The brick of the sidewalk felt odd under my pads, and after about a block I began to notice it. It was somewhere at the boundary between uncomfortable and annoying, and I told myself I needed to toughen up after Sasha’s Auntie Rosa’s lovely carpets and gleaming hardwood. I knew deep down inside that this was somewhat untrue; I didn’t need to toughen up because it wasn’t as if I was going to be out here for very long. Right?

My outer soul kept brushing Ned’s, which was panicking. He didn’t know me super well, so it was hard for him to get a reliable fix on me. Every time he did, I would shrug it off, going underneath cars so the metal would run fingers through the college kid’s g’nah and confuse him. He stayed with me, though, or at least was trying to. Right now I sympathized with Terry wholeheartedly.

Every so often the archimago would slip out in the middle of the night for a couple of unbothered hours. He would come back smelling of other people’s expensive cars and a great deal of smugness. Of their cars, mind you, not of them; bizarre as it seemed I was pretty sure he was stealing them. Or at least moving them; a last hurrah? A practical joke? Sticking it to the man on several levels? Whichever, ducking a persistent Lion, even a 20-something cub, took moxie and talent. Me, I was fine on moxie, but my native talent kept being distracted by the turmoil in my nether regions.

It had been a block and a half, and I was almost there. There was a construction site in the area, where some lucky nouveau riche would someday have a stately home. I couldn’t detect Ned anymore, so I slowed down. Something timid inside me told me he might get into trouble through my intransigence, but I told it to shut up. I wanted to listen.

Duke was sitting on a stack of plywood sheets turned on their edges, eyes half shut as he sang his song. I’m not a singer or a poet, and I don’t have a head for lyrics–if I were human, I’d need a karaoke machine and a map to get me through my favorite song–so I can only give you the gist. It was about it being a marvelous night for a moondance, with the stars up above in my eyes–and he opened his and looked right into mine. I got shivers.

Then he started singing about romance, and his eyes got bigger and bigger. I edged closer. He smirked, and asked if he could have just one more moondance with me–

“My love?” He sounded both wistful and sarcastic. I purred. I wanted to dance. Maybe a moondance would turn off that alarm clock south of my ribs. The moon itself had set, but the streetlight over the abandoned yard could be made to do, couldn’t it? I sashayed forward, stretching out my forepaws and raising my hips as high as they would go.

“And scene!” It was Terry. Where the hell had he come from?

Before I could so much as straighten out, the yard erupted in Th’nashi and sorcery. Poor Duke evaporated, his tail stringing along behind him in the streetlight like that cat Links on Joel’s PC.

“And good riddance!” called Devon. He was a nice boy from Ohio, the senior of the cubs, Terry’s man-at-arms, and the “daddyest” of them all in terms of not letting me have any unscheduled fun–for at least a week, I had suspected the Th’nashi of some sort of puppet-mastering and that Sasha pulled the young man’s strings as far as cats were concerned.  But he was fond of me. Still intoxicated on the catnip and song and whatnot, I leaned against him and purred loudly. Maybe if I could talk everybody into a moondance, nobody would get into trouble.

Devon knelt down and started scritching my back, ending up at a spot right before my tail I swear I didn’t know I had. I raised my butt by reflex, my own purr drowning my ears.

“Yeahhhh?” I asked, rolling at his feet and looking at him upside down. Devon was cracking up.

“Looks like we got here just in the nick of time.” He reached down and did that long smooth ears-to-tail petting thing, aiding and abetting it with his outer soul. Ooh baby!

“OK, farm boy, quit seducing Sasha’s cat.” Terry was laughing himself. “Um, we were in the nick of time, weren’t we, Pharaoh?”

The sorcerer stepped forward, pushing his glasses up on his nose. He was wearing nothing but a wife-beater, ragged sweats, and flip-flops, and smelled as if he had recently gated. I realized that Ned had probably called him and gotten him out of bed. His outer soul had that ruffled feeling, although the Lions all seemed to wake up as quickly as their cat namesakes.

“Let’s see.” He picked me up and muttered a moment or two under his breath. A slight sting tingled my business parts. “No, no other DNA but hers. This time. Maybe Sasha will listen to reason now.”

“He was all about ‘operative risk’ and ‘kittens aren’t the worst thing’,” volunteered Terry, sounding resigned.

“Yes, well, maybe now that his princess took off like dammit out of hell following her bliss, he’ll think twice,” groused Pharaoh. “I can’t believe you had the forethought to grab your damned video box, but maybe seeing will be believing.”

The archimago heh’d. “What will the Order do to poor Ned? Seeing as he was fighting biology on this one?”

Devon laughed. “If you’re not upset at our rousting you for advice, Your Grace, then it’s all good. No harm done, thank God.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” said Terry with great cheer. He was a morning person.

Sasha was just finished shaving when we all got back, and so hadn’t noticed anything yet; it was clear that this in itself annoyed him no end.

“Didn’t want to worry you, sir,” said Devon, not quite making eye contact and pretending that he hadn’t made the call to wake the Archimago of Nova Terra and the District Sorcerer before the cat’s actual owner, just because of who was scariest.

“But no harm was done?” Sasha said, echoing Devon in a firm voice, cocking an eyebrow at Terry in accusation.

“Got it all right here,” said Terry, sitting down with his laptop and plugging in the memory card from his camera.

I had come down by now, although I still wanted my tail rubbed some more, and the five minutes of infamy that followed was humiliating.

“For some reason I want to set it to Van Morrison. Can’t think why,” Terry mused. I couldn’t recall whether I knew enough Van Morrison to have an opinion, but I did know that if Terry sacrificed his own cat–his own loving little Eureka!–to the voracious mocking pit of the Internet, that I would never speak to the heartless bastard ever again.

Sasha was of apparent agreement. “You aren’t setting it to anything other than ‘erase.’” He reached over, but Terry caught his wrist.

“Are we getting her fixed?”

“I’ll think about it. It’s my say.”

“Then you have no say in what I do with my creative license.” Terry spoke with the smooth firmness of moral rectitude–he was right, and we all knew it. Sasha relaxed, and Terry wobbled. Terry was a Lion-type himself; I guess the struggle for that delete key had been more than it looked.

“Hiroshi will be happy to do it for nothing,” Pharaoh volunteered. Hiroshi was his twin, who was a vet for the zoo. At “nothing” Sasha wavered. He himself was a member of the Order–a few Grails and even humani were–and was living on their measly poverty-level stipend: Despite Auntie’s house and his wealthy boyfriend, the doctor managed on it alone, handing his professional salary over to the Order with becoming meekness.

“Would he let me scrub in?”

“Um, no-oo,” said Pharaoh, looking distressed at the thought. “You’re welcome to ask him, though.” There was a brief silence in the room. I was the only one there who didn’t know the mysterious Hiroshi, but I immediately realized from the breaths held in anticipation that such a conversation would be one of those meetings between unstoppable force and immoveable object that sells tickets. This guy was Sasha’s match, and that scared me.

“Right, then.” Sasha threw up his hands. “It’s all on you, missie. Can’t have you being the neighborhood floozie and getting hit by a car. Pharaoh, could you work that all out for me?” The rare note of honest human appeal in his voice touched me, until I realized that it was occasioned by somebody who was going to knock me unconscious and cut open my tummy. I crept under the bed and sulked myself to sleep.

For the next four days, I was treated like a wild animal when in the vicinity of any open doors–and probably for the best, as random notes from Duke’s song, and that of another couple of talented toms, would penetrate the house and make me drool a little, clicking my lower jaw as if trying not to spook a bird. But it gradually faded, and I thought the topic had been forgotten.

Then one morning I awoke to no breakfast–not even water. This was triggering, as one might imagine, and I went for the john in Terry’s office, just to make sure I could flush it as Fred had done, but Sasha scooped me up and tucked me into the bowling ball bag. Or tried to.

“Lordy, but you’re all grown up, Eureka! Damn it.” He called Pharaoh, and after a few minutes, Pharaoh showed up at the gate point in the office, carrying a beat up carrier that smelled of at least five species of animal, with the strongest being snake.

“Are you kidding me?” I appealed to him. He gave a shrug.

“Best I can do on the moment. You probably won’t need it to come home in; you’ll be too woozy.”

Sasha unnecessarily helped him tuck me in. “You know, I find it a little annoying when you talk to her like that. Like it’s condescending, coming from you.” This was sheer hypocrisy, coming from him–he had given me a terrifying slice-by-slice account of the surgery the night before, just to talk out his own nerves–and I waited to see what Pharaoh would say with a little anxiety.

