Tag: ready to read

  • What You Can’t See Can’t Hurt Them

    monster making AMZ cover 1If you needed to start life over in a better place, Darby-on-the-Sea might not be your first choice. Minna has been on the road for days, though–alone, exhausted, and living intentionally blind. By now, she’ll take whatever help she can get, even if she doesn’t believe she deserves it.

    His footsteps across the boards gave Minna her only warning, for he took hold of her elbow and hauled her after him without so much as a by-your-leave.

    “My darling child, you might have been killed, standing in the street like that.” Still holding her by her arm, he directed them up the street toward his own house.

    The villagers in Darby have good reason to distrust strangers. With the rocky island off their coast home to monsters, it takes a special sort of hero to win their approval. Minna, anxious, shy, and obviously fleeing misfortune, just doesn’t fit the bill. Pinewood does.

    “Weren’t no wolf, sir,” the man began as though halfway through an argument. “No wolf as I know can open pen gates, nor lock sheepdogs in the barn without a hair out of place on them.”

    Pinewood began pulling on the leather coat hung by the door and pushing feet into boots, even as they said, “A human, then.”

    “Any human who could tear apart a ewe like that—well, I’d say that monsters come in all shapes, then. Please, you will help, won’t you?”

    The offer of shelter and rest is too tempting for Minna to resist. Worst of all, Pinewood offers Minna a friendship like she has never had before. She knows, though, that one wrong look could bring it all down in flames. She knows what will happen if a hero finds out the truth about her.

    Her secret revealed, she waited in her self-imposed darkness—for the blow of a hatchet, or a hunter’s knife against her throat, or any of the thousand other deaths she imagined earned Pinewood their reputation and their keep within the village.

    Monsters of Our Own Making, a story of losing everything and finding where you belong, now available for purchase in my shop for all ebook formats, on Amazon.com for Kindle, and on Barnes and Noble for NOOK.

  • Mops and Magic Just Go Together

    Wireless Mice AMZ cover 1It’s not easy being the new witch in town. Aisha wants to make the perfect first impression by finding a neighbor in need of magical help. Too bad her familiar just came home with a stolen robotic vacuum.

    The cat hopped down and spat a small black triangle onto the bed.

    “Ew, Jasper, what’s that?” Aisha scuttled back as the object flopped itself over and started trundling across the bed on…little wheels? “That’s a ChurchMouse, isn’t it?”

    The vacuum’s owner has bigger problems to worry about, though. With an angry appliance flooding his house, Ben’s happy for any help–be it magic or a mop–he can get.

    His eyes looked wide and panicked. Aisha hurried to yank a towel out from under a protesting Jasper and toss it into the slowly shrinking puddle. With a towel under each foot, the man skidded around the laundry area, even as he asked, “Can I help you?”

    Aisha has her chance to help at last. If she can’t figure out what has this washing machine so cranky, though, that chance will slip through her water-logged fingers.

    The only warning was a rumbling in the pipes and a too-late yelp of alarm from Ben. A jet of water shot from inside the washer, hosing Aisha down.

    “Oh, hell no.” She planted her hands on her hips. “Now it is on, buster.”

    Wireless Mice & Washing Machines, a story of annoyed appliances, interfering familiars, and solutions both magical and mundane, now available for purchase in my shop for all ebook formats and on Amazon for Kindle.
  • Just Discovered In Open Space…

    forecastAMZcoverWhen your daily grind involves traveling to new planets and being the first human to set foot on them, it can seem like nothing in the universe will ever surprise you again. Irina, with her partner Milo, freelances as a miner of exotic, exo-solar materials. She thinks she’s seen it all. She’s about to discover how wrong she is.

    Magnetic radiation streamed around us and off into open space. The normal solar wind pattern had been disrupted, though, by a thick stripe of purple out ahead of us.

    “That’s weird, right?”

    The adventure Irina wished for might shape up to be the wrong kind: deadly. Investigation of an anomaly in space earns her an unexpected new companion in the void…and a ship which could fail before any hope of rescue or escape.

    “What’s happening?” I asked as I broke into a jog.

    No shaking, shuddering mess marked whatever had gone wrong. Accidents in space came quietly. The lights faded and went out. Though I couldn’t see anything, I knew the ship’s communications had gone down with them. External sensors had almost certainly cut out as well. With a series of hollow thunks, the big mechanical systems that generated the ship’s artificial gravity came to a halt.

    Malfunctioning ship. Unresponsive mining equipment. Something very large and very live in open space. Irina just stumbled into all the excitement she could hope for. Now she just has to survive it.

    “It’s no good,” I said when Milo continued to demand that I return. “There’s no way I can get back before it reaches me. I’ll probably just end up spacing myself if I try. I’m gonna go with the ‘don’t make any sudden moves’ tactic.”

    Local Forecast, a story of rediscovering your sense of adventure AND living to tell the tale, now available for purchase in my shop for all ebook formats and on Amazon for Kindle.
  • HoC Ep. 20: The Master of This House, Pt. 2

    One Week Later…

    Heather followed the doctor through the quiet hall of the clinic, closed to normal clients for the evening. The faintly antiseptic smell of the recently washed floors and tables mixed with the whiff of vitamin snacks hidden in the doctor’s pockets. He pushed open a swinging door and led Heather back into the rooms of work tables and caged animals.

    He stopped in front of a bank of cages. “He was a better patient last time,” he said. “He didn’t complain so much.”

    Heather knelt. In the dim recess of the cage, Rune blinked back at her and uncurled. She unsnapped the latch on the door and opened it. “Hey.”

    “You here to spring me?” Rune asked and levered himself up onto two good legs, a bone-bruised shoulder, and a broken hind leg in a splint. “The food’s awful.”

    Heather reached in and curled one arm under him and the other over. Rune offered no objection to being manhandled. “You bit the last person who offered you a treat.”

    Rune growled low and squirmed around until he was comfortable in her arms. His one leg dangled awkwardly and the heavy splint banged her hip. “She called me ‘puddy-tat.’ I can’t be held responsible,” he said.

    The doctor smiled blandly, only understanding Heather’s half of the conversation. “Now, you’ve got to take the splint off him before he changes,” he said. “Otherwise he could be injured as he outgrows it. Do you have something to use when he’s human?”

    Heather nodded. “We’ve got it all prepared.”

    “This isn’t ideal,” the doctor said, “but a hard cast is out of the question. Your peculiarities do pose something of a challenge.”

    Heather shrugged and smiled apologetically. She couldn’t shake hands while holding Rune. “Thanks for your help.” She looked down at Rune. “You ready to get out of here?”

    Rune chirped an affirmative that even the doctor understood and he led them back out of the clinic. Out in the parking lot, Dopple’s rented car idled in the shade of a huge oak tree. As they walked up, she got out to open the back door for them. Heather settled Rune on the blanket-covered seat and slid in after him.

    Heather kept a steadying hand on Rune as they pulled out onto the road. The sedate ride home was a far cry from the panicked flight to the clinic immediately after the accident. There had been a long, horrible hour during which they had to wait for the cat’s bane to work out of Rune’s system before taking a taxi into town. The driver’s misgivings about having an injured cat loose in his taxi were overridden by Heather’s ferocious orders to waste no further time. His intimidation, in turn, was nothing compared to what Topaz must have done to scare off the driver who hit Rune.

    Rune made an unhappy noise and Heather looked down to realize she had her fingers burrowed deeply into his thick fur, holding on to a hunk of skin over his shoulders. She loosened off her grip and smoothed the fur. They hadn’t let her stay with him while they took X-rays, since the clinic was still open at that hour and the doctor didn’t want to explain why Heather was an exception to the usual rules.

