All Kittens Have Claws (Demonic Ones Have More)
In this post from a few days ago, Kira requested this: "How could something that furry have that many teeth?" Prompt for Anita Blake, Harry Potter, or any of the cop/forensic shows. The idea took root and attacked me around 11 o'clock last night and wouldn't let me go to bed. It wasn't until 1:30 this morning that it released it's hold on me long enough for a bit of shut-eye (not that I got much anyway), and I spent another two hours after I got up finishing it.
Title: All Kittens Have Claws (Demonic Ones Have More)
Author: me
Fandom: Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton
Summary: In which Jason, Anita, and Lt. Rudolph Storr get held hostage by kittens. No, really.
Spoilers: Guilty Pleasures is the biggest one, but there are extremely vague references to anything up through Blue Moon
Warnings: None, really. Though I feel I should say "This story might qualify as crack" in here somewhere.
Word Count: 2,191
Authors Note: Unbetaed because no one but me reads these things anyway. All spelling and grammar errors are my own, and feel free to point out the ones I missed.
“It’s a werkitten.”
“Are you serious?” Anita asked, staring at him like he’d gone insane.
Jason gestured to the small bundle of grey fluff sitting in front of the door, currently washing it’s face with one tiny, white paw. “What else would you call it?”
“It’s a *kitten*!” Anita responded, stepping toward the creature in question. “A cute, grey, furry -HOLY SHIT, IT’S POSSESSED!”
The cute, grey, furry kitten’s jaw full of big, sharp, way-more-teeth-than-should-really-fit-in-that-tiny-mouth snapped shut within an inch of Anita’s toe.
Jason smirked. “Told you.”
“Now that is just unnatural,” Dolph spoke up at last, staring at the so named Werkitten in a mix between horror and fascination. He had been with Anita when she got the call and, as a fellow monster expert, had tagged along.
Anita, still slightly rattled from her brush with premature toe amputation, asked in a breathless voice, “How can something that furry have so many teeth?”
“All the better to eat you with,” Jason said. “Or, in this case, all the better to tear you into bite-sized pieces and *then* eat you with since I doubt it could manage one of us whole.”
Anita glared at him. “That was a rhetorical question.” She made another move toward the door. It was only due to the vampire-quick reflexes courtesy of Jean Claude and his marks that saved her ankle from being snapped this time.
“Right, then. I’m just going too...” She started inching towards the second door to the room, which she and Dolph had come through when they got here. She hesitated before she got more than a few feet, though, because that exit was now blocked by a second small, furry shape, this one stripy orange. And the way it was sitting and looking at them and licking it’s chops did not put Anita’s mind at ease.
“Well, fuck.”
~*~
“It’s not right!” Anita exclaimed an hour or so later after numerous attempts and failures to escape their demon-spawned feline captors. “Wer animals are not supposed to be cute and fluffy!”
“Hey!”
“Sorry, Jason,” she said, rephrasing. “All wer animals *except* Jason are not allowed to be cute and fluffy. It just isn’t *done*! Beautiful and exotic, sure, but *not* cute and fluffy!”
“Well, tell that to the Creeper Kittens over there,” Dolph responded, huddling further into his jacket, trying to ward off the chill of the stone room. After their failed attempts at escape, the three of them had retreated to sit against the wall farthest away from the werkittens. Thankfully, despite their violent tendencies whenever any of their human prisoners tried to escape, the two cats seemed content to remain in the doorways, otherwise Anita was sure they would all be kitten chow by now.
“It can’t be wer,” Anita continued after a beat. “Wer implies that it was human at once. Even *baby* wers could never get so small. Simple physics.”
“I saw the grade you got in Physics,” Jason smirked.
“Bite me!”
“Right now, Anita? But we have company.”
The smack she gave him was loud enough to make both the demonically inclined kittens jump to their feet, tails a-bristle. They hissed evilly, but maintained their guard positions.
“I don’t suppose anyone brought along a deck of cards?”
~*~
“Dolph?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re being held hostage by kittens.”
“Yup.”
“I’m The Executioner and you’re the head of the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. We’re the two biggest human bad-asses of St. Louis’s night life.”