But the Brit didn’t take the bait. “Can’t help it. Habit. Cats are good listeners.” Then, “You should try it some time.” A chill silence, and Pharaoh chuckled.

“Would you like me to gate you both in to Chattie?” Chatte’d’garcon was appropriately named in this instance, but it was really the Th’nashi scientific House, and had extensive offices downtown in the Poplar-Bricklight Building, where local Contract lurked, unbeknownst to the humani, who just had a vague something-or-other that the other tenants were a little weird.

“No,” said Sasha. “I’m driving to work afterwards. Thank you, though. Ready, princess?” He hoisted me and out we went, Outdoors smells being rather spoiled by the zoo. I kept expecting one of those snakes to gate in from somewhere and eat me. At least it was a nice carrier–cage, really–with openwork sides and top. Not the best carrier for the average cat–we prefer caves–but for me going on an adventure, I gave it good marks. I want to see stuff on my way to doom!

Instead of giving Sasha a non-stop cussing out, or succumbing to fatalistic misery in a heap, I found that if I sat up, I could see out of the windshield and thus was able to enjoy Boston in the dawn as we crossed the Charles River. Once we were away from Pharaoh, Sasha slipped back into being his ordinary just-the-two-of-us self, and when he noticed my interest, he gestured with his coffee cup at the various buildings.

“And that beauty over there is Poplar-Bricklight, right next to the Prudential but not quite as tall. Most expensive real-estate Contract owns. Sits on top of a three ley-confluence and is held up by a team of sixty-odd sorcerers because of bad engineering. Your pal Meeze de Medici bosses that operation. I agree with Meeze that turning the fix into straight physics and getting the hardhats in is the thing to do–hell, so does Terry. But the Nova Terra Nesh’vai doesn’t agree. And you think Congress gives the President a hard time!” He went on, but my eyes began to glaze whenever Sasha went on to politics, which he did on a regular basis, blowing off spousal steam, because the Nesh’vai basically made Terry fetch their sticks as a rule.

Instead, I looked around in the other cars, wondering if anybody else was doing the same and noticing that in ours a small blond man was haranguing his cat. No other pets except a chihuahua looking out of the window of a beat-up Honda in the next lane.

“Tsk-tsk-buena-suerte!” he called to me, which his outer soul conveyed meant “good luck.” I meowed a thanks, then we were gone, my kind fellow quadruped being scolded for barking at the kitty.

All too soon, we were sucked into a tunnel leading into a deep parking lot, with an adult Lion as the attendant letting us card our way in. His outer soul said “sorcerer,” which made sense, the Th’nashi being serious about their security. When we reached the bottom, there was just dreary parking lot and an elevator. Sash got on and pushed the 48th floor. I could feel his being nervous. His patients were pre-anesthetized, and he had no worries about them not waking up, that being why they were there and all.

We came out into hospital smells and a weird ambience that finally helped me grasp why the Th’nashi called outer souls/g’nah ping: I felt as if my sonar had been turned off. There was nothing to get hold of. Even to a humani, I expect it would have felt wrong. Maybe extra quiet, or something. I mewed a question at Sasha, hoping he’d pick up on context and explain things.

He did. “Chattie is ping-baffled, Eureka. I know it feels weird, but it’s for confidentiality. And practical considerations. You don’t want to be going down a hall and run smack into the whole group g’naiet of a lady in heavy labor and her family, trust me. The average hospital walls are just too damn thin to keep something like that in one place.

“But, no heavy labor for you, and tell the truth, after reading up on those possible complications, I’m getting more and more okay with that. ‘fact, I’d forgotten that my very first dissection back in school was a mama cat who’d died still with four kittens aboard.” Okay, Sasha, you can stop now. I usually had an endless ghoulish delight in his stories, but not today.

I could tell that Pharaoh was in the next room. No, not Pharaoh. I was stumped for a minute, then as we came in and I got a look, a little more stumped. This man pinged like Pharaoh’s twin, and sort of looked like him, but he was streaked, that’s the only way I can describe it. Unlike Pharaoh’s green-eyed Asian, this guy was a brown-eyed Asian–except that one eye was actually blue and it lived in a streak of pale skin, which fell down his face from a stripe of ginger hair. Humans being what they were, I suspected that this lovely decoration had probably been heralded as a deformity. He raised an eyebrow at Sasha, but grinned at me, his outer soul holding out its arms.

“Hello, Hiroshi. This is Eureka.” Sasha put my cage on a table.

“Good day, mate! Hello, Eureka.” Hiroshi unlatched things. “This looks quite familiar. Young lady have any words to say on its previously been full of rock python?”

“No, she’s been good as gold,” said Sasha, mendaciously covering my prior complaint.

“Or scared silly by it. Brother’s an ass. If he’d asked me, I could have come up with something better. We’ll see what she’s up to after she comes out of it. You waiting?” There was a fillip of you-better-not-be there.

“Actually, I was going to scrub in and observe, if you’d grant me the professional courtesy,” Sasha said, somehow making his bland statement a you-better-let-me.

Hiroshi clearly didn’t like this, but wasn’t too surprised. “Do you have a theatre, so you’re not breathing down my bleeding neck?” I thought to myself that Sash would have to stand on tiptoe to do that, and giggled at my own bad joke, born of nerves.

Most humans can’t detect cat laughter, but not only did Hiroshi, I swear he got the joke. He looked down at Sasha; although a Grail himself, he was about as tall as his twin at the Order’s minimum six feet. “Or maybe that’s not a worry, eh, Eureka?” He laughed at Sasha’s scowl, then relented.

“Stay out of my way, see? And no bleeding backseat surgering.” He scooped me up with firm, gentle hands, and we went into a small room filled with shiny things and an alcohol-like smell. Hiroshi was giving off a vibe of safe-as-houses, though, and I clung to the thought that, if he were the head vet of the Franklin Zoo, he must be cleared on a simple domestic cat spay. Am I right?

A cheerful lady with “red” hair that was dyed the color of a traffic light told me what a beautiful darling I was, and asked me to hold still. She had a razor in one hand.

“Watch her nipples!” barked Sasha. The redhead sniffed.

“Got some myself, Dr. Van der Linden. I do this all day long, and I haven’t bruised an animal yet.” Even as she spoke, the buzzy thing had zipped itself down my middle, indeed missing my nipples, but not by very much. I felt a pinch, but by the time I was up to working out exactly where it was, I wasn’t there anymore.

Other than Tuesdays, Pharaoh would only pop by on occasional evenings once or twice a week, primarily for the huge tub. He and his brother had a little one in their flat, but it wasn’t the same. The Th’nashi were big on the hot tub thing, actually using them to bathe in with each other, which I approved of as being sensible and not wasteful, although a lot of humani thought it was disgusting. When he was there, he would chat to me a bit, and it was nice, if one-sided. But he wasn’t anything like thoroughly underfoot, which meant at the bottom line that the majority of my days were spent with the staff.

Such as they were. By “staff” I mean the little team of 18-to-22-year-old Lion cubs who were responsible for keeping up the beautiful house Sasha’s aunt had left him, and for trying their failing best to keep tabs on Terry. Terry was pretty well protected by the archimagisterial scientific and sorcerous anointings in terms of being poison and bullet-proof, and his own life as a thug had made him more streetwise than the college kids who were assigned to keep him out of trouble. Thus, he more or less ignored the protective detail, weathering Dante’s wrath and Sasha’s glowering with a sunny oblivious smile. Everywhere he went he was supposed to have at least one of them with him, and there was always at least one assigned to the house itself, which was a far more cooperative client.

Dante was the only cat-hater who annoyed my existence, so I got along well enough with the boys, most of whom missed their own pets and “adopted” me. It took me a little while, but I soon learned that their outer souls, while far from fluent in Cat, understood such basic concepts as “pet me,” “feed me,” and “play with me.” I didn’t always get takers, the damned Playstation being heady competition, but I had to admit it was better than I’d gotten at Mrs. Roaman’s.

But I missed Fred, in a way–not, I assure you, the bullying and the pedigreed mockery. Just . . . having somebody to talk to. It wasn’t as if I would be seeing the Crucio any time soon. If ever. I began to ask myself if I wanted them to get another cat, seeing as I was going so well. However, the chances were too good that I’d wind up with somebody whose stupidity or meanness had been camouflaged by a fuzzy tail and a fetching purr. I decided that sufficient unto the day, etc., and did my best to enjoy being queen of a six-bedroom mansion, although I wasn’t allowed out into the garden–one of the cubs had almost melted under the Wrath of Sasha when that had happened for one glorious afternoon, most of which I frittered away in the fresh catnip bed they had laid out. (I don’t remember most of the afternoon, to be honest. Shameful, but worth it.)