    “Topaz gave me the blender,” she said abruptly, thinking of Topaz seated beside her in the exam room, battered bag clutched to his chest while they waited for news.

    “It was okay?”

    “Just the box was a little dented.”

    Rune shook his head. “No, I mean. I didn’t know if you would want something different. Aren’t blenders the one thing you shouldn’t give a woman?”

    Heather still didn’t like to think of where he had learned something like that, the abandoned life with a human wife frozen like a bug in amber since his return to the House. But she was glad he had disregarded the human rules. And she was even gladder Topaz had told her, in no uncertain terms, just what Rune had meant by it. “There’s a pot of cream of potato soup at home.”

    She could hear Rune’s stomach rumble over that of the engine. “I’m dying for a good meal. I’m lucky the Leo moon’s now or that doctor would have kept me cooped up even longer.”

    Heather grimaced. “Yeah, well, I would have preferred time for your leg to heal more.”

    “You’re not happy I’m coming home early?” Rune asked but she could tell he was pulling her tail. She tugged one of his ears fondly and he subsided, obviously worn out, for the rest of the drive.

    Rune made the torturous journey from the solarium–he had to camp out downstairs until his leg improved enough to allow the navigation of stairs–to the front porch on a pair of truly ancient wooden crutches. The top braces were padded with rolled dish towels, sacrificed from Heather’s supply, and the hand grips were wrapped in gauze left over from bandaging his paws. He barely cleared the door when Heather closed it behind him. He pivoted slowly.

    Heather held up a brush and a can of blue paint. “Right or left?”

    “Right or left what?” Rune had come home to find the solarium finished. Heather had said Topaz and Rafflesia pitched in when he asked, even as Heather set him down on a sofa no longer covered in plastic in a room no longer reeking of paint fumes. “Are you sure you should be doing that? Can’t it hurt the kitten?” His voice stuttered over the word. They still had not spoken about their soon-to-be offspring. It had been enough that Heather stayed near him as much as possible, even sleeping in the recliner that night after she took off his splint before the change came. And she had lost most of that paranoid edge.

    Heather rolled her eyes and brandished the paint can at him. “It’ll only take a minute. Now, which hand do you want to use?” He held up his right hand, helpless before her demands. “Okay, stand right here,” she said, tapping a spot inches from the closed front door.

    Rune hobbled over and leaned his right crutch up against the wall. He held out his right hand. Heather dipped the brush, barely breaking the surface of the bright paint, and wiped most of it off on the lip of the can. Then she stroked it across his palm, cool and slick, comprehensively tinting his hand with ticklish swipes. She held his wrist and brought his hand to the white surface of the door. “Press.” After a moment, she let go and he pulled his hand away with a sticky sound of tacky paint. A perfect blue hand print remained on the door, his broad palm and short fingers crisscrossed by small white lines.

    “Now me,” Heather said. She set down the one paint can and brush and picked up another, this one full of a rich cream. Rune had to set aside his other crutch and stand precariously balanced so he could hold the can while she painted her own right palm. When she pressed her hand in the same spot he had and pulled it away again, she left behind the print of her hand in the middle of his. Her hand was smaller, fitting entirely into his, but her long fingers reached almost to the tips of his.

    He held on to the handle of the paint can for an extra moment when she took it from him so their hands touched. “It looks good.”

    She smiled, bright and a little sharp, a little wary, and said, “It’s not finished.” She glanced quickly down at her belly. It was flat and would remain so, since her kitten would stay a kitten until he–she? Rune wondered–was about two years old. Only when Heather was a cat could you tell she was pregnant. “When this one comes along, we’ll add a paw print in the middle.” She looked up at him. “Okay?”

    It was the closest she had come to asking him directly if he planned to be around then. And it was about more than her suspicion, well-founded, that he might skip out on another unexpected child. He had to make a decision: would he be a tom, a rover who might protect a queen with his kittens, but who made no promises to settle down? Or would he be a father, with all the human-style responsibilities that came with the title? How willing was he to accept Heather’s baffling attachment to life as a human, which their kitten would grow up with, even if Rune refused to be a part of it? Would he refuse?

    “We should wait until the little one is old enough to remember doing it. I want us to remember.” The paint on his hand tied him to the House and to her, stark as a brand against his skin and the home they shared. The home they would continue to share. The home they would make together, all three of them.

    The phrase in cat-speak Heather used to refer to Carlisle’s job roughly translated to “one who can remove the lids from trash cans without dumping them over,” which was a much-prized skill usually only seen in raccoons. In English, she called him her Minister of Finance. Which was why, when she sat grim-faced in Yvonne’s living room, she had him in tow.

    When Yvonne settled into a chair opposite them, Heather cut off anything she might consider saying, even the niceties involved in having guests over to one’s house. “I am prepared to give your association a substantial cash gift, in exchange for being left alone for the remainder of, well, forever, basically.”

    Next to her, Carlisle leaned forward, practically out of his seat. Folded in his hands, the leather cover of a new checkbook, on which he could sign now, creaked in protest. He had not liked the idea. As far as he was concerned, if Poppy could give the homeowners’ association the brush-off, her daughter could do the same. But Heather found the more control she took over the House, the more placidly he went along with her plans. And when she expressed her desire to cut ties with humans who had proved more trouble than they were worth, both Carlisle and Rune had been tripping over themselves to agree with her.

    Yvonne uncrossed her hands from where they were primly folded in her lap. Once again, Heather was struck by how drastically the woman’s personality could change. Gone were both the casually demeaning socialite and the nervous and apologetic double agent. Now, she exuded a cool confidence bereft of personal sentiment. She picked up the folio waiting on the low table between their seats and opened it to a page marked with a yellow sticky note. She pulled out a single sheet of paper and slid it across the table to Heather.

    She waited in silence while Heather read the paper–a brief and simply phrased contract–which had been signed and dated by a person whose name Heather did not recognize and Poppy Lee. Carlisle leaned against her shoulder to read it as well. “This says my mother made a contribution to the association in lieu of membership.”

    Yvonne nodded. Heather could see where her red lipstick had bled, just a little, into the lines around her mouth and Heather wondered just how old the woman was. She had known Heather’s mother, at least. “You are a great deal like your mother, it seems,” she said as though she had read Heather’s mind. “So while I appreciate your offer, I’m afraid she beat you to the punch by rather a lot of years. This has been on the books since well before I became president.”

    Heather was thrown off her rhythm, to say the least. She had explained away Yvonne’s last visit and her warnings about Ellison as being the product of a dubious sense of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But after being kidnapped, and most especially after Susanna Dahl’s cooperation with said kidnapping, Heather felt that anyone without a thirty year precedent of friendship with her needed to be purged from her life. “Why did you wait until now to tell me?” Heather asked. Carlisle pulled the paper out of her hand and studied it at a range of half an inch, as though literal closer inspection would reveal some unnoticed details.

    Yvonne snapped one acrylic nail against the other, making a sharp popping noise. It had to be a nervous gesture, as the noise would have put anyone off the action had they not been distracted. “I drove up to your house the other day.” Heather had a split second of blind panic in which she wondered what Yvonne might have seen and why no one had told her about a strange car driving around. “You painted it,” Yvonne said. “You trusted me when I told you it was important.”

    Heather rolled her shoulders in a shrug that tried to be relaxed, but mostly failed. “You didn’t have to say much to convince me Ellison would use any excuse to screw with me.” She took the paper from Carlisle and slid it back across the table.

