Pushing off the bathroom sink with a huff of disgust, I began to pad around the house in a directionless manner. Every corner and cranny seemed to collect a bewildering variety of scents. I couldn't place most of them precisely, but by flehmming, opening my mouth to breathe them in through both my nose and mouth, I pulled the scents deeper into my brain. As a human, scents were a bit of a binary experience for me; I'd get one strong dominant scent. Now scents were different, layered and nuanced. I could mentally sift through them. By the door to the bathroom, Rudy's scent lay on the top of the pile. I followed it into a bathroom, a smaller half bath than the one where I had attempted to inspect the spell on my face.
The scent of fresh grass filtered in once I got the door open, and a stream of warm summer air tickled my whiskers. Positioned above the ancient clawed tub, a small divided window stood, just four panes of smoked glass. The morning sunlight streamed through a two-inch wide crack, beyond it a squirrel-sized hole in the screen.
I stared into that hole, noting how the day's breeze made a few hairs snagged on the wire blow back and forth in the sunlight. My thoughts drifted out, back into the world. How had this happened to me? My mind probed into the last day, looking for things I had overlooked. It all went back to the old man, who had to be another magus. O'Meara had said that a magus named Archibald had been murdered. What had the baristas called the old man? Archie? Archie the Archmagus, poor guy. And that horrible car accident—surely nothing about it had been accidental. The car had accelerated into the man. In that moment the entire scene flooded back to me. The spin of his body through the air tumbling towards me. His body striking my shoulder as I turned on inhuman ankles. The scent of his blood in my nose, and a metallic taste on my tongue from licking his cheek. His bony fingers seized a fistful of furry skin on my neck as he stared up at me, grinning a mad grin of triumph. "Got something in the cupboard for ya," he’d said.
Shaking myself, I blinked at the hole in the screen—that hadn't been how it had happened! Two parallel memories ran along side of each other. I remember the woman who had come out of the coffee shop behind me, and the terror in her face after I growled at her. Had I changed the moment the old man had gotten hit? How had I gotten back in my house?
Everyone since then had told me what would happen to me next. Maybe they were right. Perhaps I couldn't stop someone from just shipping me off to the TAU. But perhaps I could go see what the old man had for me in his cupboard before getting boxed up and shipped to Abu Dhabi.
Sitting back on my haunches, I studied the window and the sun's glare around it. It took a few moments to realize that the glare had nothing to do with the sun. Instead the entire window had a very subtle glow, a fraction of an inch beyond the physical window. I thought of the way the runes around the windows glowed as we drove in. This was the same shade. A ward? When I squinted I could almost make out tiny letters floating within the glow like motes of dust drifting in and out of a sunbeam. Well, I figured the squirrel had gotten out, and I did not detect the scent of charred fur. Was it just an alarm, then? Or perhaps one-way? Bracing for the shriek of an alarm, I pawed the window all the way open. It looked far too small to fit me and my 200 pound largeness. However, during my unemployment I had happened to watch many a video featuring cats squeezing through tiny holes. Surely cougars were merely overgrown house cats, right?
As it so happens, cougars are not house cats. Our heads are much smaller proportionally, so merely being able to stick my head through a hole is not indicative that I will fit. Fortunately the window was much wider than my head, so I only got stuck a little bit. I got my head and my front legs through and then had to twist myself sideways, my chest far too deep for the height of the window. With a little wiggling I managed to ratchet my rib cage through. Once the ribs were through, gravity took over a bit suddenly and I hit the ground with a pitiful mew of surprise and pain blossoming around my hips where the window had decided to keep a few tufts of fur for itself.
"Kitty!"
I turned towards the shout of delight as my paws levered me off the perfectly groomed lawn. An adorable child pointed a pudgy finger at me, her dark eyes bright with wonder as she rode on her mother's back in one of those child backpack things. The mother, however, did not share her child's love of large felines. Her dark skin went ashen as her eyes blinked once before going wide with terror. She thought fast though, throwing her hands in the air and waving them around.
I watched her do this dance for a moment. The child giggled as her mom bounced beneath her. I knew what she wanted me to do, but she was standing in the middle of Sabrina's driveway, my escape route. I could try to leap over the white picket fence, but the white pickets had tips that glinted with gold in my vision. The window hadn't fried me, but I didn't want to take another risk.
Waiting a moment changed nothing other than the frequency of the woman's flapping. Had her arms been wings she'd be in danger of getting hit by a jetliner. I glanced back up at the window I had jumped through, it now occurring to me that waiting until dark might have been prudent. Too late now. I charged over the grass. As I brushed past the woman, she let out a shrill scream that might have shattered glass. I did not stop to check and concentrated on bounding across the street. As I dashed over a neighbor's fence, my mind divorced from my body. The bounding motions of my legs triggered that same creepy sense of pure wrongness that I had first experienced waking up. I nearly screamed in terror as I leapt up onto the roof with barely an effort. Parts of my mind hollered at my body, "I can't move that fast! I can't jump that!" as I ran over the roof and launched over the yard, and crashed into a huge stand of holly in the next lot.