The summer passed without any real event, and then the fall thing started to happen. There were many trees in the garden and on the street, and when the green canopy of Outdoors began to shift into paler and duller shades, it was downright eerie. I’d been prepped for this through TV, but not well enough. Most TV happens in California, after all, and the occasional gush spot on New England fall color left me cold—apparently humans see colors far more intensely than we do. But it was different when it was on top of you–and starting to fall down.

Why, oh why, didn’t they let me go Outdoors? I knew the reasons, because Pharaoh and I had a tiffy about it, in which I took advantage of his not-understanding and vented my frustration by yelling at him one afternoon, using pieces of vocabulary that were really disgraceful. Cars. Theft. Birds. (“But I am a predator! That’s what they’re for!” I didn’t give a damn about the statistics about how we could clean a neighborhood of songbirds–what we mostly had were sparrows, anyway.)

“And Boy Cats of Evil Intent. You’re not . . . old enough yet. Maybe. Hmm. All things considered, maybe it’s time that topic needs to be brought up with Sasha.” He tried to buy me off with a cat treat, but I stalked off in disgust. Boy Cats, indeed. As if they’d have a chance. We had a few in the neighborhood, and it was maddening to watch them saunter through what was MY yard. The house was air-conditioned, so the opportunities for hurling insults through the screens had been limited all summer, but I knew their names, and resented their sneers, both because I was a poor widdle indoor kitty–and because I lived with the alien freaks.

This unfortunately wasn’t improved one afternoon, when the AC had been switched off and the windows opened so that we could all enjoy a Cambridge thundershower, with an onslaught afterward of every good smell in the neighborhood, all fresh and clean. Except for Duke.

Duke was of old New England stock, as proud of his freakish paddle-paws with their seven toes as he was of the missing chunk of one of his scarred ears, and absolutely livid that my innocuous little Russian Blue crossbreed self had the nerve to sass him about crossing a yard which he had long considered part of his own territory.

He had a low, gloating voice, even for a cat, and had no problem coming up and taunting me through the open windows, going so far as to take a leisured and unburied crap in the rhododendrons outside Terry’s study. This drove me around the bend and I ran from window to window, screaming and cursing until I had to take breaks to pant.

One of Terry’s friends was visiting, and he took pity on me, finding Duke’s present the outside of enough himself. Meeze de Medici was the freakest of the freaks, in some ways–a tailsbreadth under seven feet tall and possessed of strawberry blond hair so long that it came down to his ankles when not braided up. He had won my approval by letting me use the braid as a toy, and all in all we had a fairly satisfactory cat/human friend relationship. But Meeze was both an engineer and a sorcerer, with a sotto voce purr to his outer soul that almost scared me with its power, and he believed in solving problems directly.

“No problemo, pusscat. I gotcha Evil Kitty spell right here. A bunch of them, in fact.” Meeze sauntered out to Duke and zorched his deposit right in front of him, shriveling it to nothingness in a puff of bad-smelling smoke. Duke’s eyes widened and he hunkered down for a second, poised between fight or flight. Fight won–Meeze may have been big, but those seven-clawed weapons of destruction were enough to daunt the most magnificent of souls. And indeed, Meeze reached into his hip pocket and put on his work gloves.

“Oh please. You’ll need a suit of mail to protect yourself against me,” snarled Duke, standing his ground. He poised, awaiting the scruff. From the study window, I whimpered and did a little dance of miserable anticipation. Joel, the cub on duty, didn’t seem to realize that our team was about to be scored against–literally, but was watching beside me with a relish I found inappropriate.

Meeze scruffed. With a scream of raging exultation, Duke tried to fling his weight around to break the hold or at least shred Meeze’s forearms with his back claws. But he twisted in vain. His body slammed against what appeared to be empty air, no matter how he whirled or sunfished. Being a mature tom with no fat, he didn’t have much of a scruff, and after a moment he was able to break Meeze’s hold–at least, he wrenched his neck out of Meeze’s hand. But this just left him hovering in midair, and he began screaming in terror. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

Meeze floated him out to the property line, keeping his hand in the general locale so that any humani observer would think he was seeing a masterful scruff job in the more ordinary sense. He dropped him on the other side of the hedge, and Duke dangercatted out at Mach Four. Meeze then brushed off the fur in the glove, hovering that too, and all of a sudden a network of fine-threaded fire spouted forth from them. It leapt up and bounced against an invisible barrier, hovering in the air about Meeze’s head.

“Damn,” the redhead said cheerfully. He came back inside.

“What happened?” asked Joel. “What was that last spell?”

“Plan was that whenever Mr. Kitty’s DNA touches our grounds, he’ll get a little zap through his feet. Sort of like an invisible fence. But our other defensive spells won’t let me piggyback onto them without Pharaoh’s password. Still, I’d say I put the fear o’ weird on him. Teach him to crap in our yard. No, Eureka’s yard!” He ruffled my neck, and I meowed in gratitude. It was the thought that counted.

Joel thought a bit. “Wouldn’t that spell possibly hurt him, though? What if he landed in the middle of our yard from a tree branch, and got zapped? But in every direction he ran, he still got zapped? And had a heart attack from fear or something? Isn’t that why you’re not supposed to whack sorcery around in the first place?”

Meeze sighed, and I did too. Whose side was this kid on? But Meeze said, “Yeah, that’s why ‘you’re not supposed to whack sorcery around in the first place’. But it’s a calculated risk. I’m betting it would take a helluva lot to stop that battleaxe’s heart. That’s why it’s a tailor-made spell. Still, if Pharaoh consents, I’ll put the overhanging trees in too. Just to suit you. Okay?” Joel nodded, and I sighed again.

Then I caught myself being a diva. I belonged to a pathologist with alien DNA, who lived with the Archimago of Nova Terra in a house which was protected by the District Sorcerer’s spells. And I was getting huffy because some yahoo made a litter pan out of a piece of ground I might never touch with my own paws.

Well, yes. Yes, I was. I sniffed. Lese majeste, indeed!

But time passed, and something inside of me changed. One early October morning, I awoke from the only safe spot on the boys’ bed (up above Sasha’s pillow) feeling the queerest sort of vibration, which I couldn’t quite place. I went down and used the pan, which felt a little different, as if something was swollen inside of me. Not painful, really, just . . . different. I poked and licked and padded afterwards, but whatever was amiss wasn’t going to be tweaked like an errant lock of fur. I told myself that I was being a hypochondriac, and went to the kitchen for a nibble.

It was 5:30, and the cubs were changing shifts. They had had pizza last night–hmm, maybe my internal unrest had to do with that large chunk of cheese and piece of sausage? Nah, it was a regular thing of habit by now. Ned Carlos, who was new to the team, was taking out the boxes through the back door, and (I knew this was naughty, but each cat for herself) I slipped out behind him into the wonder that was the Cambridge dawn.

I only had a few seconds before Ned came back from the trash and his outer soul spotted me far faster than a humani’s eyes would have in the shadows, so I made the most of it, having a roll in the catnip bed, unfrightened by the warning spells Pharaoh and Meeze had set up to ward away the neighborhood competition. I could only stand the shivers they were sending through me for so long, though, and I bounced up to the garden wall, surveying the deserted street outside and soaking in the sight of all those mysterious houses and cars, each a puzzle to be solved: Whose were they? What lives did they live?

And that’s when I heard the singing. Loud and proud, it was Duke! Of all people! An answering tingle in my belly told me that that was what had awoken me in the first place. Without thinking twice–well, without thinking once, I leapt over the wall and went in pursuit, a newmade fangirl in my fascination. I felt Ned’s consternation and didn’t care. I’d be back later. Yup, later.

After a couple of months, the rhythm of my new life sank in. Every Tuesday there was another council breakfast meeting, and by the very next one I was allowed to have lox–but not too much. Sasha growled like a junkyard dog at people being too generous. This was good parenting and good sense, although I failed to appreciate it. One Tuesday afternoon, after everybody had gone their way, the Lion cub who was on duty guarding the house let me have my fill of the leftovers. It all stayed down for only twenty minutes. This made both of us unhappy for a number of different reasons.

“Ok, Eureka, you don’t tell Sasha, I don’t tell Sasha,” Joel sighed as he plied the paper towels. I would have no intention of telling Sasha, because he would be insufferable at being proven right. But seeing as the only human I knew to tell lived on the other side of the planet, and that I couldn’t imagine raising such a subject in a casual chat, it was a moot point.