“Sound’s about right.”
“And we’re being held hostage by kittens.”
-Beat-
“Zerbrowski’s never going let us live this down.”
~*~
Two hours later, Anita had dozed off against Jason’s shoulder, and he and Dolph were taking turns playing games on Dolph’s cell phone with the sound turned off. Jason was trying to beat Dolph’s high score on Pinball without disturbing her.
“You think anyone knows we’re down here?” Dolph asked quietly.
“Probably not yet,” Jason responded just as quietly. “I’m pretty sure Jean Claude will figure it out once he wakes up, though, so I’m not too worried.”
“Great. I’m not sure which is worse, being held hostage by demon kittens or being indebted to the Master of the City for rescuing me from aforementioned demon kittens. Either way, my reputation is shot.”
“It’s not so bad.” Jason cursed under his breath when his third ball slipped through the flippers only a hundred points shy of the highest score, then continued. “From what I understand, your reputation wasn’t all that great when you were assigned head of RPIT (pronounced Rip-It). You were put there as a punishment, kind of the joke of the force. But in a true example of taking limes and starting a tequila bar, you took the Regional Preternatural Investigative Team and turned what was a joke into one of the biggest assets of the St. Louis Police Department. You got cops all over the Midwest begging for your expertise when even the best of the best are stumped. A little thing like being held hostage by mutant kittens isn’t going to ruin your reputation, it’s just going to give it a feminine edge.”
Dolph chuckled softly. “I guess if Anita can survive being a girl in this Big Bad World, I can, too.” Noticing that the girl in question was shivering slightly - she was only wearing a t-shirt - Dolph shrugged out of his own jacket and said in a low, non-threatening voice close to her ear, “Anita, you’re arms are turning purple. I’m just going to put my jacket over you; please don’t jump up and shoot me.” Knowing how trigger happy Anita was, and how often she reacted when woken suddenly, Jason did not fault the man for his precaution.
Dolph settled the jacket over her shoulders extremely slowly and carefully, like one might act when trying to help a bobcat caught in a bear trap; wounded, exhausted, and trapped, but still something wild which might lash out at any moment. Anita, either put at ease by Dolph’s warning, or just too exhausted to fight anymore, wasn’t awake enough to do more than a trivial protest.
Jason, ever the snarky bastard, smirked again. “Awww, Lt. Storr, I didn’t know you cared.”
Dolph just glared at him. “You know as well as I do that she hasn’t slept in two and a half days. Being held hostage by possessed kittens that, despite not letting us leave, are otherwise unthreatening, is the closest to a break that she’s had in months. Let her sleep.” Probably realizing just how much he sounded like a gruff mama bear fussing over his cub, Dolph hardened his face and continued. “After all, she’s of no use to me half-dead with sleep deprivation.”
“You’re just a big softy at heart, aren’t you?”
“Fuck you. And give me back my phone.”
~*~
After what Jason judged to be around their sixth hour of entrapment (all Dolph’s cell phone told them was “No Signal”, and Jason and Anita had stopped wearing watches since they always got taken when they were kidnapped or broken when they got into a fight), he heard a soft, metallic rattling sound echoing from the hallway that their kitten wardens had been keeping them from.
The Demon Kittens heard it, too, perking their ears forward and looking in the direction the noise had emanated from. A split second later, both of them had disappeared in an orange and gray streak, and the doorways were left clear.
Jason exchanged a wary look with Dolph, neither of them quite willing to believe it could be that easy, before Jason set to the task of carefully awaking Anita. “Anita,” he said in his normal voice, nudging her gently with his elbow. Without the forewarning, she was awake in an instant, and the three of them got warily to their feet, Anita handing Dolph his jacket with a muttered word of thanks. They cautiously approached the door nearest to them.
By unspoken consent, Jason went first. After all, he was the only one of them that could heal from anything except a death blow, and on the off chance they were actually werkittens, he couldn’t exactly get clawed and then start purring instead of howling next full moon. He hoped, at least.