    “Well, it was only fair that I tell you about the agreement. As a show of good faith and proof that we have a dislike of Mr. Ellison in common.” Yvonne slipped the paper back into the folio and closed it. “I very much wanted any excuse to see your home.”

    “The local haunted house,” Heather said, remembering their first conversation.

    “I would have liked to have been friends. But I get the impression from you that my time spent dealing with the likes of Mr. Ellison has perhaps had a negative effect on my personality. So barring the possibility of friendship, I would like to help you make life difficult for him.”

    Heather leaned back and considered the idea. “And if I’m not part of the association, he’ll hit a dead-end if he tries to pressure any of you. Saves all of us a lot of trouble.” Even if she was not sure which personality was the true face of Yvonne, Heather found she was rather grateful to finally have the woman on her side. For a lady who put on a good show of being as superficial as possible when surrounded by the other members of the association, she was ruthless. And when she had to go up against George Ellison, Heather had a lot of respect for any ruthlessness she could get.

    George left work later than he would have liked. He had the impression that cats were primarily nocturnal and spent the afternoon sleeping. He wanted to be free in the afternoon. Instead, it was verging well into evening before he drove out of the office parking lot and stopped at the gas station. The late June sky was full of pink tinged light, the only hint that sunset approached. He filled the red plastic gas can with an obscenely expensive quantity of gas. Damn summer price hikes.

    He wasted another hour by circling town a couple of times, burning off more overpriced gas in his car, but none of his nervous energy. He knew what he wanted to do. It had come to him like a revelation, bright and painful, while listening to Susanna’s voice message and watching the construction crew. It had, like all proper revelations, come from somewhere beyond what he just saw and heard. It was more than the sum of its parts.

    It was the right solution. He knew that. But it took almost three winding circuits through town before he could work up the nerve to pull over to the side of the road some way past the driveway and walk back to it. The gas can was very heavy.

    He walked up the middle of the long driveway. If someone came from either the road or the house and saw him, he would not care. He was in a place beyond shame and beyond doubt. He crested the hill and walked right across the empty front lawn.

    The house was very still and very quiet. He waited a long moment, standing at the corner where the front porch connected to the house, where no one would be able to see him unless they came outside. He heard sounds of movement somewhere on the second floor, so he knew someone was at home. That did not concern him.

    He started there at the porch, which was all weather-worn wood, gone pale and dry with age. The gasoline made dark, stinking puddles but the wood quickly sucked them up. He doused the floor and the railing and the boards that blocked off the crawl space, just as far as he could reach without moving into view of the window. Then he poured a shaky line down the long side of the house where stonework met tufty grass.

    He bent low to pass under windows along that wall. He felt a burst of déjà vu, remembering the last time he found himself inching along that wall, and an answering pang of regret that he had not managed to get a video of the still-unexplained transformation he had witnessed then. If he had, perhaps the situation would not have become irretrievably screwed up. Then George might have avoided the uncomfortable territory of physical intimidation, rather than his preferred world of psychological pressure.

    He backpedaled from the word intimidation as he shook out the last of the gas over the wooden frame of a window. He needed to remind himself that this was not just the next step in persuading Lee to sell to him. He had made a decision: Lee was never going to willingly let go of the house and it was pointless to keep dicking around as though she was just like any other stubborn owner. No, George had realized an endgame was the only logical action for him to take.

    He took the box of matches out of his coat pocket. He was not a smoker and so did not own a lighter. Instead, he had moved the matches he kept over the fireplace to the glove box of his car. That had been the moment when he knew he truly intended to go through with the plan. At that point, he had started considering days and times and had known there was no turning back.

    He struck the match, holding it away from the possibility of fumes from the soaked wood. It flared to life, strangely dim in the daylight. It looked innocent. It was such a small thing, simple too, and it hardly seemed like he was doing anything wrong. He stepped up to the window, no longer concerned with hiding. He reached out.

    Dopple stretched on her back with her son, who was still just being called The Creature, wriggling across her belly. His strategy lately had been to use his stomach as an extra appendage and forcefully squirm, legs and tail flailing, in the general direction he wanted to go. So far, he headed in the opposite direction about half the time, but his record was improving.

    On the floor next to them, Mysti read an honest to god book of baby names. They had taken over one of the least used rooms on the north-facing side of the house. It was unfurnished, but it let them get away from the crowds during the Leo moon. Mysti was, in fact, working through her second book of names. “Matthew? Nigel? Othello?”

    Dopple scooped The Creature up and touched noses with him. “No, really, now that Rune is back, we’re asking him for suggestions. You are banned from picking names.”

    Undeterred, Mysti turned the page and said, “Presley?”

    Dopple lurched up. “Banned, I say.” Something flickered in the corner of her eye.

    Yellow. A stranger’s red-flushed face underlined by flames. A sky gone orange.

    Dopple rolled to her side and shoved The Creature into Mysti’s hands. The book dropped to the floor. “Go! Take him to the woods and hide,” she ordered while hauling Mysti to her feet by one elbow.

    She pulled Mysti into the hall and down it. At the stairs, she twisted her head to one side and shouted, “Heather! Human, fire,” and kept going.

    Her shouts got everyone’s attention so that people tried to stop and question her. She shouldered past them until she had Mysti out the back door. With a last look at her son in her lover’s arms, she turned left and raced in the other direction.

    In the pocket of her jeans, her hand closed around a hard cylinder. She pulled it out and curled her thumb over the top. How many runs had she been on since Heather gave it to her? Not once had she needed to use it, so that it became a familiar touchstone instead of a weapon. Now, as she rounded the corner of the house, she held it out at arm’s length like a gun.

    Her eyes flicked from the red gas can on the ground to the line of fire spreading from the window and down the length of the house and finally to the man. She did not have to recognize his face to know him.

    The man looked at her without expression. She wondered if it was possible to go into shock even if you were not the victim. She tightened her hand and a hard stream of liquid shot out from the can of pepper spray.

    Now the man reacted, hands flying to his face where they clawed and scrubbed. A box of matches fell close enough to the fire to catch, going up in a series of flashes, as though each match burned in orderly succession.

    “Son of a dog, bastard,” Dopple bellowed and followed his movements with the spray, splashing his hands, his hair, his shirt collar.

    When clawing his own eyes out did not help, he turned blindly in the direction of the spray and lunged. He snarled and cried, frantic like it was his house on fire. That was when Dopple ran, spay clutched in her hand, bravery failing her at last.

    Topaz grabbed Heather as she careened down the stairs and twirled her away from the front door. “The porch is on fire, I already checked,” he said and they both turned toward the back door.

    “What the hell happened?” Heather asked as she tossed a fire extinguisher to him from under the kitchen sink.

    “Dopple said human,” Topaz answered on his way out the door. He didn’t know, but he wondered if that meant who he thought it meant. He knew Heather would guess the same thing.

    Rounding the front of the house was like walking into a war film on mute. The far side of the porch was just covered in flames, which were inching and more than inching their way across it. Whatever noise the burning wood generated, Topaz did not hear it. All he perceived was that his home was on fire and, at the moment, he alone stood between it and just burning up entirely.

    He pulled the pin on the extinguisher and shot a stream of white foam at the advance guard of the fire. And wow, that stream of foam was small and helpless compared to an angry, billowing fire. How had he ever told himself that setting fire to the catnip was a good plan? How had he believed that being made in large part of stone meant the House was impervious to fire? He didn’t think a house made out of concrete or mud or gravity-defying water would be safe against the maw of flame that seemed ready to engulf the whole porch.