On the other weekdays except for Thursday, Terry went in to teach history at Harvard, which seemed to piss everybody off. They resented his insistence on keeping a day job despite being an archimago, but I sympathized. He hadn’t run for the office or anything–it didn’t work that way. Th’nashi in general didn’t have elections. Rather, people ganged up on you and appointed–or anointed–you for the important jobs. Terry had been a minor Famous Person, a video maker of all things, who had led a colorful life which included surviving being very rich, serious child abuse, and going to Sing Sing for three years on felony narcotics charges.

I’m not sure how that added up to making him the go-to guy for the most complicated piece of real estate the Th’nashi had, and I don’t think Terry was sure either. But he had Dante Fabrizio to tell him what to do, and that seemed to make it okay with everybody.

It was unfair, I thought. The Privy Councillor had even more day job than Terry did. He was an Episcopal priest with a counseling degree in psychology, who taught at the Harvard Divinity School and even took patients. But nobody fussed at him about it. He was just like that. Like almost all Lions of Mercy, he was a big man, 6’5” and clocking in at 240 or so, but he always managed to be immaculate if not splendorific in his attire, tailored jackets slicking over his massive shoulders like a second skin. Lions swore a vow of poverty (not to mention chastity and obedience) and got by on a piffling little stipend, so I don’t know how he did it, but somehow he was gorgeous. His Lion’s mane of long platinum blond and his copper eyes only topped the sundae. We hated each other on sight.

I’m not a destructive or even a vindictive person by nature, but something about those raw silk trousers started a vibration in my claw beds as soon as he stepped through the door. I swear I never went near them, but one meeting I sort of went ape on Pharaoh’s poor knitting bag, which was made of an alpaca so tight it was waterproof and well-nigh indestructible. I had to do something before I went on what Sasha and Terry called a dangercat, running amok through the house and howling at full force just for the fun of it. I knew that if I did, Dante’s pale eyebrows would raise and he would Say Something.

Even as it was, he started to Say Something to Pharaoh, but my friend just ignored him and plunged his reckless hands into my mayhem and wrestled with my midsection until I was a mass of kitty giggles. The frequency was too high and the volume too soft for human ears, but most Th’nashi could pick up my happiness with their outer souls. The room was on our side, Disrupted Meeting and Destructive Animal be damned. Eureka 1, Dante 0.

On the weekends and Thursday, Terry tried to lounge around the house and goof off, but all too often got dragged off to do archimago stuff somewhere else. I’m assuming this was usually a meeting because he was just famous enough that he’d be noticed if he were off opening a Th’nashi K-Mart or something. This pissed me off, because much of Terry’s goofing off time involved making a lap for a cat, or wielding his laser pointer in a useful way. But there was no help for it. I wished with all my heart that the archimagi got the Cruciate spells, so I could give him a pep talk regarding his stress levels. However, I had to settle instead for the usual: dancing with his ankles in the morning and when he came home, and finding something appealing-looking to do in full sight when he was doing the morose stare-into-space thing. It worked pretty well.

I regret to say that Sasha, on the other hand, was almost never home at all. The man was a workaholic. He was the FBI’s expert on serial and child murders in Boston, holding a concurrent post with the Medical Examiner’s office. Forensic pathology only makes good dinner conversation if you really like those TV shows. I did, but Terry didn’t, and by the time I came on the scene, he had beaten the impulse out of Sasha to share about work. And seeing as Sasha was monosyllabic around humans on his chatty days, this cut down his possible topics by a good amount. Why do couples do this to each other? I tried leaving the big TV downstairs set on Dr. Phil for days, but to no avail.

However, like a lot of introverts, Sasha would talk to me when nobody else was around. Unlike Pharaoh, who knew I could understand him, Sasha was only pretending I could, but that was good enough. Better than good enough; I daresay that despite my hanging on his every word he would have clammed up on me too if he had known the truth. Within a week I had bounced off “loyalty,” skipped “love” and was deep in “adoration,” so I was happy with the status quo.

Sasha was quite the mensch. Cats don’t judge the human physique, as a rule, unless we’re, well, catty, like Fred was. But I had noticed that when all the guys were down in the hot tub, one of their things was not like the other ones: It was missing entirely. Sasha being small of stature (like most Grails), I had figured that he was a bornwoman transsexual, which was interesting but not earthstopping. But the real story chilled my tail. Every once in a while Pharaoh would chat me up with mini dossiers on the crew, and I remember exactly where we were when he told me Sasha’s horrible story.

It was after an evening’s chill session in the tub. Sasha and Terry had been not-quite-squabbling, and I think Sash had had a bad day at work, pathologists being low on the list of on-the-job shits and grins. I had meatloafed myself out of splash range, to be social, and when my putative owner got out, his metaphorical tail was puffy enough that I debated with myself over going upstairs with him early, just out of good fellowship and all.

I decided not to, because the Lion who was Terry’s lawyer was visiting, and Eamon Davenant told good stories–funny ones about cases, touching ones about Ireland, you name it. But Pharaoh noticed my head follow Sasha upstairs, and, unable of course to ask me what was on my mind, his train of thought came up with some additional information for me. So after Dante sailed home and Eamon and Terry went up to the office for some last minute something or other, and the cubs (which was what they called the younger Lions) were about the nightly chores of running the washing machine and taking care of my box, Pharaoh bent close to me and murmured, “I noticed you watching Sasha tonight. Do you know why and how he’s been disfigured?”

I shook my head, nobody else being around, and poked him with a paw to indicate that he should go on, detecting big gossip in the offing. And I wasn’t wrong.

Sasha’s dad was a wealthy senator, and Sasha had been kidnapped by the family chauffeur when he was twelve. The senator refused to cooperate, and the madman heading the gang had taken a hunting knife and sent Sasha’s parts to the local newspaper.

“The poor little boy almost died of it–his urethra closed off and he got a massive kidney infection. Had one once myself, don’t you know. Most painful thing imaginable, believe you me. And on top of being maimed, and kidnapped! The FBI raided the cabin just in time–that’s why he joined the Bureau himself. I tell you, Eureka, I’ve known some tough men and some bad women, but of all the people I know, if you leave sorcery out of it, I’d want Sasha Van der Linden at my back in a dark alley.” I blinked. How to tell Pharaoh that on a small scale I knew what it was to be little and abandoned to die? I gave him a hasty bump with my head and shot off upstairs.

Sasha was already half asleep, but as always, his hands reached for me as I burrowed under the covers.

“Purring like thunder, kitcat. Did ya get lonely downstairs?” I purripped, and he laughed, drifting off with me warm under his chin. Right then and there I decided to grow up to be the sort of person Sasha himself would want at his back in a dark alley, even if it only meant via the content of my character. I felt very small, but then, in human standards, so was Sasha himself. Size really didn’t matter a hill o’ beans.

When I awoke, the Pharaoh was sitting next to me, curled up tailor-fashion, knitting.

“Ooh!” I said, and headed for the dancing string from sheer reflex. He gave a little mock scream and bounced the ball out onto the floor for me to fully enjoy. Long before I was done, however, he scooped me out of the yarn.

“I knew you needed a nap, poor sweetie, but the Crucio has about a shadow of a minute and has consented to have an audience with you. Boyhood friend, but don’t tell him I told you so,” he added. “Now this will feel a little odd–”

It did. Everything went all cold and tingly, but in a pleasant sort of way. I wondered if this would be what snow felt like. I could have sworn I heard the Song of Bast somewhere, and then it was over. I opened my eyes, only then realizing that I had burrowed myself in the Pharaoh’s sweater for all I was worth. My ears flushed as I retracted my claws. “Sorry,” I muttered, even though he couldn’t understand me. I hoped he wouldn’t notice the strand that I’d pulled fuzzy.

He sighed, and did some more sorcery that fixed it (so much for the not noticing) and rubbed my ears, radiating sincere affection. “We’re here, little lady.”

I gasped and went stiff. It was snow–lots and lots of it. On mountains. Was it a window? Or just the world’s biggest TV? I wriggled down to get a closer look. There wasn’t any snow on the ground–we were inside–but the black marble was so shiny I could see myself. I didn’t do myself any credit, but it didn’t seem like the time and place to wash. I continued to the window/TV, which took up one whole curving wall of the huge round room, and hopped up onto the seat. Window, I decided. But wow! Where in the Discovery Channel were we? Mountains for days! And the moon was full!