Keeping his feet out of what he hoped was kitten-swipe range none the less, Jason leaned forward and stuck his head out the doorway. The sight that greeted him, however, was not at all what he expected.
~*~
When Jason didn’t get attacked by killer kittens right away and did, in fact, stand there doing nothing but stare dumbly, Anita assumed it was safe and rushed forward and out into the hallway, with Dolph no too far behind her. Then it was her turn to stare dumbly.
Sitting on the steps with the two Demon Kittens eating perfectly normal looking kibble from a metal dish on the floor was Jean Claude, looking not in the least bit worried. In fact, he was happily scratching the orange stripy one’s back while it munched contentedly at his feet.
“The Demon Kittens are you *pets*?” she asked, incredulous.
“I always pictured you as the dog type, myself,” Jason added.
Jean Claude, used to Jason’s inability to keep his mouth shut, didn’t even spare him a passing glance. “They aren’t demons,” he said, responding to Anita’s question, “and they weren’t mine to begin with, but after Nikolaos died, ownership was passed on to me, so to speak, as the new Master of the city.”
“Nikolaos had kittens?”
“Many times, especially when something upset her. She was prone to tantrums.” Now it was Jean Claude’s turn to smirk.
Anita glared at him. “Hardy har har. Seriously, though. Kittens?”
Jean Claude shrugged gracefully. “Despite the barbarous gorgon she turned into,” he started.
“He means ‘Sadistic Bitch’,” Anita clarified to Dolph, who was still unused to Jean Claude’s French Gentlemanisms.
“As I was saying,” Jean Claude continued, returning her glare, “despite what she turned into, when Nikolaos was first turned, she was still an innocent, sentimental little girl. She thought it would be wonderful if she could have a pet that never died an that could stay cute and small forever, so she turned a pair of kittens.”
“Vampire Kittens.” Dolph stated. At least Anita was comforted by the fact that she wasn’t the only one who was having trouble processing that bit of data.
“They were her most prized possessions.”
Orange Stripy was still eating the mystery kibble (and if they were Vampire Kittens, Anita really didn’t think she wanted to solve that mystery), but Grey And Fluffy had finished and was now sitting in Jean Claude’s lap, kneading his leg and purring contentedly. The fact that it’s purrs were loud enough and deep enough that Anita could actually feel them vibrating through the floor like someone with their bass on too high left her with little doubt as to the truth of Jean Claude’s story. She should’ve suspected that something so cute and nasty could only come from the twisted mind of Nikolaos.
“So you decided to keep them? They’re dangerous to human, wer, and vampire alike! The grey one almost bit my foot off!”
Jean Claude shrugged again, and looked down fondly when the grey one snuggled closer. “They do get a bit quarrelsome when they haven’t been fed recently.”
“They held us hostage for six hours!”
Orange Stripy had finished it’s dinner and was now weaving affectionately around Jean Claude’s ankles. “They probably thought you had food. Nikolaos dotted over them quite considerably, so now they believe that anything with two legs is only here to feed and pet them.” He stood up and set Grey and Fluffy down on the stairs so he could pick up the metal dish with one hand and the half-crumpled bag of kibble (Anita noticed that it had some sort of swarthy, fancy, French-looking name) with the other and started back up the stairs. “Besides,” he continued over his shoulder, “they are extremely friendly when they aren’t hungry.”
Anita still couldn’t believe it. “They’re Vampire Kittens created by Nikolaos! I would’ve thought you’d have them staked as soon as you possibly could once Nikolaos was taken care of!”
Jean Claude half turned on the stairs and looked at her in horror. “Do you honestly think I’m capable of something like that? *Look* at them!”
Anita made the mistake of doing just that. While Orange Stripy had followed Jean Claude up the stairs, Grey And Fluffy was still sitting on the stairs where Jean Claude had left it. It looked up at her with it’s big blue-grey eyes and cute little pink nose and looked for all the world like a cute, innocent, friendly little kitten. When it gave a cute little kitten meow that was almost like it was asking “what are you three waiting for? It’s cold down here!”, she was lost entirely, and Anita knew *exactly* what Jean Claude had been talking about.
