Nya padded restlessly through the forest, her large sleek body flowing like a large black shadow somewhat ahead and to the side of the Benshira and two horses. She had her senses directed outwards taking in the smells of the woods. Tendrils of scent crossed her senses, neatly filtered out and distinguished by her forest cat brain far easier than her bondmate could process. Tightly linked, the trails of deer scent, squirrel, even the smaller denizens of mouse and chipmunk crossed her senses and were filtered out while they inundated the human with information that often threatened to overwhelm his senses. When Nya was scouting like she was, the deadliest thing to her was something right under her nose because she was so entirely focused on their surroundings and what lay beyond their sight or what had crossed paths with them hours ago.
It was getting easier for him to recognize and process what Nya smelled and what she heard, but it still wasn't 'easy'.
His own eyes were better than hers unless she was simply tracking movement, and Shai sometimes caught Nya using them in her cat form to double check something she smelled or suspected she smelled. Scent formed layers for her, overlapping and overshadowing color. She could far more easily smell where an elk had lain down for the night than she could notice the pushed over grass and shed tuffs of hair littering such a grass bed. So she'd smell, pause, use Shai's eyesight to curiously look, and move on. It was a weird double usage, and the Benshira often caught himself doing the same thing... seeing something unusual, then checking the scent of it through Nya's eyes to see if it gained any more information.
But he was right. It wasn't always easy to be close to her. Nor was it easy for her to be close to him. For one, she was often hungry. Still growing and still considered a juvenile, the Forest Cat had a huge appetite that wasn't easily overcome. Her growth spurts were marked by gorging on meat and then sleeping the day away in the sun. She was on high alert at night, which sometimes interrupted his sleep since he got his best rest during Leth's reign. And on her part, Shai's mind was always busy. He never stopped thinking, never took a break and simply enjoyed the moment for what it was. Thoughts crossed his mind about all sorts of things constantly - religion, love, life, death, duty.... it was exhausting to Nya to think like a human or to listen to one constantly being human. An animal was so much less complicated.
And the closer she was to Shai, the more sensitive she became to his needs. There was no privacy between them. Where there'd been some before, there was absolutely a lack of it now. She knew when he was grumpy and why. He knew when she had a full bladder or an empty stomach. Even their lovemaking was complex because it was too easy to loose themselves in each other and forget who was who. Sometimes they needed space. Just a breath. Just a moment... but sometimes that was a whole day or longer. When Shai started to loose his sense of humanity Nya would retreat, giving him space to remember being a man. She'd travel parallel to him downwind, and find a tree to curl up in and sleep for a while, catching up later.
Sometimes he left her, seeking out settlements and cities to go into town and be among the other people. But he wasn't the same. Not like he'd been before. Just like she wasn't the same. Without Nya, and her sense of smell that he'd come to use as if it was his own, Shai felt half blind among people in the same way he'd feel overwhelmed if Nya stood beside him. And it was the same for her. Without him, and his constant thoughts, she found herself bored and wondering what his human mind would think of next. His thoughts often entertained her, surprised her, and she'd grown used to them as if they were her own. With only her own company, Nya's mind was quiet. She never suddenly thought of a design to make her horse's pack more compact and easier to load up. She never spotted a little creek with a pasture and lovely view of a mountain range and thought a little cabin would look nice there.
Things were what they were.
And now that they were so tightly bonded, Shai was reminded daily about how inhuman she was. He knew of how deeply the longing for a bond with him had ran and how dependent upon it she was. Nya would never willingly leave him or displease him. She was a slave for all intensive purposes, even though that slavery was sweet bondage in her mind. As a human with such a tight link to her mind, he could see the beginnings of the construct that was built inherently into kelvics. Had he a little familiarity or more magical design knowledge, Abashai could have easily unraveled what Marcus Kelvic did as a mage to create his bondmate and all of her kind. It was right there, easily processed by his human mind, completely something Nya was blinded to however.
Foreign, otherworldly, he could tell somewhere back in her bloodline something had been summoned and captured, bound into the form of flesh via an animal's blood. The animal form was true - taken directly from the patterns he could almost understand that linked to her blood. The human form was the lie - a camouflage that allowed her to pass through society virtually undetected. The deception was so perfect she could reproduce humans with her tainted blood easily, but she could never truly be one.
That she walked beside him so closely needing him was astonishing. She needed his thoughts, his ideas, his touch and his guidance. She could survive without him, but built deeply into her psyche was a need to have him there so without him she couldn't thrive. Marcus Kelvic had built the perfect servants. Powerful, incredibly loyal, and flawed enough to know they needed bondmates to thrive.
And so it was her sense drank in the blood, smelled the death, and brought the quartet to the site of the bodies. Nya surveyed the area, frowning at the waste of meat. Predators hadn't done this. They would have eaten and moved on. Something else had. Either men, who knew the most about waste, or a monster that killed mindlessly.nudged one of the corpses to see if the meat was still edible (she didn't like rigor in kills), and glanced at Shai.
"A few hours, no more. Tell me, Shai, are they still here?" It was an invite for him to look with her senses, though looking was a loose term.
Scent spilled out around her, trailing from where the men came in to where whatever else killed them. It appeared on Nya's senses like trails of wispy fog different colored and textured indicating who'd been there. The boldest trails where the dead men, the blood, and the cause of the death.. .but underlying those scents were the forest denizens - birds, rabbits, the green itself - until the scent Nya detected formed a weave of pattern all around Shai. It was as if he was looking at djed or viewing like a wizard with Auristics would. The only difference was the scent was distinct, individual, and she cold tell immediately how many, where thy went, and if they were anywhere upwind close.
"What do you see?" She asked again, careful to keep her view neutral. Nya wanted Shai to use her without relying on her viewpoint so she could watch how his mind worked and how he thought of the situation and compare how it was different than hers.
Overlying all of that, as well, was her hunger. The blood was making her consider helping herself to a free meal. Only her bondmate's presence was restraining her.