Then I jumped a foot and spat, dashing back to the Pharaoh and hiding behind him. There was a . . . ghost or something. A tall man in black, the biggest one I’d seen yet, was sitting on the window seat. I hadn’t noticed him because he had no outer soul at all. It wasn’t like when Mrs. Roaman died, because I could see him breathe. The Pharaoh wasn’t upset at all, though. He bent down and picked me back up.

“For the love of God, My Lord, drop the damned spells. You’ve frightened her out of her wee wits. It’s all right, Eureka. This is the Crucio. You can talk with him. I promise you he won’t hurt you.”

“And I’m not a supernatural being. Well, on most days.” The huge man got up and walked over to me. Up close, I put him at a shade shorter than Terry, but about three times his bulk. And none of it fat. He had pale gray eyes that crinkled when he smiled, and suddenly I wasn’t frightened, especially as he turned his outer soul on. (Even the Pharaoh relaxed just a tiny bit when he did so, boyhood pal or not.)

“Football?” I mewed. I had a bad habit of saying snarky things to humans which Fred had only encouraged. Most people have no idea what’s coming out of our mouths.

But, “Sheep,” he said. In Cat. Almost perfect Cat, albeit with a weird accent. The Pharaoh cracked up. He had to put me down while he pulled up a comfortable looking chair.

“I’m so sorry, My Lord. I’d just . . . ha ho . . . never heard you  . . .  *snort* . . . meow before.”

The Crucio ignored him. “I grew up on a farm hauling about huge sheep. Puts one in condition like nothing else. Nowadays, I mostly have to work out like anybody else, or I’ll go to seed. Runs in my family.” He put up a hand to one of his small human ears and flirted it around a little, to make “family” mean my-blood-line and not the-people-I-live-with. I was impressed.

“I didn’t mean to be rude. Well, I sort of did. I usually am. I’m sorry.” I wanted this guy to like me. Or at least not make me into kibble, which I somehow knew he could. “If you’ll pardon me, sir, how do you come to speak our language?”

“It comes with the anointing into the Cruciate. An old, old spell. Some ancient Crucio was a linguist who loved his cats, and part of the sorceries that have now been literally threaded into my skin–you can go now, Pharaoh,” he added in English, frowning.

My British friend was by now in tears, showing that he couldn’t understand a word, since nothing funny had been said. He nodded, making little moaning noises. He pulled a sky-colored robe out of nowhere and put it on, then headed for the door in the opposite wall, still sounding as if he were going to be sick on the rug.

“You’re just jealous!” the Crucio called after him.

“True, true.” He left, still snickering.

The Crucio sighed. “Pharaoh is a linguist himself. He speaks over a dozen human languages, and if he only could hear and reproduce the proper frequencies, would put me to shame. The fact that the Crucio or Crucia can talk to cats is a secret, but he wormed it out of an old Crucia when he suspected her of doing it. I’m sure he’s been just dying to see me at it.”

“Is he really Pharaoh of Egypt, or is it some sort of Th’nashi title like His Grace’s? And yours?” I asked, with all the manners I had.

The Crucio laughed. “Oh my, no. It’s the poor bastard’s given name. Although I shouldn’t poke fun, seeing what I got handed myself. But that’s one of the perqs of the office–you give up your name. I’m just ‘the Crucio’ or ‘My Lordship’ now, and that suits me. Besides, nobody dares laugh. Big creepy bald guy can turn them into peanut butter.” His eyes twinkled as he ran a hand over his shaved head.

“Anyway, I’ve got a meeting with the Archimago of Water in half an hour, so this must be fast. Put your listening ears on, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

It was quite the half hour, and if I weren’t really sitting there looking out at the nighttime of what I learned were the Himalayas, when minutes before I’d been in a Boston afternoon, I would only have believed half of it. But . . . Maybe you had to be there, but that window was the realest thing I’ve ever seen. Despite its thickness, it was like ice to my pads when I put my paws up against it. The room was jutting out on a spur in the very middle of the mountains–Everest over there, looking just like any of the rest of them, K2 over here looking a bit prettier from the angle we had of the moonlight. The Crucio had to stroke me with one massive finger to get my attention back, but he laughed and said that if the window hadn’t had that effect, it meant there was something wrong with me.

I asked a lot of stupid questions, and wasted five minutes doing the pee wiggle before he very nicely sent a servant for a litter pan for me. (It was black plastic, presumably to match the rest of the decor.) But the upshot of it all was this:

The Th’nashi were descended from aliens who dumped them off 5000 years ago presumably to fail at taking over the Earth. They interbred with the humans–excuse me, the humani–which is why they can’t be told apart at first or even second glance. But for cultural reasons, the alien scientists who did the genesmushing didn’t get rid of the blood thing: 90% of the Th’nashi can’t make their own blood without a goose from humani blood. Or that of one of the other 10%. They’re called Grails, and Sasha is one. Terry is a Fang. (Duh, even the Crucio admitted they weren’t verbally creative, but we all live on a planet called Dirt so what can you do?)

There aren’t all that many Th’nashi, but they have their own little bloodsucking culture, which they call Contract. They’re divvied up into Districts. “Water” is all the little islands in the Pacific. Great Britain, where the Crucio grew up with Pharaoh and the sheep is “Albion,” and my own Terry is the Archimago heading up “Nova Terra,” meaning the Northeastern Seaboard of the U.S. (Apparently the Privy Councillors aren’t the bosses after all, but from Dante’s tone of outer soul, I don’t think he got the memo.)

There are Th’nashi cops, called the Order of the Lions of Mercy. One of the things they do is patrol the great Hunts of the new and full moons, when the Th’nashi sneak about pouncing on humani. (Dai’yaht was the full moon one and was just over; that’s how Sasha happened to be on call that night and saved me: The moon was full, and the usual guy was a Lion and off working it. Go figure. Although I’d like to think he might have saved me too. I don’t like thinking about the alternatives where I don’t get saved.)

And then there were the sorcerers. I’d already seen Pharaoh do the basic stuff: get glasses, towel, and me from Point A to Point B; and the Crucio’s Cat accent (which he said was Tibetan from the locals) was still sharp enough to convince me.

The Lions and the sorcerers spent most of their energy keeping the humani from finding out about the Th’nashi, although the pouncing was helped along by them secreting special venoms that erased about ten minutes of the poor bastards’ memories and healed the wounds super-quick. (That was why Sasha’s neck smelled funny but didn’t have any holes.) And the fangs themselves hid up behind the normal teeth and were retractable. The Crucio very nicely bounced his in and out, even letting me peer up into his mouth to see where they fit.

All Th’nashi could communicate after a fashion using their more flexible outer souls, which they called their g’nah. Thus the handless petting which I was already getting used to. And that’s about it. We could have kept going, but the Crucio’s secretary poked his head in and made eyebrows twice. So he did this wicked cool spell and gave me a glowy dragonfly to follow all the way down the hallways to find Pharaoh, who met me halfway, following a dragonfly of his own.

I was a little disturbed inside by something the Crucio had said in passing, though. He’d told the secretary at the first set of eyebrow-making that talking to the cat of the most annoying archimago he had to supervise had political benefit. I wondered if he wanted me to spy on Terry, but figured that I had a good read on his outer soul, once he turned it on, and it mostly seemed that he was considering it a sort of break from work—the sigh when he conjured up my dragonfly was genuine. I think being Crucio is possibly not much fun. Poor guy. Maybe Pharaoh would let me visit again, although I’d hate it if he tried to Officially Debrief me or something.

And then we were back in Terry’s office. Pharaoh put me back on the windowseat and went off to work (he’s the District Sorcerer, which I gather is some kind of important) and I passed out cold. You would too, if you’d been to the Himalayas and back in an hour.

Eureka Amid the Th’whatsies

The blood part didn’t last long, and then they both curled up and went to sleep. Once they were solidly out, I crept up Terry’s long body and crouched on his pillow. I held my breath and patted his upper lip with a velveted paw, tickling both of us by the friction of his mustache stubble against my pad. Obedient to the reflex, he shot up a hand which I’d swear was faster than a living normal person’s, and rubbed it, leaving his lips parted. Good. I wanted to inspect.

Disappointing: No fangs, just short little human-style teeth. How had he done it? I sniffed Sasha’s neck as thoroughly as I could, but there was no trace of the wound, although I could smell some mixture of secretions that didn’t belong in human spit either. What the hell? I resolved to watch them like a mousehole until I figured it out. And then what? Call Dr. Van Helsing? I had no answer for that. They didn’t seem to be hurting anybody, and I was already feeling something uncomfortable about Sasha that I knew was probably called loyalty, if I looked myself in the eye. But I was curious, just the same.

