, and the patterns of blood on the alley's cobblestone told him that the attacker ate a portion of the victim.
	So that's why she was killing people.  She wasn't just running around killing people, she was eating them.
	He felt it was time to think like a hunter.  She wouldn't be out right now.  Cats were nocturnal by nature when it came to hunting, preferring to hunt at night.  Nobody would be on the streets during the day anyway, with those barricades on the streets.  That meant that she was laying around somewhere in the area, sleeping or resting, or possibly eating whoever she'd killed that night.   So, he was looking for a Were-cat that was hiding, and that meant she would find a dark, small space with an easily defendable entrance.  She would be in a basement, or the end of a narrow alley partially blocked by debris.
	It came down to finding her scent trail.  Tarrin roamed around the area for nearly an hour, moving in a methodical fashion both on the street and on the roofs above them, picking through her crisscrossing scent trails to find the most recent one.  Her territory was a large one, he found, many blocks, and it took him a while before he finally found a fresh scent.  Once he had it, he determined which direction she was moving by finding a pawprint in some dust near an alley, then turning back around to track her.  He wasn't really sure why he was taking the time to do this.  Now that he understood what she was doing, his curiosity was satisfied.  But a part of him couldn't leave it alone.  If she was eating humans and living in a hunting territory, she couldn't be sane.  He did feel a little bit of duty to his people to find her and discover if she was insane or not.  To uphold the laws of Fae-da'Nar if anything else, even if he had little respect for them.
	It took him another hour to systematically track her movements.  He must have found her scent at the beginning of her cycle of activity, and it led him out of the territory.  He was forced to track her along populated streets, attracting a great deal of attention from the pedestrians, until he reached one of the city's many public fountains.  She had come for water.  Her path then turned back towards the slum, but at an angle that took him in a different direction.  He saw no reason for the change in direction, until he found the signs that she had attacked and killed someone not far from the fountain the night before.  Most of the blood had been cleaned up, or licked up by dogs, from the smell of it, but the smell of it was still in the stones of the alleyway.  Two blocks away, on the roof of an empty house, he found the remains of a teenage female, the flesh completely stripped off an armbone, but the rest of the kill untouched.  Her path went back to the fountain after that, to drink more water, and then it went back towards the slum along the rooftops.
	He was starting to get close.  The scent trail was fresher and fresher, and the possibility that he was going to get blindsided while trying to follow it was now a serious possibility.  He moved slowly and carefully, with utter silence, tracking the scent laid down on the street step by step as he kept himself alert to any change in the environment around him.  He began to get nervous when the scent trail led him to a series of resting places, one with signs that she had been there recently, for she had relieved herself in a corner, and her urine was still damp.  He was very close.  Still his memory teased him over the scent.  It seemed familiar, like he knew the scent, but he knew for a fact that no Were-cat he knew had that scent.  That distracted him a bit as he left the resting place, on the second floor of an old house where she had piled up old blankets and bits of soft materials to form a bed under a window, but he knew this wasn't her den.  This was just a place she laid where she could look out onto the street and see prey.
	The trail led him into a very small house that had one wall fallen out of it.  It was nothing more than a single room, a single story, and half the roof had caved in when the wall fell down.  That littered the floor with small rocks and piles of debris, and he had to pick his footing carefully towards an open trapdoor in the corner of the room to keep quiet.  He was right on top of her, he was sure of it.  He could smell her now, not just her scent trail, a Were-cat smell mixed with dirt, excrement, and the smell of rotting flesh and bone.  She had picked a good place to make a den, for the broken house made sneaking up on her very difficult.  It only had one way in, the trapdoor, and anyone trying to enter would have to negotiate the narrow opening without alerting her to his presence.  She may be insane, but she wasn't stupid.  Her only mistake was picking a den where her scent emanated from it without allowing her to scent the approach of an invader.  The air in the basement would warm and flow out the opening without allowing air to flow in carrying smells from outside.  Anyone who tracked by scent could, and did, find her scent without giving away his own, just as certainly as if he would have approached her from downwind.  She wouldn't smell him until he was literally inside the basement.  That was a mistake of inexperience, not an error of instinct.