She shook her head, sighed, and started trumping up the stairs. Jason and Dolph followed behind her, Grey And Fluffy weaving around their ankles with unnatural grace.
~*~
“Anita?”
“What, Jason.”
“You really think I’m cute and fluffy?”
END
Title: All Kittens Have Claws (Demonic Ones Have More)
Author: me
Fandom: Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton
Summary: In which Jason, Anita, and Lt. Rudolph Storr get held hostage by kittens. No, really.
Spoilers: Guilty Pleasures is the biggest one, but there are extremely vague references to anything up through Blue Moon
Warnings: None, really. Though I feel I should say "This story might qualify as crack" in here somewhere.
Word Count: 2,191
Authors Note: Unbetaed because no one but me reads these things anyway. All spelling and grammar errors are my own, and feel free to point out the ones I missed.
“It’s a werkitten.”
“Are you serious?” Anita asked, staring at him like he’d gone insane.
Jason gestured to the small bundle of grey fluff sitting in front of the door, currently washing it’s face with one tiny, white paw. “What else would you call it?”
“It’s a *kitten*!” Anita responded, stepping toward the creature in question. “A cute, grey, furry -HOLY SHIT, IT’S POSSESSED!”
The cute, grey, furry kitten’s jaw full of big, sharp, way-more-teeth-than-should-really-fit-in-that-tiny-mouth snapped shut within an inch of Anita’s toe.
Jason smirked. “Told you.”
“Now that is just unnatural,” Dolph spoke up at last, staring at the so named Werkitten in a mix between horror and fascination. He had been with Anita when she got the call and, as a fellow monster expert, had tagged along.
Anita, still slightly rattled from her brush with premature toe amputation, asked in a breathless voice, “How can something that furry have so many teeth?”
“All the better to eat you with,” Jason said. “Or, in this case, all the better to tear you into bite-sized pieces and *then* eat you with since I doubt it could manage one of us whole.”
Anita glared at him. “That was a rhetorical question.” She made another move toward the door. It was only due to the vampire-quick reflexes courtesy of Jean Claude and his marks that saved her ankle from being snapped this time.
“Right, then. I’m just going too...” She started inching towards the second door to the room, which she and Dolph had come through when they got here. She hesitated before she got more than a few feet, though, because that exit was now blocked by a second small, furry shape, this one stripy orange. And the way it was sitting and looking at them and licking it’s chops did not put Anita’s mind at ease.
“Well, fuck.”
~*~
“It’s not right!” Anita exclaimed an hour or so later after numerous attempts and failures to escape their demon-spawned feline captors. “Wer animals are not supposed to be cute and fluffy!”
“Hey!”
“Sorry, Jason,” she said, rephrasing. “All wer animals *except* Jason are not allowed to be cute and fluffy. It just isn’t *done*! Beautiful and exotic, sure, but *not* cute and fluffy!”
“Well, tell that to the Creeper Kittens over there,” Dolph responded, huddling further into his jacket, trying to ward off the chill of the stone room. After their failed attempts at escape, the three of them had retreated to sit against the wall farthest away from the werkittens. Thankfully, despite their violent tendencies whenever any of their human prisoners tried to escape, the two cats seemed content to remain in the doorways, otherwise Anita was sure they would all be kitten chow by now.
“It can’t be wer,” Anita continued after a beat. “Wer implies that it was human at once. Even *baby* wers could never get so small. Simple physics.”
“I saw the grade you got in Physics,” Jason smirked.
“Bite me!”
“Right now, Anita? But we have company.”
The smack she gave him was loud enough to make both the demonically inclined kittens jump to their feet, tails a-bristle. They hissed evilly, but maintained their guard positions.
“I don’t suppose anyone brought along a deck of cards?”
~*~
“Dolph?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re being held hostage by kittens.”
“Yup.”
“I’m The Executioner and you’re the head of the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. We’re the two biggest human bad-asses of St. Louis’s night life.”
“Sound’s about right.”
“And we’re being held hostage by kittens.”
-Beat-
“Zerbrowski’s never going let us live this down.”