Terry got up in the morning and got dressed in a lovely tailored suit that matched my smoke-blue fur to perfection. I know, because he laid the trousers down on the bed while hunting around for his cufflinks and I couldn’t resist lying on their smoothness. Just for a moment, and then he yelped at me. This woke Sasha up. He had the artistic eye to see the similarity and told Terry it wouldn’t show, and this would teach him not to be a slob with his clothes.

“I wouldn’t have ever picked you for a cat spoiler, Sash. I thought all they carried out in Montana were barn cats, extra large, not tiny gray fuzzballs.” Terry wasn’t mad, just enjoying picking on Sasha, which after last night’s donation seemed a little unfair.

Sasha pulled the bedclothes over his head and mumbled, “It’s called blue, not gray. Russian Blue, and I’m betting Missy’s damn near purebred. So go get some masking tape to de-class your damn pants and send one of the kids for a proper clothes brush later on.” He pulled Terry’s pillow over his head too and was back asleep at once. I had no idea how purebred I was or wasn’t, but Sasha didn’t seem to mean anything racist by it, unlike certain Maine Coons I knew, so I decided to be complimented.

“De-class my pants, indeed!” Terry muttered. He got dressed and I followed him out, needing to use my pan. His long legs outstripped me in a second, but I heard him tell the young men in the room about the clothes brush. These were a different set; I guessed they all really were bodyguards, and since they hadn’t been following Sasha, they were probably Terry’s. I remembered the “His Grace” bit, and that many vampires were European nobility. In fact, it made sense for vampires to have bodyguards in this cross-and-garlic savvy media age. I just hoped cat blood wasn’t on the menu.

Down in the basement there was another vampire-Nazi taking a bath in the big tub. He was Asian looking, except that he had pale cat-colored eyes of one of the colors the humans called green. He startled when he saw me.

“Hello! Where did you come from? Never mind, I’ll ask one of the humans. So sorry,” he called after me when he realized where I was heading. He had an upper-class British accent. Cosmopolitan bunch, this. I finished my business and came out as he was rinsing his hair under a showerhead at one end of the tub, leaning over a filtered drain which was neatly keeping his long dark hair from making a mess in the rest of the soaking water. Fancy-schmancy again, but tongue and paws were just fine for me. The thought made me thirsty, and I headed up the stairs to the kitchen.

But the damn treads were just a little too steep still, although this time I got halfway up. I sat there, wondering if the Brit would possibly give me a lift when he toweled off. I was shaking a little from the exertion–still not 100%, although I was feeling worlds better today.

He got out of the tub and I blinked, as he picked his glasses out of midair and put them on. Definitely not 100%, Squeak–Eureka, I said to myself. But then a small towel floated over to him from the bench and he put it around his hair. Oh come now. Vampires, okay. But this? There had to be a literal string attached, and I meant to find it. I hopped downstairs–okay, that was the plan. But what happened was that my traitorous limbs folded mid-hop and I flipped head over heels down two of the steps.

“Oh, kitty, kitty, kitty!” the man exclaimed, leaping out of the tub, and in a moment was by my side, wet as he was, which I didn’t appreciate. I pulled away as best I could, which was rude, but I was now thirsty, bewildered, and a little bruised.

“Sorry!” He did something with his outer soul and all of a sudden we both were dry. What kind of witchcraft was this? I crouched still as stone, waiting to be turned into something useful yet attractive.

“Sorcery,” he explained. “I take it you’ve never seen it before. It’s something some of us Th’nashi can do with our g’nah–oh dear, what is it a–oh yes, what you cats call our outer souls.”

I just stared at him. “You speak Cat?”

He grinned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Cat. However, I know you understand what I’m saying–well, you are just a bit of a thing, and I don’t know who’s raised you–hello!” This was to Terry, who had opened the door at the top of the stairs.

“Pharaoh, why are you sitting bareass naked on the stairs talking to the cat?” He answered himself. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. But the meeting is starting in like five minutes. Everybody else except Dante is here.” He closed the door. I got the impression that he didn’t think much of Pharaoh.

“We don’t get on well. A lot of humans think sorcerers are creepy, even the Th’nashi themselves. And I must admit I’m a tad eccentric.” He went back downstairs and got dressed from a neat pile of clothes folded on a bench. “I’ll get the human side of your advent from the people upstairs, and then I’ll see if I can pull a string or two and get somebody to explain things to you properly. Would you like a boost up the stairs?” He came up to me, brushing back his long hair into a ponytail which he of course elasticked out of midair, and I sat up and put my paws on his jeans. He chuckled and picked me up, so delighted at such a brief communication that I purred for him. Eccentric or not, I liked the Pharaoh. Pharaohs, Graces, where does it end?

The Pharaoh carried me up to the mercy of my breakfast and continued on into the dining room, where a dozen people had gathered for bagels and whatnot. I gulped down some water and followed him, because it smelled promising.

“No lox,” ordered Sasha out of nowhere, stopping a friendly lady in her tracks. “She’s still got another day of taking it easy, and it won’t do anybody any good in a lump on the rug.”

“Where did she come from?” asked the Pharaoh in an artless tone. Terry did a sort of kick-under-the-table thing with his outer soul. No, his . . . G’something. I hoped the explainer was good at it.

“Abandoned,” Sasha straight-face lied. I could tell the Brit had caught the lie, and that Sasha knew it and didn’t care, except that now the Pharaoh was curious and I thought Sasha rather hated that. But the green Asian eyes crinkled in polite assent and they all sat down and had a very confusing meeting, all about politics and Houses and humani. I did finally work out that they were the Th’nashi and called ordinary people “humani,” which I thought rather twee, just so everybody could be called human. After that, I fell asleep in a patch of sunshine on the rug, which was a bad plan, as somebody stepped on my tail when he got up to use the restroom.

“Watch it!” I yowled, and ran off to hide under the living-room couch. This didn’t work, because it was too close to the floor, and the humans all laughed themselves silly, crowding into the archway between the two rooms to enjoy my scrambling backside as my tail vibrated like a berserk metronome in a vain attempt to get traction.

The couch lifted before I could sprain something, and the Pharaoh picked me up. He murmured, “I’m taking the liberty of putting you in His Grace’s office. Plenty of corners there. Windowseat in full sun right now.” I just clung to his hand with my paws, too humiliated to purr or even give him a human-style nod of assent. Sasha followed us in with my dishes and gave the hapless bodyguards an order to set me up another auxiliary pan in the small powder room in the office. Terry watched this from the door, trying to look sour, but still recovering from my unfortunate exhibition.

“Now that the new family member is taken care of, perhaps we can get back to the meeting?” The speaker was a huge man named Dante Fabrizio, who was something called the Privy Councillor, which apparently meant he was Terry’s boss. So everybody left me alone. I curled up on the windowseat in the promised patch of sun and had a quiet attack of hysterics from all the stress. Then I had a bath, finally getting the last invisible flecks of Mrs. Roaman’s dissolution out of my fur. At least the bodyguards would be likely to clear away any corpses and keep the kibble coming, so I guessed life with the Th’nashi might be bearable after all. On that thought, I drifted off, the pleasant smell of the dusty lace curtain all around me like a mother’s purr.

I awoke to a smell so familiar that it was disorienting. Once again, it was me and Mr. Roaman’s bowling ball. Or at least the bag; after a moment of panic I realized we weren’t in the closet and I was inside of the bag. What if he’s taking me to be drowned? came the wild thought. Back at the pound another pair of kittens had told me a horror story that still haunted my dreams–they had been fished out of the Charles by a Tufts coxswain one early morning, but it had been too late for the other three in their litter. I shuddered, and found myself reaching out to Sasha’s weird outer soul. It rippled like a live thing and I felt it stroke my fur with a crackle of reassurance. I yipped in surprise.

The man laughed. “It’s okay, Eureka. Mind if I call you Eureka? It means ‘I found it.’” It had a better ring than “Squeaker,” so I guessed I was okay with it, meaning I’d deign to answer when he called me. It was only fair. I purred. It felt right to purr again, with my tummy no longer hurting and that crazy outer soul doing the handless petting thing. What was up with that, anyway? I batted at it, feeling a tingle in my paws. It withdrew, and Sasha laughed again.

“You’re a Th’nashi cat now, Eureka. Get used to it.” A Th-whatsy? My vocabulary was pretty good, but this was a new one. He had a sort of Western accent–maybe they were a Native American tribe? No, the Navajo woman who cleaned for Mrs. Roaman a couple of times was an ordinary human. I shrugged it off for now.