	Reaching the trapdoor, Tarrin squatted down on all fours and poked his head into the opening, looking down.  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the cellar, but the scene below him slowly took form.  There was a ladder that led to an earth-floored basement that looked to be used to store food.  It was as large as the room above, and was littered with empty jars and an overturned shelf.  In the corner of the building was the Were-cat, curled up on her side in the corner with her back towards him.  She had blond hair, this one, nude, and she was absolutely filthy.  She was so dirty that he couldn't tell what color her skin was.  She had dirt, excrement, and even what looked like bits of flesh tangled in her unkempt hair.  Scattered on the floor around her were bones and scraps of cloth from past victims.  There were a great many flies in the den, and the female swatted at them with her tail absently as she rested.
	He found her.  Now he had no idea what to do about it.  He hadn't really had any idea of what he was going to do about it when he started, he just wanted to find her and figure out what she was doing, and who she was.  She was a stranger, that much was certain, and now he knew what she was doing.  He debated about trying to stop her.  It really wasn't his business what she did, outside the fact that she was violating the strictures of Fae-da'Nar.  But the city had no idea who or what they were dealing with.  They'd never capture her, and she would go on killing until they either brought in a wizard to deal with her or completely abandoned her territory.  Getting into a fight with her was the last thing on his mind, but on the other hand, it really wouldn't be right to just leave her here and let her keep doing this.  It wasn't what Were-cats did.  It was wrong.  It did prove that she was insane, though.  She had been completely dominated by her instincts, instincts gone out of control from the human part within her.  That told him that she wasn't born Were.  A natural Were-cat wouldn't go insane like that.  She'd been bitten, and her sire had either no idea she was infected, or she had abandoned her.
	The Were-cat's ears picked up.  She knew he was there.  She pulled up onto one paw and turned to look back over her den.  And when she did, Tarrin nearly fell into the basement.
	It was Jula!
	Jula!  Impossible!  Tarrin caught himself before he fell inside the den and pushed himself out of the opening, falling backwards so hard he landed on his rump, right on a big rock.  But he didn't feel a thing.  A whirlwind of emotion roared up inside him, fear, anger, rage, astonishment, confusion.  Jula!  How did Jula get here?  How did she survive?  And how in the hells did she become a Were-cat?  It made no sense!  He'd ripped out a good span of her backbone and left her to die.  There was no way any Sorcerer could have saved her, even if one had been close enough to help!  And even if the impossible had happened, it didn't explain how she was a Were-cat.  He'd never bitten her.  He'd never gotten any part of his blood or spittle anywhere near her!  When he left her, she was a dying human, but now she shows up, half a world away, as a living Were-cat!  Just seeing her triggered a nearly overwhelming desire to go down there and rip her apart.  She had collared him, she was reponsible for everything that had happened to him since then!  But that need to destroy her found competition in a singular, odd need to know how she had gotten here, what had happened, how she had survived.  But answers wouldn't be easy to get, because it was obvious that she was mad.
	All other thoughts scattered when a growling roar issued from below, and Jula erupted from the opening like a dark angel of death.  In the air above the stunned Tarrin, her filthy body rose over the opening from her leap through the trap door, her eyes glowing green in her mindless anger, her challenge to this invader to her territory.  She descended on him with her claws leading, claws stained with dried blood, and the sight of that banished his confusion as the Cat within rose to meet this challenge.
	He caught her wrist as she landed on him, falling down onto his back as his feet caught her belly.  He kicked her over his head, but she twisted in the air and landed on all fours.  Tarrin snapped to his feet as well and turned to face her.  She hissed at him, lowering down on all fours like a cat, arching her back threateningly.  He was still stunned that he was looking into the face of Jula.  It felt like he was in some kind of a nightmare, staring into the face of the woman who had a hand in destroying his life, a woman he thought he had killed long ago.  Animalistic rage blasted through his mind, ignited his eyes, desired nothing less than ripping the woman into small pieces, and making sure she was alive long enough to see it happen.  Faced with the woman he felt was responsible for most of his pain, he lost himself in the depths of rage, a rage totally pure in its desire for nothing less than to kill just one woman.
	The female Were-cat suddenly seemed to get nervous, become afraid, when Tarrin hunched down and opened his arms, claws out, and roared at her in mindless fury.  She was trapped inside the building, and he stood between her and the door, but she showed no signs of trying to flee.  She rose up on her feet and squared off against him.