    He vowed to empty the lighter fluid out of Oden’s cigarette lighter, assuming it and the house still stood by the end of this.

    Rafflesia jumped over the moving hose that wrapped around the side of the house. Good, that meant someone was helping Topaz out front. Smoke was thick in the air but the south side of the house remained comfortingly fire-free. She waved her hand toward her. From the house came a gush of people, forced into something like a line by the size of the doorway and the size of Rafflesia’s commands.

    “Come on, this way,” she said, continuing to wave people across the garden. “Keep going, all the way through to the graveyard,” she ordered in a loud voice. Around her, panicked voices murmured and sobbed and shouted, but they all kept moving. Queens carried their unchanged kittens in their arms. Older parents and young adults helped the elderly. “Stay down there until I tell you it’s safe. Stay together and you’ll be fine.”

    Rafflesia’s mother broke free of the stream of people to get to her daughter’s side. “You need to get clear of the house,” Valoria said.

    Rafflesia shook her head and kept waving people on, keeping up a steady monologue of calm instructions. “I can’t,” she said between breaths. “Someone’s got to make sure everyone is out. The other adults who don’t have someone to protect are all putting the fire out.”

    “You’re not going back in there alone,” Valoria insisted and tried to pull Rafflesia along into the woods.

    She shook free and grabbed her mother’s shoulders. “You need to go with them and make sure everyone is accounted for. If someone is missing, I need you to tell me. Please, Mom, there isn’t time to argue. Get everyone down there.”

    Valoria made a stricken noise in the back of her throat. “What are you going to do?”

    “Check all the rooms. Help anyone I find. Now go. Go!”

    She slipped in behind the last few people headed out the door and began clearing rooms and halls one by one.

    Rune hobbled down the hall, letting out a stream of curses to himself and making his leg hurt like a son of a bitch by putting too much weight on it because crutches were just too slow. When he saw Rafflesia charging down the hall, throwing open doors as she went, he called out, “What the hell is going on?” Which yes, obviously from the smoke and panic in the air, fire was what was going on.

    “Heather and Topaz are out front putting out the porch. I’m checking for anyone left behind. My mother is with the others down at the graveyard.” She darted from one side of the hall to the other. “I heard it was a human.”

    Rune cursed again. “Where is Dorian?” Rafflesia shook her head. “I need him to stop the human from leaving.”

    Rafflesia stopped in front of him, thrumming with energy just waiting to be unleashed again. “You need to get out of the house. I want everyone out. What if it burns down?” He could see on her face the moment when the adrenaline and the focus dropped away and she realized that was the reason she was running through the house looking for people. Heather and Topaz and whoever else was around might fail to put out the flames. Their home might be lost. Her face crumpled painfully, everything pinching around her huge eyes.

    “Hey, stick with me here. You’re doing a great job,” he said. “We’re going to beat this. I’ll keep looking through the ground floors. I need you to go find Dorian and tell him to stop the human. Okay? Can you do that?”

    Rafflesia nodded. She ran away down the hall, seemed to not even touch the ground. Rune had to drag himself, but he finished checking the hall. Grinding his teeth against the sharp pain in his splint-supported leg and the bruised feeling of deep muscles in his arms and side where the crutches bit in, he headed back out toward the unchecked parts of the house. He held the image of Heather dousing flames with a hose in his mind, because he could not help thinking of her, but all the other images his mind wanted to supply tried to freeze him with terror.

    Carlisle was dragging his fifth stack of boxed papers out to the backyard, where several other cats were transporting them to a safe distance. He trusted Heather (in this moment he was even prepared to trust Topaz, if it just meant someone fixed this), but he was not going to leave several generations’ worth of paperwork and record keeping unattended in a burning house. Then he heard the commotion and, since he had overridden his common sense by returning to said burning house, he disregarded it again to follow the sound.

    He came around the front of the house to see that more cats had joined the effort to put out the flames, going so far as to smother fires with towels and blankets where possible. But Heather had disappeared from the group and putting out the fire had been her steadfast position as soon as it started. Someone was up on the roof, obscured by smoke and heat haze, raining water down on everything and everyone with the garden hose, pulled taut against the edge of the roof.

    He still had to go beyond the house and look down the hill to see what had people shouting. Or rather, it seemed to have one person shouting. Out of the oak trees to the side of the road down the hill, Ellison burst with his arms flailing as though he was beset by invisible attackers. Then the visible attackers came into view: Dorian and two other veteran hunters chased him with grim determination. They must have only just found him, as any one of them should have been able to outrun him. Then, in the middle of the road, Carlisle saw Heather.

    With the setting sun on her left, half her body was thrown into deep shadow, which seemed to pool at her feet and stream away into the creeping twilight. The light made her pale hair glow like flame. She was monolithic. She was running.

    Carlisle chased the whole staggered field of them down the hill. Ellison ran like a man possessed, mad and terrified. Dorian and the others ran like a pride, fanning out around Ellison and pacing themselves, prepared to run him down rather than go to the trouble of a burst of speed and a tackle. But Heather outstripped them all, as though everyone’s life depended on her getting to the bottom of the hill first.

    Ellison would not have stopped when he reached the road, either planning to run to wherever his car waited or perhaps just running blind and straight on, except Heather screamed, a panicked noise that only faintly resembled the word “stop.” She actually grabbed him before he could step into the road and manhandled him around to face her. Carlisle could only imagine, after what happened to Rune, what she saw when someone ran into the street without looking. Perhaps she did not even mean to stop him personally, but reacted on instinct.

    “You stupid child,” she said fiercely. Carlisle skidded to a stop behind her. Even though he was out of breath, he found himself almost holding it just to remain as quiet as possible. The deep, wild parts of his mind told him that one did not attract the attention of any queen when she was that angry. Even Dorian, whose laid back personality belied a relentless hunter, kept his distance.

    Ellison tried to fight her, but he had to stop any movement halfway through to scrub at his face, which was red and blotchy and streaked with dirty tears. His breath came in ragged gasps, sucked through a tiny straw over great distance. Heather put a hand around the back of his neck and shook him like she was snapping the neck on a caught mouse. “You can’t have it, so no one can? Grow up,” she ordered and now her voice was getting quiet. The hair on the back of Carlisle’s neck and arms stood on end.

    Carlisle saw Dorian make an aborted motion to help her, to take control of Ellison for her. But Heather’s voice did not belong to someone who needed help controlling the likes of Ellison. “Sometimes, we can’t have what we want. But you thought you were special, you thought you were clever and could take what you wanted.”

    She maneuvered them, fingers still digging into his thick neck, until he was looking up at the sliver of roof visible from where they stood. “But you failed. You blew it.” She shook him again. “Do you get that? You could not drive me from my home. That will always be my House,” she said and Carlisle thought even Ellison could hear the capital letter on House.

    She leaned close to his ear. “I have bigger things to worry about than your greed and your plotting and your sneaking around. I am bigger than you, you petty thief.” She turned them around the face the road again. Ellison had gone along with all of this, hands knuckling his eyes like a distraught child. “I’m never going to see you again. I’m not even going to hear about you from my friends, who are not going to have to put up with your nonsense any more than I am. Do you understand?”

    She must have squeezed her hand, because Ellison finally barked out a wheezing “yes.” Heather did not shove him away. She just let him go. Then she stood there, implacable and unafraid. “Go away now.” And Ellison went, running and tripping down the road and out of sight.