I poked my nose into the crack left by the zipper pull. The bag was so old that it had plenty of air holes, which was probably why Sasha had picked it, but none big enough to see out of, and I wanted to get a good solid smell of where we were. But the remnants of Mr. Roaman’s hair gel were stifling. I pawed at the zipper.

“Nothin’ doin’, pardner,” he drawled. “All I need is a kitten underneath the brake pedal. Cool your jets. We’ll be home in about five minutes.” Ah. Car. Fair enough. I overlooked the imputation that I’d be stupid enough to interfere with its operation, because I knew that there were cats out there whose moronity transfixed the entire human population, their faces of shame immortalized forever on the computer. Not me. But as Fred used to say, if there’s a Rule #1, it’s “Never let on that you’re fluent in English,” so I pawed and mewed enough to make it look good. I noted that Sasha’s understandable exasperation at my accompaniment was tempered by a great deal of good-natured amusement. Good sign, that. I left off after a bit and went back to sleep. Five minutes is a long time when you’re recovering from starvation.

I was awakened by the sharp and delectable smells of Outside–lots of plants, including some minty cousin of catnip, and I believe a squirrel. But all too soon, we were indoors again. My bag was deposited on something firm yet very soft, and Sasha went back Outside for a moment, returning with a familiar smell that I’d tuned out before–he’d nabbed my litter pan from Mrs. Roaman’s. Then we were off again, his footsteps muffled on what I had now figured out was a rug that was far softer and denser than the wall-to-wall I was used to. Fancy schmancy, as Mrs. Roaman would have said.

We crossed through a couple of different sets of foreign smells, including what I’d swear was a kitchen, but I wasn’t sure because if so, it was a lot cleaner than Mrs. Roaman’s; although there were mice, and I began to feel at home. But as we descended a set of stairs, a new overwhelming odor hit me and I felt a little panicky: There was a lot of water down there, scented in an odd way. What the hell? Did this guy have the world’s biggest bathtub in his basement?

Well, yes. Yes, he did. He uncorked me on a soft-sanded wooden bench, and there it was. Huge. A two-paw worth of humans–or Th’whatsies–could fit in the thing. It was bubbling. I just sat and stared bug-eyed. Surely he didn’t even begin to imagine that I . . .

But no. He laughed. “Calm down, Eureka. Unless I find fleas, you’re on your own in the bathing department. Here’s your pan,” he called over his shoulder, and tapped me with his outer soul so beguilingly that I followed him without thinking about it.  He set it up by some big white machines that smelled like clean clothes and I hopped in at once and christened it for luck. I could tell this pleased him.

“I’ll put your food and water upstairs,” he said, half to himself, “but you won’t need any more for a few hours. And then–hello! Your other daddy’s home. Hope he ain’t got an aversion to cats. I don’t think so. Don’t think it’s come up. Oh well. My house!”

We went upstairs, Sasha pausing to let me try the stairs on my own. I got pooped out after three. “Isn’t it time for more Prairie Picnic?” I mewed. I had to get my strength back before the local mouse pack found out what a wussy I was. But instead he picked me up in those warm gentle hands and held me eye to eye for a second. He had fair hair and eyes that were the color of sun on leaves, very like Fred’s. I patted his clean-shaven face and he smiled. He had a crease in his forehead and a few slight wrinkles around his eyes, which I knew from TV meant he’d been in the sun, but no wrinkles around the smile, meaning it was still brand-new out of the box and not much used.

He carried me up to where another not-quite-human man was unpacking his briefcase on a big dining table. Even with him sitting down, I could tell that this new man was very tall. He had dark hair flecked with silver and strange pale eyes, and his face had little wrinkles at all the places which meant he used the whole thing a lot all the time, like an actor’s. He spied me in Sasha’s arms and grinned, his outer soul lighting up the room. I felt smug. No cat aversion to speak of.

“What the hell do we have here?” He stood up and held out a hand. He was very thin, but it looked like it was normal for him. Other-Daddy was even a bit taller than Phil the exterminator, who had told Mrs. Roaman and the neighbor lady that he was 6’6”. Sasha only came up to his armpits, but it didn’t seem to faze him. I could tell by measuring their outer souls that both these men were as dangerous as toms in a back alley, but I would wager a two-paw of catnip that Sasha’s ears wouldn’t be nicked worst.

“Terry, this is Eureka. Her former household has been disrupted by what appears to be a natural death. Little old lady, no surviving anything, and the other cat had an unfortunate snack, although he might have yacked it back on the rug by now, Mrs. Roaman having left the firm about a week ago. Not Eureka, though, I hasten to reassure.” Terry’s hand had hesitated for a moment on hearing about Fred’s deplorable misbehavior, but continued on to me and started stroking my fur. I meeped what I knew was my very cutest and patted at his finger, figuring I should hasten to reassure as well.

Sasha transferred me to Terry with a sharpened caution. I could tell he was prepared for the big man to drop me or do something stupid, but he needn’t have worried. Terry’s huge hands almost covered me, and I felt safe and sleepy from the overkill of the protective buzz of his outer soul–a table turned on the usual cat-human cuddle. Maybe the Th’whatsies had cat DNA.

Sasha continued. “She’s missing, presumed starved, and I had a startling lapse of professionalism and decided to cut some corners around the MSPCA. Did you know kittens this age cost over $200?” From the furnishings of the house, I wouldn’t have thought that that was a deal, but I could tell that it was to Sasha. I felt a small qualm. I hoped I could handle the mice, to justify my expense.

Terry sat down, putting me on the table, then scooping me up with haste at Sasha’s scowl. He decided instead to take me into the living room, and we all sat on the couch. Another couple of the weird new humans were in a room nearby, but I was too tired to investigate. Besides, I could somehow tell that they didn’t matter to Sasha, not the way Terry did.

Terry laughed. He had a nice voice, with an accent that was neither Mrs. Roaman’s Boston brogue or Sasha’s cowboy twang. Classy part of New York, I guessed. He could have been on TV. “You stole a cat from a possible crime scene? Alexei Van der Linden, I’m shocked at you. No, seriously, Sasha,” he added, “I’m shocked. What possessed you? What if you get caught?”

Sasha drew himself up and his outer soul dropped about a thousand degrees. “I’ll eat my hat if Mrs. Roaman died by foul play. No crime scene. I wanted a cat. You know as well as I do that humani-raised cats, like the average shelter kitty, don’t adapt well to Th’nashi homes. That meant a kitten. One discarded kitten.” He pointed at me. “One happy kitten owner.” He pointed at himself. “Who happens to be the boss. I don’t get caught, I do the catching. It was just weird luck that Araimfres got pulled by the Order onto Dai’yaht duty tonight and I got this call.” He frowned. I could hear the whirr of some small device on his person. “In fact, here comes another one.”

He rose from the couch, rumpling my ears until I shook them out. “Make friends. Tell the bodyguard that she’s an indoor kitty. Her box is in the basement. In fact, make yourself useful and give her some water in the kitchen. No food,” he finished sternly. “I’ll give her a little more when I get home. She has to take it easy for a day.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Terry grinned. He seemed to know what all this Armfruh-Die-ott-Order jazz was all about. Me, I was mystified. I curled up in a corner of the huge leather couch and went to sleep.

It was early morning when Sasha returned. I remembered what he had said about the possibility of filling my once-more-rumbling stomach, and ran to meet him. He laughed, although it sounded weak. I could tell that he was very tired. He was covered in an antiseptic smell and his short fair hair was damp.

“Hey there, kitcat. Have a spoonful.” He served me out some more Prairie Picnic and sat cross-legged on the floor while I ate it. I noticed he was now wearing doctor’s scrubs instead of street clothes. The ties dangling from his waist had possibilities, I noted to myself, but I was still not quite up to playing yet.

He carried me upstairs with him, to the interest of a young man with long hair, who had poked his head out of a small room in the hall where I could hear a video game and another person cursing.

“His Grace has a cat now?”

“No. I have a cat now. His Grace just lives with us,” said Sasha in a stony tone. Quelled, the boy vanished back to his friend.

We entered a large bedroom that smelled of strange toiletries but no human decomposition, and I relaxed against Sasha’s shoulder. Terry was already sprawled across most of the king-sized bed in the room, snoring in a soft baritone. Sasha put me down on the foot of the bed and stripped off his clothes, pushing Terry to one side and climbing into bed with a sigh. Terry half-woke up and snuggled him close.