	They sprang at the same time, going from staring at one another to engaged in the blink of an eye, and their initial exchange was nothing short of brutality personified.  Neither even tried to defend against the other.  They tore and ripped at one another with their claws, even biting with their fanged teeth, rolling across the littered floor as each sought to tear the other apart.  But their claw wounds began to heal even as they were inflicted.  Not that either of them felt the wounds they were receiving.  Tarrin was completely overwhelmed by his rage, and Jula's insane anger had risen her to a similar state, a state that made them both unfeeling, invulnerable to pain or fear, completely dominated by the need to kill.  Tarrin and Jula were both inhumanly strong, but he was larger than her, and he was stronger than her, and that let him eventually get her on her back beneath him, begin to start trying to protect herself as he pinned her down with his knees and tried to hit her in the neck.
	With a foot to his belly, Jula kicked him off of her, separating them for a moment.  Both were covered with blood, both of their blood, and most of Tarrin's clothing had been shredded by Jula's rending claws during their initial contact.  He landed on his feet and immediately reversed his momentum, rushing right back at her.  She managed to twist out of his charging attempt to grapple her, and she turned and ran for the door.  But Tarrin turned even as he went by and grabbed her by her long, filthy hair, snapping her head back forcefully and pulling her off her feet.  He turned on her as she landed on her back, trying to put a paw through her head, but both her feet rose up and kicked him dead in the face before he could reach her, kicked him with so much force that he was lifted off his feet, sailed over his own head, and landed hard on his stomach a couple of paces away.
	Regaining his feet, the enraged Were-cat shook his head a few times to clear the ringing in his ears.  He hadn't been hit that hard in a long time.  The impact of it had shaken a bit of his rage loose, allowing a portion of his conscious mind to return to him.  And that logical part analyzed things.  It realized that if they just flailed at one another, either of them could win.  It would come down to whose regenerative power would fail first.  But she fought like a wild animal, where he had been trained by some of the finest fighters in the entire world.  He wasn't using what he had been taught, he was simply lowering himself to her level and playing by her rules.  His rage wasn't going to win this battle.  He would need his reasoning mind to be completely assured of victory.
	Tarrin rose up from his hunched posture, and retracted his claws.  That made the female give him a curious look, unsure of what he was doing, until he closed his fists and shifted into the Ungardt defense position.  She hissed at him and rushed, then tried to bull into him to continue raking at him wildly.  But he backed up, keeping a cushion of distance between them as his paws and wrists deflected her seeking claws.  He tried to get her to hit his manacles, where the steel would protect him from having to heal the wounds she inflicted, save his strength for more serious injuries.  Jula seemed unmoved by his shift in tactics, simply trying to bull him down and rip him apart, but she couldn't get close enough to him to do it.  He backed up in a complete circle to keep the cushion between them, and the entire time he studied her movements.  She was wild, untrained, and that meant the her movements were instinctive in nature.  Her speed made this dangerous, but he was just as fast as she was.  She depended completely on her speed and her regenerative defense, because she had no formal training.  She only attacked.  She made no attempt to defend herself.
	He'd seen enough.  She drove a paw in to try to gouge out his eyes, but he caught her by the wrist, turned to press her up against his back, then whipped her over his shoulder in an arm-throw takedown.  She slammed into the floor hard, her breath blasting out of her lungs.  He dropped to a knee and tried to punch his fist right through her face, but she rolled aside even as he struck.  His fist drove into the soft stone of the floor of the ruined house, shattering the stone it hit and sinking half his fist into the basement beneath.  He rose back up to his feet as she rolled to her own, and confusion was evident on her face.  She had never seen that coming.  But that moment of confusion evaporated in her insane fury, and she charged him again.
	She staggered back woozily when his fist slammed into her cheek, using his longer reach to hit her before she could reach him.  Her knees wobbled for a second before they solidified, and she wiped blood off her lip that had come out of her nose.  The raw power of the punch had affected her, just as it had done Triana.  Regeneration couldn't quickly counter the stunning effects of a powerful physical blow.  Even that wasn't enough to dissuade her.  She roared at him furiously and lunged at him with her claws on one paw leading, but Tarrin simply twisted to one side and leaned back, and let her paw fly harmlessly past his head.  He grabbed that paw's wrist after it went by even as he continued spinning to one side, jerking her out of her jump path and swiging her around, then letting her go.  She sailed out of control, slamming into one of the walls of the house squarely on her back.  She rebounded off the wall and landed on her side on the floor.