    Carlisle watched Heather as she stood for a long moment. No one moved; they would wait until their Queen showed them what she wanted them to do. Carlisle looked at Heather and he saw the House of Cats, more than just a building on a hill, but made of flesh and blood and fur. Living and immortal at once, Queen and House were connected. Carlisle held that image in his mind, keeping the memory of the day when his childhood friend and his home and his Queen became all one figure.

    Two Months Later…

    Heather slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. Oh, yeah, her kitten could feel free to be born any time now. Across from her, Dopple hunched over their new laptop computer and peered furiously at the screen. On the floor by her feet, a wireless router blinked and, from Dopple’s frustrated grumble, failed to respond in the appropriate way. Heather reached her hands up to Rune. “Okay, I’ll take him now,” she said.

    With endearing reluctance, Rune handed over Dopple’s son, with whom Rune had formed some sort of unbreakable bond after giving him the name Adam. “He’s in a climbing mood this morning,” he said.

    The kitten sneezed then gave them all a startled glance. “Sometimes, I wish they changed from the start,” Heather said. “At this age, human babies are not so much with the mobility.” It said a lot about how far Rune had come that the comment elicited no more than a pained grin that had more to do with the kitten on hand. “Are you sure you don’t want me to talk to the builders when they get here?”

    “I’ll be fine,” Rune assured her.

    “You have the check for them?”

    Rune touched the back pocket of his jeans. “Stop worrying. It’s bad for the kitten.”

    Heather snorted. By now, the phrase “it’s bad for the kitten” had been applied to the following: worrying; painting; tap water; overly hot baths; tomatoes; loud music; and microwave ovens. Heather was beginning to regret encouraging Rune to be a part of their kitten’s life, as actively forbidding him seemed to be the only way to get his own worrying down to manageable levels. “So, Dopple,” she said, deliberately forgetting about Rune so he would get on with his own day. “Do we have internet yet?”

    The inarticulate growl that followed prompted Carlisle to look up from where he leaned against the kitchen counter, reading the instructional brochure on accessing their account online from their stock management company. “Maybe you should wait until Mysti gets back from the airport.” This suggestion did not go over well.

    Out by the front door, Heather heard the clatter and thump of a suitcase bumping down the stairs. A moment later, Topaz came in and did a quick twirl. “How do I look?”

    Heather looked over the shirt, complete with actual collar, and the pants, entirely free of frayed hems or torn knees. “I for one would be completely willing to let you into my home if you showed up on my doorstep after one phone call and a letter.”

    Heather watched Carlisle looking at Topaz without raising his head again. After a moment and with a quirk of his mouth that Topaz would be smart enough to not comment on, Carlisle said, “Marginally less disreputable than usual. The cats at the New York House probably won’t count the silverware after you leave. Probably.”

    Topaz pouted, which Heather found cute on her maudlin days and enraging on her testy days and which she chose to ignore all the rest of the time. “You will have the internet working by the time I get there, right? Because this will be a lot less impressive if I can’t connect them with the Queen here.”

    Dopple looked up from the computer. “Kid, you’ve never been to New York. I promise, even if it took me the next month to get this working, you would find a way to keep yourself amused. Now please be quiet so I can work.”

    From the solarium, Rafflesia called back, “Oh, yes, did I possibly ask for the same thing five minutes ago? Oh, that’s right, I did.”

    “No sass,” Heather called back, “or I won’t quiz you tonight for your history test.” Rafflesia had taken to studying for her GED so well that Heather sometimes found herself wondering why she had not seen Rafflesia for several days. Shortly after which, Rafflesia would emerge from her room and announce that she was hungry and long division would be the death of her. Mostly, it was going about as well as any teenager-in-high-school experience went, from what Heather could gather.

    Mysti came into the kitchen and immediately came over to Adam and began smoothing the fur on his chest. “Sit up straight, pudding, or you’ll have bad posture later.” She kissed the top of his head. “Well, what’s the hold up? Airport traffic is hell and LAX waits for no cat.”

    “Okay, okay,” Topaz said. “Ambassador Topaz is off on his first diplomatic mission.”

    Heather smiled up at him. “Good luck,” she said. He looked like a little kid playing dress-up to her, but she thought he would probably look pretty impressive when he showed up at the House of Cats in New York, bearing a letter from Heather and instructions on setting up their first point of contact in the transcontinental network Heather had envisioned.

    Well, they had all envisioned it. Heather had wanted to bring more technology to the House. Carlisle wanted a more reliable way of sharing news. Mysti had contacts with just about every group of cats, from full-scale House down to extended family cluster, anywhere in North America. With Carlisle occupied with managing the House’s finances, it had been Topaz who took the role of diplomat. Even Carlisle admitted that Topaz had shown promise in Carlisle’s usual work, way back in that first winter together when Topaz did half the interviews with returning cats.

    And while the network, a dream of real-time connections between cats across the country, was just getting off the ground, Rafflesia had already proposed a traveling school, where she could teach cats at Houses all over the country, who could then teach their own kittens, about human life and how to go to school or get a job. Rune had dredged up some of Poppy’s long-disused contacts to get human papers for Topaz and Rafflesia.

    So now Heather was maybe a week away from seeing her House become the starting point of something big and amazing. She was also, from what Valoria told her, maybe a month away from having her kitten, which blew ideas about diplomatic relations between Houses clean out of the water in terms of big and amazing. She had a house that had not burned to the ground and, in fact, looked a lot less like a heap of rubble than when she had first returned. She had a construction company building a new porch to replace the one that, between termites and fire and way too many years, definitely needed to be retired.

    Heather braced Adam on her chest, where he purred and kneaded her shirt with sharp little claws in a way that made Heather’s hormone-addled brain turn to happy mush. Mostly, she had a family who stood by her through all those changes, big and amazing and scary. Even when she ran, her family followed after her. She delegated a lot of her running, these days.

    Dopple suddenly threw her arms up over her head. “Take that, computer.” From the solarium, Rafflesia yelped, “Quiet!” Dopple said, “We have internet, your majesty.”

    “So, we need to make an email address, right? Where are Mysti’s instructions?” Heather asked. As Dopple turned the screen to Heather and scooted her chair around so they could both use the computer, Heather wondered what she had gotten herself into. But she didn’t worry too much; in the past year, she had developed a damn good track record for this sort of thing.

    Previous Episode :: Back to Index

  • HoC Ep. 19: The Master of This House, Pt. 1

    Up on the ladder, Rune swept the brush left and right, spreading a thick daub of paint across the molding where the wall met the ceiling in the solarium. After the experience of falling out of that tree–not landing on his feet being yet another reason he disliked a human body–he would have preferred to avoid the ladder. But Heather had stubbornly refused to give up her spot over at the nearest window, where she swept a brush swiftly around the wood framing the taped-off glass.

    Heather had been strange for at least a week and, no matter how often he hashed out his impressions with Topaz, Rune could never get more specific than “strange.” She seemed jumpy, becoming inexplicably snippy if anyone came up behind her or if she had to spend a long time outside. Then she would laugh it off and tell Rune she had made dinner for the two of them. Or, as more often was the case, the ten of them, since Heather’s dinners had started to take on mythic proportions. More and more, she invited Topaz and Carlisle, Dopple and Mysti, Rafflesia and Valoria to join them and referred to the meals as “family night.”