Fred had been with Mrs. Roaman since her husband was alive, and had told me rather lurid stories that I thought prepared me for what was going to happen. But instead of any mating activity, after a sleepy affectionate kiss, Terry bit Sasha hard on the neck and started drinking his blood. Just like in the movies! I would have bet my eyes couldn’t get any wider, and my heart pounded until I was dizzy. They weren’t human! Oh Bast!

(This is my 2013 NaNoWriMo being reposted. Explanation over in blog Real Soon Now.)

This bit of fluff is dedicated to Ripley and Zoë, who manage my household very well.

I shook my paws. I don’t tend to be all that fussy about getting wet, especially when it’s only damp; it was psychological and I knew it. Frederick assured me that the water in the toilet was perfectly fine. He even flushed it a couple of times, which was one of his secret party tricks–poor Mrs. Roaman didn’t realize he could do it and had told the lady next door that she thought she had a ghost.

“Ghost,” sneered Frederick from the doorway, as if reading my mind. He was licking his chops. I wrinkled my nose, although my tummy rumbled.

“What did you find to eat?” I asked. It smelled like an old mouse. Yuck, but by now I hoped he’d cut me a break and share. The hopper of the food dish had been empty for two days, and I had dug out every last bit of stray kibble I could find under the counters. Frederick was too big to fit, and I had to scoot him out over half of it after he’d cuffed me one and called me a little pig.

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he took an extra-long drink and then burped. “Ate too fast. Hope the ghost isn’t offended.”

“Ate what?” I yelped. “Please, Fred. I feel funny. Dizzy. I’m so hungry.” I hated myself for sounding pathetic.

He sighed and flopped over on his side on the bathmat. “Plenty left, Squeaker. Go right on in. Let me know if she’s ripe enough for those tiny teeth of yours. I might be able to open her up for ya.” He grinned, his tartar-coated fangs as long as half my paw. He flirted a lazy tail in the direction of the bedroom. I didn’t want to go in there, because Mrs. Roaman was giving me the creeps. But my stomach was starting to cramp, so in I went.

Mrs. Roaman was still in bed, which was unsurprising. Much as I had hated being grabbed up and the air half choked out of me with her affection, I would have given anything to have her do it just one more time, particularly since at least half the time it also meant she would go to the treat packet and come up with a delectable tidbit of Tuna Triumph. (I had nicked my tongue on the clean-licked foil of the empty packet this morning. It was still sore.)

The smell in the room was a creature in and of itself: thick, oily, and beginning to be nauseating. I was impressed that Fred had been able to mouse at all; I sure as hell couldn’t find the thing. I pawed at my nose and sneezed, eyes watering. I looked under the bed: nothing except dust bunnies and the new pair of Mrs. Roaman’s underwear Fred had taken under there to chew holes in. I drew a blank under the rest of the furniture too. “Damn it, Fred,” I muttered.

I couldn’t stand it any more. I knew it was the same stupid psychological urge that had me shake my paws from the microscopic remnants of Mrs. Roaman’s last dozen meals, but I had to scratch. I leaped up onto the bed and began to paw at the grease-sodden sheets as one possessed, although the smell would have made me vomit if I’d had anything to come up. I tried not to look at what had been Mrs. Roaman’s amiably wrinkled face, now swollen smooth, eyes sunken, tongue-tip poking out like an incongruous bit of forgotten beef.

I did a double-take. The tongue was no longer showing. I froze, waiting I think for the heap in the bed to move–to blink, to turn over. To grab me and smother me with the smell. Which I would now have to lick off my paws. Smooth move, Squeaker. But nothing happened, and then I noticed that Mrs. Roaman’s lips were . . . gone. I took in the unmistakeable furrows left by those long, dangerous fangs and every strand of my fur went on end.

Then I was off the bed and out of the room like a shot. I ended up in the back of the hall closet, wedging myself in the corner behind Mr. Roaman’s long-abandoned bowling ball, immovable in its flaking leatherette case. It didn’t take a genius to think it through: Mrs. Roaman probably wasn’t as yummy as I was. I had been born in February of 2004 and was only three months old and small for my age; Frederick weighed 18 pounds (or had a week ago); and I cowered in my hole feeling like snack food.

“You don’t eat people,” I moaned. “Not human people, not cat people. Oh please Bast, not cat people.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Fred hissed. He was outside of the closet. No way could he get at me, and we both knew it. “Do you want to die too? You will, you know. Before I will. You’re skin and bone already. Safe enough from me, little queencat. Not worth the pounce. Better get in there and check your scruples at the door. She may not smell too good, but she’ll keep us going for a while.”

I covered my ears with my paws and tried to envision it but I just couldn’t. Some fearless predator I was. I was a failure as a cat. Hell, in my inability to hang on to this one of my putative nine lives, I was a failure as a being. The pain in my stomach was overwhelming, but my imagination kept me trapped behind the bowling ball. I sniveled myself to sleep. It was a dizzy thing punctuated by nightmares of the bloated mess that had once been a querulous old lady still stumping through the house and calling, “‘eeker? ‘ere’ eeker?” Its articulation was hampered by the mess Fred had made of its mouth. I shuddered and put out my claws, but it was coming closer and closer–

I was awakened by the sound of human feet trampling about and human voices. It took a moment for the reality to sink in. Then I heard Fred screaming, “Squeaker! Squeaker! We’re saved! It’s all right!” The unmistakable joy I heard in his voice surprised and touched me. I wouldn’t have thought the old bastard had it in him. Then the humans were exclaiming and talking about the big kitty and, oh heaven, opening a tin of food.

“Looks like you had to fend for yourself, big fella. Can’t blame ya, though. It happens.” I could feel Fred purr through the floorboards as he scarfed down the Prairie Picnic.

I tried to scramble out of my hideyhole, but my paws wouldn’t obey me. Nooooo . . . I growled to myself, or started to. All that came out was a squeak even more pitiful than my usual toy-mouse mew.

“Fred?” There was no answer. I scrabbled with my hind legs, trying to get up. No use. The effort left me dizzy, light and dark splotches pounding in my eyes. I lay there, panting, listening and smelling as something metal on wheels came and took away what was left of Mrs. Roaman and some fascinating-smelling people came and took Fred to the pound. I’d come from there; Fred frequently mocked me for it. I hoped he appreciated the irony.

“Maine Coon. He’s a beautiful cat. Keep his recent diet a deep dark secret and he’ll be adopted out in a jiffy,” said a woman. She was standing right outside the closet and I squeaked with everything I had. But there was no helping it. Her thick human ears couldn’t hear me. Hell, I could barely hear myself.

“Where’s the second one? The kitten?” This new man was different. I couldn’t make sense of it to myself, but it was as if he were an entirely different type of human. Smell, the sound of his voice, even the vibrations of his outer soul made him stand out from the rest.

“What makes you think there’s a kitten, Sasha?” asked the woman with interest. In response I smelled and heard him rattle the empty bag of kitten chow I had shredded to bits days earlier.

“Not rocket science. Ask about the kitten in the neighbor canvass.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Her footsteps faded toward the door; his, toward the bedroom. I slumped in hope, if there could be such a thing. At least they knew I existed.

Through the blood rushing in my ears, I heard somebody tell Sasha that I hadn’t had any of Mrs. Roaman: none of the teeth marks could have been mine.

“Poor little tyke,” Sasha said, and I felt all their outer souls go all sad. I appreciated the thought. I felt all sad too. Every so often I’d squeak, or try to, but not a lot came out. After about an hour, they all left. Period. Lights out. I felt them leave, and I curled up in the musty dark and waited to leave too. Sucked to be me.

But after some time I couldn’t measure, I heard the key in the lock and sensed that Sasha had come back alone. I wondered if he were going to steal something, the way the neighbor lady sometimes did when she had picked up some groceries for Mrs. Roaman. I could hear him going through the house, his strange outer soul poking into corners. Looking for something. Looking for . . .

His outer soul then yipped without sound and the closet door yanked open, the light from the hall brighter than it had ever been before. Mr. Roaman’s bowling bag disappeared and the warmest hands I had ever felt were picking me up. Small hands for a man, I thought. Small man. Big outer soul.

“Eureka!” he whispered to me. He draped me over his shoulder and the next thing I knew, one of his fingers was poking a tantalizingly tiny morsel of Prairie Picnic into my mouth. He wrapped me in a dishtowel and sat down on the couch with me in his lap, doling out licks of Prairie Picnic and rubbing my belly. I was embarrassed by the wisdom of the dishtowel when my vacationing gut roared up without warning, but this human seemed immune to smells and he just tidied me up. I almost expected him to lick me with his smooth, flat tongue; he was that cattish about it all.

“Eureka,” said Sasha again, and this time I fell really asleep.