Mother Lioness - a flash fiction story for National Flash Fiction Day

I write a quick flash fiction story in honor of National Flash Fiction Day. The original story was 784 words long, but I was attempting to write a 500 word flash fiction story so I cut it down to 502 words.

My powers came to me very suddenly.

I took my three kids with me to the park while walking the dog for his evening walk. After a few minutes, Jasper, our collie, stopped suddenly, his body completely still as he stared forward at something I couldn’t see. The fur on his back slowly started to rise until it stood straight up and a low growl emanated from him. The kids didn’t notice any of this and skipped right past us, unaware anything was wrong.

That was the first time Jasper spoke to me, although I didn’t realize it was him at the time.

“Danger!” a decidedly male voice shouted in my head, and I instinctually heeded it.

“Katie, Callum, Jenny, get back here!” I shouted as I ran towards them. I didn’t know what the danger was, only that there was something dangerous ahead.

As I got close enough to my children to pull them close to me, three men came around the corner. Their eyes were deep red. Their skin was pale and I definitely glimpsed fangs on one of them. Of course, back then, I thought vampires were just fictional characters in books, so I had no idea what I was actually looking at. I didn’t need to know what they were to sense that they were dangerous.

Jasper was standing beside us, hackles raised, that low menacing growl still emanating from him, and I heard again, “Dangerous! Must protect!” (Dogs think in very simple terms.)

The vampires were looking at my children hungrily and moving towards us purposefully. That’s when my first shapeshifting occurred. The shapeshifting was almost seamless. One minute, I was noticing claws sprouting from my fingers and the next I was on all four, covered in fur, feeling powerful and very angry.

I pounced on the vampire closest to me, and with one bite, I crushed his skull. He disintegrated then and there.  I kept my cubs, I mean, my kids behind me and used a paw to strike out at one of the remaining  two vampires. I was pretty powerful in lioness form, judging by the five feet I knocked him back.

Jasper was biting the leg of the other vampire, shouting, “Kill! Kill!” I told him to let go, and he did. The two vampires immediately took the reprieve to get up and run away. My animal instinct made me desperately want to chase them, but I had my kids to protect so I stayed where I was.

My children were excited, having seen my transformation and stroked my back all the way home. We probably got some strange stares from people on that walk home, three kids and a dog walking beside a lion. Once home, I changed back into myself.

I thought that this was my new reality and accepted it. But then one day Katy, my oldest, turned herself into a cat right in front of me and I knew that we were all in for a crazy adventure.

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