    Rune descended the ladder and moved it over to the next couple feet of unfinished wall. He ran his thumb across the masking tape protecting the edges of both wall and ceiling from the contrasting paint of the molding. Rune had relented to the hiring of professional painters for the outside of the house in exchange for Heather’s cooperation on painting the inside themselves. He also relented about taking cat’s bane. The emergency use of it when Heather was kidnapped had pushed him past the last wall of reluctance. He didn’t like it, but being human had stopped being a source of unthinking terror for him.

    Below him, Heather sat down on the plastic-covered couch in a whuff of displaced air. She pressed the back of her wrist into one closed eye and then the other. Rune held his brush over the mouth of the paint can and asked, “You need to take a break?”

    Heather sniffed and pressed her wrist to her mouth as well. “I’m so sick of these fumes.” She went over to the already open sliding door and stuck her head out. Her shoulders rose and fell with deep breaths.

    Rune stepped down from the ladder again and he could see her wince at the way his boots rattled the metal against itself. “Why don’t we quit for the morning? You go do your thing with Carlisle.”

    Heather nodded. She looked ready to cry, face pinched and eyes wet. “Thanks. We can finish the room this afternoon.”

    Rune watched her leave to change out of the paint-flecked jeans and t-shirt she wore, and then he went back to his painting. Heather might have other business to take care of, but Rune still contented himself with acting as the resident handyman. Apart from that, he had no other demands on his time or attention these days, which made him about the only one in the increasingly busy House.

    Carlisle watched Heather’s hair split to either side of her bowed neck as she bent to sign the papers. She straightened up and pushed the papers over to the man behind the counter. He signed below both Carlisle and Heather’s names, stamped and sealed the papers. The process of notarizing the paperwork was horrifically dull, yet Heather seemed stressed.

    Heather collected the papers back into a sheaf while Carlisle paid the fees. The bell over the door rang as another customer came in. The noise must have startled Heather because Carlisle heard the flutter of papers flying into the air. But even as he watched, Heather caught them up into a rough pile again, practically picking them out of mid-air. He had noticed that since she had started spending more time as a cat, her reflexes had improved. But she had also become alert almost to the point of hyper vigilance.

    On the sidewalk outside the notary office, Heather tapped her fingertips against the manila envelope of papers. “I have another stop to make, if you don’t mind,” she said.

    “Lead on, then,” Carlisle said and followed her back to the street and east. He had needed to go with her to sign the papers with a witness, but the truth was that no one wanted Heather to go anywhere alone. After what happened with Ellison, Carlisle had to concede that hyper vigilance was not an inappropriate response. “How did Dahl take it when you called?”

    Heather glanced over at him. Her hands hovered at stomach level and held the envelope like a shield. Inside it were contracts and trusts and wills describing who controlled what at the House and in what order control passed to them. Susanna Dahl, who had managed the trust for years before Heather came home, was no longer anywhere on that list. No human was. “I think she was relieved to not have to work for us ever again.”

    “Do you think she believed Ellison?” Carlisle had hesitated to bring up the subject after what happened. Heather had, if anything, become more obviously distressed as more time passed.

    Heather jogged through a cross walk so that Carlisle was left behind even though the signal had only just changed for them. When he caught up, she said, “I don’t know, but she didn’t make any threats when we spoke. She made some noise about wanting to know we were satisfied as clients, but I could tell it was lip service. So maybe she suspects, but I think she’d rather not know anything.”

    Carlisle hesitated before bringing up the next subject as well because Heather had been so determined in her course of action. “I’m going to have to brush up on my investing skills, with the way you set up the stocks.” Which was an understatement: Carlisle had been officially reassigned to managing all the House’s assets himself, with the certificates being held by a company that left most everything but the actual work on the stock exchange floor to the customer.

    Heather turned into another strip mall with several glances over her shoulders. “Not really. The House is the definition of long-term stock. We’ve had most of those companies since they went public. If you don’t want to touch anything with quick turnarounds, you don’t have to,” she said with a careless shrug at war with her tense body language.

    Carlisle made a neutral noise in response. Heather had come back from her kidnapping with some strong opinions on what changes needed to be made to the House. She stopped in front of a store and pointed to a bench a few feet down from its door. He looked up at the name. “Phones?”

    “You can wait outside if you want. It might take a while to get signed up for service.” Heather had a hard expression on her face that dared him to make the mistake of questioning her plan.

    “I’ll come in. They can show both of us how to use them. I’m not familiar with them.” Carlisle tucked his hands in his pockets and tried to look inoffensive. Heather nodded and whirled into the shop. Carlisle followed her, trying to walk the fine line between protecting her and getting his head bitten off.

    Dopple stroked her bare thumb down her son’s spine and across the thin whip of his tail. He squiggled across the bedspread on pudgy legs and bumped his head into her other hand. His eyes were still closed, but everyone told her that was expected; changing-cats took longer to do everything as kittens.

    She curled her arm around him and hitched her body up over his a bit when she heard a knock on the door. “Who is it?”

    Heather stepped in quietly, eyes going to the kitten largely hidden by Dopple’s body, and silently took up the desk chair. “He asleep?”

    Dopple relaxed enough to let her hip settle onto the bed again, but kept her arm curled around him. “Just woke up, so he’s bored.”

    “Have you decided on a name yet?” Heather fidgeted with the top flap of a cardboard box. She kept turning it in her hands so Dopple couldn’t make out the writing on the sides.

    “Mysti keeps vetoing everything. I’m threatening to call him Pudding if she doesn’t start helping me pick.” She jerked her chin towards the box. “What’s that?”

    Heather stopped tumbling it and faced the label toward her. The front had a plastic window through which she could see a flip style cell phone. “I got the family plan,” Heather said and pulled the plastic packing out of the box.

    “We’re getting phones?” Dopple uncurled her arm from the kitten to accept the phone Heather offered.

    “That’s just for starters.” She handed Dopple a slip of paper. “These are all the numbers you need to put in.” It listed numbers for Rune, Carlisle, Topaz and Heather. “Carlisle says you know something about computers.”

    Dopple grimaced. “Mysti taught me a little. I can use the things if I have to.” Typing hurt though and her fingers didn’t have the right reach to easily use a full-sized keyboard.

    Heather picked at a tear in the corner of the box and peeled off strips of the glossy coating on the outside. “If we got a computer and ran cable lines up here for internet, could you use email?”

    Dopple raised her eyebrows. “Who am I going to be chatting with?”

    Heather had reduced the corner of the box to confetti. “I’m not sure yet. Just, could you be technical support if I go through with it?”

    Dopple shrugged the shoulder she was not bracing on. “Between Mysti and me, we can manage.”

    Heather smiled and Dopple noticed she looked a little flushed. “Thanks.” She took the damaged box with her as she headed for the door. At the threshold, she turned back. “How is it?” At Dopple’s questioning wave of her hand, Heather said, “Being a mom?”

    Dopple looked down at where her son gnawed on the pad of her thumb with needle-sharp teeth. He had his arms wrapped around the ball of her thumb and she counted–again–the little pink and white claws just peeking through the black fur. “I’m scared all the time, even when he’s right with me, that something might hurt him. And I spent four hours the other day watching him nap after Donya nursed him.” She shrugged again. “I wouldn’t change anything. Now I’m not just myself. I’m his mom first.”

    Heather’s smile looked a little less shaky this time as she nodded and let herself out of the room. Dopple flipped open the phone. She stretched over to the desk and snagged a pencil. The buttons for the numbers were too small for the blunt ends of her fingers, but with the eraser end, she typed in the numbers for the other phones in their new fleet, adding Mysti’s, long ago memorized, first.