~*~
Two hours later, Anita had dozed off against Jason’s shoulder, and he and Dolph were taking turns playing games on Dolph’s cell phone with the sound turned off. Jason was trying to beat Dolph’s high score on Pinball without disturbing her.
“You think anyone knows we’re down here?” Dolph asked quietly.
“Probably not yet,” Jason responded just as quietly. “I’m pretty sure Jean Claude will figure it out once he wakes up, though, so I’m not too worried.”
“Great. I’m not sure which is worse, being held hostage by demon kittens or being indebted to the Master of the City for rescuing me from aforementioned demon kittens. Either way, my reputation is shot.”
“It’s not so bad.” Jason cursed under his breath when his third ball slipped through the flippers only a hundred points shy of the highest score, then continued. “From what I understand, your reputation wasn’t all that great when you were assigned head of RPIT (pronounced Rip-It). You were put there as a punishment, kind of the joke of the force. But in a true example of taking limes and starting a tequila bar, you took the Regional Preternatural Investigative Team and turned what was a joke into one of the biggest assets of the St. Louis Police Department. You got cops all over the Midwest begging for your expertise when even the best of the best are stumped. A little thing like being held hostage by mutant kittens isn’t going to ruin your reputation, it’s just going to give it a feminine edge.”
Dolph chuckled softly. “I guess if Anita can survive being a girl in this Big Bad World, I can, too.” Noticing that the girl in question was shivering slightly - she was only wearing a t-shirt - Dolph shrugged out of his own jacket and said in a low, non-threatening voice close to her ear, “Anita, you’re arms are turning purple. I’m just going to put my jacket over you; please don’t jump up and shoot me.” Knowing how trigger happy Anita was, and how often she reacted when woken suddenly, Jason did not fault the man for his precaution.
Dolph settled the jacket over her shoulders extremely slowly and carefully, like one might act when trying to help a bobcat caught in a bear trap; wounded, exhausted, and trapped, but still something wild which might lash out at any moment. Anita, either put at ease by Dolph’s warning, or just too exhausted to fight anymore, wasn’t awake enough to do more than a trivial protest.
Jason, ever the snarky bastard, smirked again. “Awww, Lt. Storr, I didn’t know you cared.”
Dolph just glared at him. “You know as well as I do that she hasn’t slept in two and a half days. Being held hostage by possessed kittens that, despite not letting us leave, are otherwise unthreatening, is the closest to a break that she’s had in months. Let her sleep.” Probably realizing just how much he sounded like a gruff mama bear fussing over his cub, Dolph hardened his face and continued. “After all, she’s of no use to me half-dead with sleep deprivation.”
“You’re just a big softy at heart, aren’t you?”
“Fuck you. And give me back my phone.”
~*~
After what Jason judged to be around their sixth hour of entrapment (all Dolph’s cell phone told them was “No Signal”, and Jason and Anita had stopped wearing watches since they always got taken when they were kidnapped or broken when they got into a fight), he heard a soft, metallic rattling sound echoing from the hallway that their kitten wardens had been keeping them from.
The Demon Kittens heard it, too, perking their ears forward and looking in the direction the noise had emanated from. A split second later, both of them had disappeared in an orange and gray streak, and the doorways were left clear.
Jason exchanged a wary look with Dolph, neither of them quite willing to believe it could be that easy, before Jason set to the task of carefully awaking Anita. “Anita,” he said in his normal voice, nudging her gently with his elbow. Without the forewarning, she was awake in an instant, and the three of them got warily to their feet, Anita handing Dolph his jacket with a muttered word of thanks. They cautiously approached the door nearest to them.
By unspoken consent, Jason went first. After all, he was the only one of them that could heal from anything except a death blow, and on the off chance they were actually werkittens, he couldn’t exactly get clawed and then start purring instead of howling next full moon. He hoped, at least.
Keeping his feet out of what he hoped was kitten-swipe range none the less, Jason leaned forward and stuck his head out the doorway. The sight that greeted him, however, was not at all what he expected.
