Chapter 22

I confess that being crouched before him was sublime. His beauty and perfection took my breath away. It was a cat, a giant and beautiful cat.

The creature bared its fangs with a very feline hiss, writhing angrily beneath the barrel of the gun that kept it crouched on the ground. You could sense his anger in the air, and in the way his ears were flattened to his head, pressed back. Its sleek tail swung hatefully, striking the bloody mosaic, but its blue-green eyes never left Ivan’s face. You could see the anxiety he felt to sink all his teeth into his neck, in anger. The werewolf, for his part, also bared his fangs at him, continuing to growl in response.

Going back to my initial appreciation of Ivan and Mirko in their semi-animal form, it could be said that I had a similar impression of this being: it was like seeing a photo of a man dressed in a fur suit, onto which they had pasted another image of a big cat’s head, torn from the pages of a wildlife magazine. The flash