    George’s cell phone started vibrating to tell him he had a message, just as the foreman led him past the skeletal walls of a house being built. His thumb pressed the keys to start playback without looking away from where the foreman used a rolled up blue print to point out something a couple of workers were doing up on the roof of another house.

    “Message received on. Monday. June 7th at. 7:53. AM,” the automated voice chanted. Then the voice changed and became richly, viciously human. “Hello. It’s Susanna. I called when I knew you wouldn’t answer because I wanted to say this without having to listen to you interrupt me and shout at me and tell me how stupid I am.”

    George turned the volume on his headset down a bit, so that Susanna’s voice became a murmur underlying the outside world. And outside, the foreman droned on about fire-resistant materials. “So. Um. What I wanted to say is, I think you’re a real bastard.” She paused as though she had surprised herself by saying it. “I tried to walk on eggshells around you when you were busy and pissed off and I told myself it was just the work getting to you. And that, if I brought over dinner or went to work late to see you when you weren’t busy, you would start having more time and be good to me again. That didn’t exactly work, now did it?”

    The foreman picked up a shingle from a pile and showed it to George. With a flick of his nail, the shingle rang brightly. “I’m a busy woman, too, you know,” Susanna whisper-shouted in his ear. “I have a career that takes all my attention and I thought you understood that. I thought you wanted to spend time with me. That’s what the stupid house was about, you said. But no, it was all just about going after Lee.” George instinctively growled, prompting a confused look from the foreman. George noticed just long enough to make a dismissive noise.

    “God. Do you have a crush on her or something?” The foreman led him over a crunchy section of rocks, out beyond the last house being constructed, so they could look down over the rest of the development where a machine crawled over overturned land on caterpillar treads. “Because God knows you’re horrible to the women you like.”

    “Was I always just a way to get at her? I had my misgivings–you never really stopped obsessing over that house–but I thought it was just a thing for you. A sticking point. But it’s not like your whole life revolved around that one house.”

    George followed the foreman back across the lots to the trailer he used as an office. “Except, apparently I was wrong about that. So.” As he walked, the foreman fanned out the blueprint and tried to hold it with both hands and point to something with a third one he didn’t have.

    “I guess that’s everything. You never cared about me, I see that now, and you used me and you were so rude to me I can hardly think about it. And now I think you might be completely insane.”

    George followed the foreman up the steps into the trailer. “And I don’t ever want to see you again.” The foreman waved him into a seat. “Goodbye.” Before he sat down, George pressed the button to delete the message and flipped his phone shut again.

    Heather leaned over Rune’s shoulder and pointed to one of the brightly colored icons on the little screen of the cell phone. “See, you go there to change the settings,” she said. She reached around his side and tried to press the buttons.

    Rune pulled the phone out of her reach and scowled over his shoulder. “I know how to use a phone,” he said. He leaned over the arm of the couch in the front room to get away from her, which didn’t exactly make her feel great.

    Heather jerked back. “Well, I didn’t,” she snapped. And yes, maybe her attempts to teach Rune how it worked had turned into taking the phone away from him and doing it herself, but damn it, he wouldn’t ever do it the way she told him to. “I had to make the man in the store explain everything to me and he looked at me like I had two tails.”

    Rune continued to press buttons and the phone obediently beeped back at him. “If you had told me what you were planning, I could have gone with you.”

    Heather made a rude noise and thumped over to the opposite end of the couch. She leaned her back against the arm and propped one leg up on the couch. She flipped through the instruction booklet, letting her left arm drape over her belly between page turns. After a chilly pause, she said, “It’s not like you tell me anything about your past. How should I know what you know about cell phones?”

    Rune shut his phone with a loud snap. “Can we get this fight over with soon? You’ve been weird lately and I can’t help but think I’m the reason.”

    Heather looked at him over the top of the booklet and curled up a little more. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not mad at you.” At least, she hadn’t been before she gave him the cell phone.

    “So why are you riding me?” Rune asked and pulled the booklet out of her hands to toss it on the floor by the rest of the packaging from the phones. “And I’m not talking about the phone. You threw a book at me the other day because I didn’t knock before I came into your room.”

    “You startled me. I didn’t know it was you.” Heather thought of Dopple’s answer: I’m scared all the time.

    “Do a lot of people attack you in your room?” She saw the moment when he realized what a small leap it was from “kidnapped in your driveway” to “attacked in your room.” He lurched across the middle of the couch and put a hand on her bent knee. “Is this about–”

    “No,” Heather practically wailed because she got enough of the post-traumatic psychology talk from Carlisle as it was. “This isn’t about, about that night,” she said. Part of her continued to be bitterly disappointed, as it had been for the past week since she realized what was going on herself, that Rune had not just guessed what was on her mind.
    “Because I can talk to Dorian about setting up more daytime patrols and rigging up more booby traps,” Rune said, like he didn’t hear anything she said, just relentlessly pursuing the wrong trail.

    “I’m pregnant.”

    Topaz found Rune in the attic, which didn’t bode well when he had just seen Heather restlessly thumping about in the kitchen and refusing to talk to him. Even when he said he still needed her to help him with the new phone and if she had time now, he would go take some cat’s bane, she just snarled that he should ask Rune because he knew all about them. She had a big knife in her hand. He booked it out of there.

    Rune was human, at least, which meant he hadn’t taken any catnip. Yet. Topaz trotted over to where he leaned against an ancient steamer trunk. A bar of light from the tiny window slanted down across his face. The light washed out the lines and cast everything past the hard line of his jaw into shadow. Topaz thought he might have looked like that as a young man.

    Rune rolled his head to the side to look at Topaz then back again. He shut his eyes against the light. “Heather’s pregnant,” he said. Desperation put a hysterical edge to his voice.

    “Dude, you don’t waste any time,” Topaz said. He sat next to Rune and flicked his tail in the dust of the floor.

    Rune groaned. “I didn’t mean to.”

    Topaz snickered. “Uh, bro, you do know how this works, right?”

    Rune opened his eyes just enough to glare. “We weren’t really thinking about it at the time.”

    Rune really did sound desperate, so Topaz took pity and dropped the teasing tone from his voice. “Isn’t this an okay thing? You two have been, what’s the word, dating? Dating for a while.” Cats translated the human concept of dating as “patrolling the same territory amicably.” Topaz thought that was a pretty good description of the two and their strolls around the property. “What did you say to Heather?”

    Rune winced and Topaz braced himself for whatever deeply insensitive thing Rune had probably blurted out. “I don’t think I said anything. I kind of just stared at her for a while and then I went away.”

    Topaz grumbled in the back of his throat. It was worse than he thought. “Man, Heather’s pissed. What were you thinking?”

    “I was thinking I can’t be a father!”

    “Did she ask you to be?” Because lots of queens, most, in fact, raised their kittens alone or with someone who wasn’t the actual father. Just because a queen thought a tom was good enough to have his kittens didn’t mean she wanted to be stuck with him the rest of her life.

    Rune seemed to hear all the unspoken remainder of Topaz’s thought. “Heather lived as a human most of her life. She’s going to expect me to help if I’m going to be part of her life any more.”

    Topaz scoffed. “Heather’s not going to break up with you. She wouldn’t be this pissed if she didn’t care too much to let you walk away.”

    “You don’t understand,” Rune said, leaning forward to drop his head between his knees. “She knows about,” and his voice trailed off into a strangled mumble. He sat back up and fixed Topaz with a hard glare. “I had a human wife and I got her pregnant and she had a human daughter,” he said in one rough breath. “And I ran away. And Heather knows.”