~*~
When Jason didn’t get attacked by killer kittens right away and did, in fact, stand there doing nothing but stare dumbly, Anita assumed it was safe and rushed forward and out into the hallway, with Dolph no too far behind her. Then it was her turn to stare dumbly.
Sitting on the steps with the two Demon Kittens eating perfectly normal looking kibble from a metal dish on the floor was Jean Claude, looking not in the least bit worried. In fact, he was happily scratching the orange stripy one’s back while it munched contentedly at his feet.
“The Demon Kittens are you *pets*?” she asked, incredulous.
“I always pictured you as the dog type, myself,” Jason added.
Jean Claude, used to Jason’s inability to keep his mouth shut, didn’t even spare him a passing glance. “They aren’t demons,” he said, responding to Anita’s question, “and they weren’t mine to begin with, but after Nikolaos died, ownership was passed on to me, so to speak, as the new Master of the city.”
“Nikolaos had kittens?”
“Many times, especially when something upset her. She was prone to tantrums.” Now it was Jean Claude’s turn to smirk.
Anita glared at him. “Hardy har har. Seriously, though. Kittens?”
Jean Claude shrugged gracefully. “Despite the barbarous gorgon she turned into,” he started.
“He means ‘Sadistic Bitch’,” Anita clarified to Dolph, who was still unused to Jean Claude’s French Gentlemanisms.
“As I was saying,” Jean Claude continued, returning her glare, “despite what she turned into, when Nikolaos was first turned, she was still an innocent, sentimental little girl. She thought it would be wonderful if she could have a pet that never died an that could stay cute and small forever, so she turned a pair of kittens.”
“Vampire Kittens.” Dolph stated. At least Anita was comforted by the fact that she wasn’t the only one who was having trouble processing that bit of data.
“They were her most prized possessions.”
Orange Stripy was still eating the mystery kibble (and if they were Vampire Kittens, Anita really didn’t think she wanted to solve that mystery), but Grey And Fluffy had finished and was now sitting in Jean Claude’s lap, kneading his leg and purring contentedly. The fact that it’s purrs were loud enough and deep enough that Anita could actually feel them vibrating through the floor like someone with their bass on too high left her with little doubt as to the truth of Jean Claude’s story. She should’ve suspected that something so cute and nasty could only come from the twisted mind of Nikolaos.
“So you decided to keep them? They’re dangerous to human, wer, and vampire alike! The grey one almost bit my foot off!”
Jean Claude shrugged again, and looked down fondly when the grey one snuggled closer. “They do get a bit quarrelsome when they haven’t been fed recently.”
“They held us hostage for six hours!”
Orange Stripy had finished it’s dinner and was now weaving affectionately around Jean Claude’s ankles. “They probably thought you had food. Nikolaos dotted over them quite considerably, so now they believe that anything with two legs is only here to feed and pet them.” He stood up and set Grey and Fluffy down on the stairs so he could pick up the metal dish with one hand and the half-crumpled bag of kibble (Anita noticed that it had some sort of swarthy, fancy, French-looking name) with the other and started back up the stairs. “Besides,” he continued over his shoulder, “they are extremely friendly when they aren’t hungry.”
Anita still couldn’t believe it. “They’re Vampire Kittens created by Nikolaos! I would’ve thought you’d have them staked as soon as you possibly could once Nikolaos was taken care of!”
Jean Claude half turned on the stairs and looked at her in horror. “Do you honestly think I’m capable of something like that? *Look* at them!”
Anita made the mistake of doing just that. While Orange Stripy had followed Jean Claude up the stairs, Grey And Fluffy was still sitting on the stairs where Jean Claude had left it. It looked up at her with it’s big blue-grey eyes and cute little pink nose and looked for all the world like a cute, innocent, friendly little kitten. When it gave a cute little kitten meow that was almost like it was asking “what are you three waiting for? It’s cold down here!”, she was lost entirely, and Anita knew *exactly* what Jean Claude had been talking about.
She shook her head, sighed, and started trumping up the stairs. Jason and Dolph followed behind her, Grey And Fluffy weaving around their ankles with unnatural grace.
~*~
“Anita?”
“What, Jason.”
“You really think I’m cute and fluffy?”
END