	Shaking her head, she got back to her feet, but now the mindless fury on her face was replaced by trepidation.  He still stood between her and the door, and he knew it.  Now the animal within was telling her to flee, and he knew that too.  But she wasn't going to get away.  He may have enough of his rational mind to fight her, but the desire to kill her was still making his mind swirl in a maelstrom of anger and rage.
	She made a show of readying to pounce at him, but at the last instant she turned and tried to rush around him, trying for the door.  He turned in the other direction, putting his back to her for an instant, and then his manacled fist came flying around him as it whipped around his body, using the momentum of his spin to accumulate awesome speed and power.  The manacle struck her just under the left arm, in the ribs, and it blasted her off her feet as her body simply folded around the irresistable force of the blow.  She tumbled to the floor, spitting up a mouthful of blood, but she again got out of the way when he went for her prone form.  She got back to her feet and ripped her claws right over his face, nearly taking out his eye, but he grabbed that paw as it went past, then slammed his fist into her face.  Still holding onto her, he punched her again, and again, and once again, making her knees wobble, then yanked her to the side and spun her back to him, then wrapped her up in the Ungardt sleeper.  Arm over her neck, he squeezed with all his might, enough to take the head right off of a human, cutting off the blood to her brain and her windpipe.  She struggled, gasping for breath, then pain shot through his groin when her tail lashed up and struck him between the legs like a whip.  The intense pain made him loosen his grip on her, and he struggled to recover from it, struggled not to lose himself to the rage again.  She bit the arm that had been around her neck savagely, and the pain was like a wake-up call as her long fangs penetrated deeply into his forearm.  It conjured an irrational image of Jesmind, her fangs sank into that very same arm, and it was like the entire nightmare had begun again.  He jerked that arm back with her teeth still stuck in it, snapping her head back.  She grabbed his arm with both her paws and got her teeth out of his arm, but her arched back shuddered when his fist hit her right in the kidneys.  Her head slid under his arm and she fell to the floor, gasping for breath and groaning, as he staggered back and allowed his regeneration to wash out the pain her tail caused him.
	Still struggling with the image of Jesmind, of the memory of how it all began, Tarrin snarled at the female as she got back onto her feet , losing his grip on his rational mind once again.  But instead of rushing her and trying to rip her apart, Tarrin lunged forward just a bit, then fully extended his body to send his fist sizzling between her upraised paws and right into her nose.  The blow shattered her pert little nose, crushing it against her face and his fist, and it sent her right back to the floor.  She sprawled onto the floor nervelessly, and she laid there for a few seconds before she began to move again.  She moved just in time to catch his paws as he dropped on her, struggling to keep them away from her head.  Desperation showed clearly on her face, as the glow in her eyes faded and showed the green cat's-eyes of a Were-cat beneath that glowing radiance.  In those eyes was fear.  But Tarrin barely registered that, for his mind was spinning with images of Jesmind, memories of the pain and fear and confusion he felt when he'd first been bitten, and seeing Jula before him only brought back the memory of what he was, what he had become.  Her face became the representation of everything he hated in his own life, everything he feared, and he tried to destroy it with every fiber of his being.  But Jula was fighting for her very life, and that gave her a strength to match his fury, keeping his bloody claws from reaching her as they trembled to sink into her flesh.
	He felt her foot claws snag on the skin of his hip and push, and it was enough to drive him off of her.  He was pushed off to the side, and she immediately rolled the other way and sprang to her feet.  She had no intentions of fighting anymore, she turned right towards the door and tried to flee to it.  She managed one step before Tarrin's foot swept her ankles, spilling her back to the floor.  "No!" Tarrin screamed furiously as he regained his feet at the same time she did.  "Not again!  You're not getting away!"  He struck her in the face, snapping her head back, and her paws fatally sank down from the stunning effects of the blow.  Instead of grabbing her by the head, he hit her again, and again, staggering her back as he vented all his frustration, all his rage, all his pain on her.  He had her now, and there would be no quick kill.  He grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her into his grasp, then lifted her over his head by her arm and a paw on the small of her back.  He turned and threw her into one of the walls with all of his strength, with all of his pent-up fury and rage, with such tremendous power that her body shattered the bricks and plaster that held it together.  She was driven through the wall in an explosion of brick, crumbled mortar, and flakes of white plaster, landing limply on the street beyond as shards of masonry rained down on and around her.