    Rune gave Topaz a minute to chew on all that information. He thought maybe Rune was a big asshole for running off like that, except then Topaz would never have met him and Rune wouldn’t have met Heather and life just generally started to look like a foreign country. “Do you want to be a father?” Topaz asked at last.

    Rune’s face twisted painfully. He held his hands out like someone would drop the answer into them. “I don’t want to be the kind of man I was before I met her,” he said and it sounded like he was choking on the words.

    Topaz rolled his eyes. Leave it to Rune to bury the truth about whatever he was feeling under fifteen feet of only vaguely related crap. “So let her know you plan to stick around.”

    “I can’t afford to buy her a ring, if that’s what you’re thinking. Unless I borrow money from her, which is pretty tacky. I’ve got about fifty bucks left to my name.”

    Topaz hadn’t been thinking of a gift, but now that Rune mentioned it… “Something for the kitten would just make it seem like you want her to act like a regular cat. So something human.” He could see Rune hesitating, talking himself out of the whole idea. “I’ll get changed and go with you, so get your tailless butt off the floor and get that money.” He trotted away before Rune could argue. Really, he understood Heather’s pain; talking to Rune was like convincing a mouse to braid your whiskers.

    Rafflesia hooked her claws at the pages of the newspaper and scrabbled them open to the one she wanted. A6, [UNIVERSITY], where they kept talking about tuition and books and protests and students. Her tail flicked across the dining room table, where Heather had left the newspaper. Rafflesia could read, but a lot of the words didn’t mean anything to her. She left the paper behind, unable to carry it, and hopped down from the table.

    In the kitchen, Heather sliced peaches with quick, fluid motions. The room smelled of juice and vanilla and paint fumes from down in the solarium. A burst of lemon scent joined them as Heather squeezed half of one over the bowl of peach slices. She glanced at Rafflesia as she came into the room and jumped onto the counter then Heather went back to reducing peaches to paper-thin slices.

    Rafflesia sniffed a pot cooling on the stove. It was filled with a cream-colored goop that smelled strongly of vanilla. “Whatcha making?”

    Heather pointed her knife at the large glass bowl set back against the wall. “Trifle,” she said. The bottom of the bowl was lined with sticks of pound cake. A carton of whipping cream and a bottle of orange juice sat next to it, along with the plate bearing the partially sliced pound cake.

    Rafflesia snuck a quick lick of vanilla goop from the wooden spoon lying next to the stove. Pudding. Delicious. “Did you make all this right now?”

    Heather grunted a yes-like noise and used a bright red brush to spread orange juice on the cake in the bowl. Then she started arranging peach slices in a starburst pattern. “Did you need something?” Heather asked, hitting the word need hard, like anything less than life-or-death desperation would be ignored.

    Rafflesia thought of asking her what was wrong, because any idiot could see she was upset, but Rafflesia knew she cooked to forget about her problems. So instead, she said, “What is a university? And what is tuition?”

    Heather picked up the wooden spoon and scowled at the long stripe of clean wood through the middle of the pudding residue. “You’ve been reading the paper again?” She asked as she washed the spoon in the sink. “It’s a type of school. They’re talking about increasing how much you have to pay to take classes there.”

    “So it costs to go to school?”

    Heather spooned a big glop of pudding into the bowl and used the back of the spoon to push it around, covering up the cake and peaches. “Yeah. This one is a state university, so the government runs it and it costs less, so lots of people can go.”

    “Costs less than what?”

    “Than a private college,” Heather said and started making more sticks of cake.

    “What do you have to do to go there?”

    Heather raised her eyebrows but kept her eyes on the swiftly moving knife. “Well, mostly, humans apply while they finish high school and, if they get accepted, they start taking classes at the university.”

    “And how to you get into high school?”

    Heather set the knife down and looked at Rafflesia. She stood with one arm folded across her stomach and the opposite elbow resting on that arm. She circled her hand around in a sort of get on with it motion. “Why the sudden interest in schools, Raff?”

    Rafflesia drew herself up to her full height. “I want to go to school and learn lots of things so I can come back and teach the other kittens.”

    Heather relaxed out of her stern stance. “You want to be a teacher? Here? The way you talked, I thought for sure you would want to leave home again. Maybe go stay with Umber for real this time.”

    “That’s just it. I want to learn all about life outside, but I want to come back and tell people about it. Then the other cats would know enough to go out and have their own adventures.”

    “Well…”

    Rafflesia tiptoed across the edge of the stove, still warm from use under her feet, to sit right next to Heather. “This is important to me. I really, really want to do this.”

    “I guess, if we can get some papers for you, you could get your GED and apply with that. You might have to start at a city college before a university will take you. And I’ll have to talk to Carlisle about paying for tuition, but I’m sure we have more than enough. And…” Heather kept talking to herself, thinking of details and complications and solutions. And Rafflesia listened to everything and added to her list of words to ask about, filing away GED and city college and dormitories for later consideration, missing nothing.

    Rune switched the handles of the paper bag from one hand to the other and wiped his sweaty palm against his jeans. “Are you sure Heather will like this?” He looked down into the oversized bag at the box labeled “immersion blender.”

    “She doesn’t have one, does she?” Topaz asked. His brother made a big show of walking along the narrow ridge of asphalt along the shoulder of the road. Even with Topaz’s effortless balance, Rune thought it looked like too much trouble. “She already has a cook book she likes. And this looks pretty cool.”

    Rune wasn’t sure why anyone would need an immersion blender, cool or not, but they had argued the point three times already. He had bought the thing and that was that. “I just feel like I should be getting her jewelry. Or flowers. Women still like those, don’t they? Human women, I mean.” Except apparently his brain wasn’t all on the same page and needed to circle around the problem a little longer.

    He could feel Topaz roll his eyes at him. “Does Heather even wear jewelry? I mean, if you were trying to impress Mysti, I’d say sure.”

    “Impressing Mysti could never be worth pissing off Dopple,” Rune grumbled. As they rounded the sharp curve in the road, he caught sight of the mailbox. His stomach flip-flopped. If Heather didn’t like it…

    “The point is that you know Heather is not like other women. She’s not like other women to you and Rune, look out!”

    Rune had barely stepped out to cross the road. Stupid, stupid, his mind repeated in the brief eternity it took to turn enough to see the car already braking hard as it came around the turn at him.

    Even with the driver simultaneously laying on the horn and the brake, the car clipped Rune. The impact broke his left leg, he thought distantly, and the image of Poppy Lee, ancient before her time and leaning heavily on a cane, came unbidden to his mind. The force bucked him up over the hood, but the angle made him roll up and off to the side, instead of into the windshield.

    The worst part was hitting the ground. His brain already protected itself in an absorbent layer of shock, so he heard, rather than felt, the crunch of his ribs cracking and something going pop in his shoulder. Asphalt scraped his cheek. The prickle of dry oak leaves all over his skin was a relief because it meant he was off to the side of the road, out of the way of crushing tires.

    It hurt too much to move, so he felt grateful he ended his rag doll roll on his back. Above him, a half sky of blue and a half canopy of leaves twisted in a dizzying rhythm. If he lay still and took shallow breaths, his body just seemed to buzz, foreign and ignorant of his suggestions, but somewhere out the other end of pain.

    He heard Topaz screaming at the human, telling it to get out of here. That was good. He couldn’t go to a human hospital and the human would want to call an ambulance, but maybe not as much as it wanted to be let off the hook. Rune forced himself to croak out some assurance, some variation on it’s just a scratch, just a flesh wound. He couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears whether or not it came out right. Were his eyes even open any more?

    To be continued…

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