	The blow had killed the house.  The entire structure began to groan and shift, dust and pieces of stone dislodging from what was left of the ceiling, and the entirety of the building began to lean ominously in the direction of the wall that Jula's body had punctured.  Instead of trying to escape, his enraged mind simply reached out, reached out and made a connection to something outside of him, a sensation he remembered only once before.  That connection seemed to expand him, make him part of a greater whole, and in its connection he was blessed with power.  That power exploded from him, sending a shockwave of force away from him to shatter the crumbled dwelling in a loud detonation, to keep it from collapsing on him by sending it away from him.  In a column of dust, the building where they had been was blown apart by the defensive reaction, sending bits of masonry raining down for blocks in every direction.
	Tarrin stepped from the cloud of billowing dust, and looked right at Jula.  She was on her stomach, looking back over her shoulder, and there was panic in her eyes.  She struggled to get to her feet, but her body was trembling with the effort.  Her regenerative power was beginning to wane, slowing down as it struggled to heal what were probably massive internal injuries, and it left her vulnerable until she could move.  She tried to crawl away from him feebly, but he was on her before she could get more than one paw away from him, kicking her in her wounded side and putting her on her back.  She cried out at the impact, a cry that turned into a gasping whimper when she landed on a rock that dug into her injured body.  But he showed no mercy, kneeling over her chest and grabbing her by the hair, then punching her dead in the face.  The blow sent her head crashing back to the ground, taking a pawful of her hair out of her scalp, which Tarrin threw aside contemptuously.  All the things wrong with his life were her fault.  They were because of her!  He killed people, he couldn't make friends, he had become a stranger to his own friends and family because of her!  Her organization had killed Faalken, and had tried to kill him!  Rage became powerful emotion, grabbing her by the neck and pulling her up so her glazed eyes could meet his.  "You destroyed my life, and you did it for nothing!" he screamed hysterically at her.  "I hate you for what you did to me!  I want you to suffer, suffer like you've never suffered before!"
	Letting go of her neck, he slapped her with the pad of his paw, smacked her hard enough to snap her head to the side on the ground.  Then he slapped her with the other paw, snapping her head to the other side.  She was the object, the representation of everything he hated in his own life, and punishing her was the same as punishing what was inside him, the darkness that he hated, yet could not deny was part of him.  With tears streaming down his face, he struck her again, and again, and again, feeling nothing but more anger and pain every time he hit her, feeling nothing but the rage as he punished the one responsible for it.  She was unconscious, beyond pain, and that only made him more enraged.  He wanted her to be awake for this, to feel her life slip away from her, to know that he had destroyed her.
	Tarrin, enough!  Stop this! the voice of the Goddess rang in his mind, forcefully.
	"She did this to me!" he retorted hotly, grabbing her by the hair and lifting her head off the ground.
	And how does it make you feel? she demanded.  Does it make you feel better to hurt her?  Does it make everything alright?  Does it make you feel more human to act like an animal?
	The words were like a slap across the face.  He blinked and looked down at the helpless Jula, but his mind was on what the Goddess said.  He felt....rage.  Hurting her didn't make him feel better, it only made him more and more angry.  There was no satisfaction in it, only a towering fury, a need to hurt that had nothing to do with punishing her.  He didn't want to punish her.  He was punishing himself.  And if he killed her, all he would have would be the memory of it, and it would bring him no real comfort.  In the end of it, he no longer saw Jula.  She was only a representation of what he truly hated and despised, and that was what he had become.  And that was what he was trying to punish, to destroy.
	He sat down on Jula's dirty stomach limply, looking down at her with sober eyes.  She was completely mad.  There couldn't have been a worse punishment for her than that.  He knew.  He had felt that madness, he had faced it, and he had conquered