Only then did I realize the woman had stopped screaming or at least was far enough away that the pounding of my own heart drowned her out. My tail twitched with the adrenaline flowing through me as images of trigger-happy police flooded my vision with shiny badges and jet-black shotguns. If Sabrina hadn't known of my escape the moment I jumped through the window, she knew it now. I had to keep moving. My place was about five miles away.
I kept to the backyards and woodlots the best I could as I bushwhacked my way home. The neighborhood seemed asleep. Most of the houses were dark and empty, and the remainder echoed with the sounds of small children. I stayed away from those. In about two hours the streets would be roamed by school busses and feral children would fill the yards. Now it appeared those parents who were home were enjoying the stillness of the early afternoon. I imagined how much harder it would have been to slip through the neighborhood twenty or thirty years ago, before the dual-income lifestyle became a way of life. The town was a commuter burb of the city, and most of the folk worked. I could just hear the sounds of cars start rolling home as I slipped into my backyard from the woodlot behind the small bungalow that Angelica and I called home.
My thoughts had been returning to Angelica the entire way home. I kept imagining what it would feel like to have her arms around my neck. I stared at the darkened windows of my home with disappointment. Angelica had not come home in the last few hours, nor would she for another four days.
I admit, the human me may have been a bit of a doormat for Angelica. Yet I wanted to at least see her one last time before I got whisked away to the magical pound and put up for adoption, and try to say good-bye no matter how poorly that would go. I’d often thought of getting a cat recently, but any time I broached that subject she'd make cracks about the various ways the cat would accidentally wind up in her cook pot. I always laughed it off as a joke, but she had licked her lips awfully convincingly.
The old man’s place was probably the last place I wanted to be if I wished to avoid Sabrina and other wizard kind for a few days. But if the old man had actually left something useful for me, then it might pay off. That said, maybe the old man just wanted to feed the big kitty a nice can of tuna with his dying breath.
If so, I declared I would hate all wizards forever.
I
had never popped over to the old man's house to borrow a cup of sugar for a reason. The eight-foot stone wall topped with iron spikes that separated his lot from mine communicated his stance towards visitors perfectly well. The tips of the spikes shone in such a way that Dirty Harry quotes reeled into my mind. I recalled that cougars had been known to jump ten to twenty feet high.
I should be able to clear it no problem, right?
I hunched down and prepared myself to jump, but videos of cats falling on their faces kept materializing in my brain as I gathered myself, including a very unfortunate one that had resulted in a cat being skewered through the leg.
No need to sweat, or in my case, pant, however. My yard was well furnished with several overgrown trees. Large and straight pines with lots of small branches—nothing I would have rated as a good climbing tree back when tree climbing had been a favorite activity, but maybe good enough now. Hoping that my claws were good for something other than ripping my bed sheets to shreds while panicking, I drifted over to the tree nearest to the stone wall. The trunk looked a bit thin, about five inches wide, but I didn't need to get up very high. After sinking my claws into the soft bark, I caught a whiff of an odd scent. It smelled like cut plastic. Looking closer at the tree, I found that a brown extension cord ran up the length of the trunk, nestled in the folds of the bark and held in place by rusting staples. Peering upwards, I spied a ball of leaves in the upper branches.
Just how long had Rudy been watching me? And how the hell could somebody who couldn't weigh more than five pounds operate a staple gun?
I muttered to myself about having a squirrel burger the next time I saw the bushy-tailed maniac as I climbed, which for all my mental bitching proved to be a trivial affair. That was until I actually looked over the fence and into the Archmagus' yard and nearly fell right off the tree purely from shock.
"It’s bigger on the inside," voices from
Doctor Who
exclaimed in my head. They were right. Through a hazy purple tint stretched a garden that belonged in an English manor. Rows of well-trimmed hedges seemed to stretch for miles beyond the fence, forming circular spaces around opulent statues and fountains. I could see the old man's little house but it sat in the distance, nestled under two gnarled oak trees that grew together over it, sheltering it with their combined foliage.
My fur prickled as I jumped over the fence, and my ears needed to be popped by the time I landed. It had been a much longer drop than I had been expecting, and my paws stung a bit from the impact. Shaking them out, I looked around.
On this side the fence had become a wall, perhaps thirty feet up, with no helpful trees anywhere near it. The air smelled wonderful—full of the scents of grass and piney hedges. Yet there was an emptiness to it, like a steak missing salt. Maybe it was just the lack of exhaust? I wandered down a cobblestone path, trying to stick to the main route. I gave the statues that lined the walkway a wide berth. Each one depicted a recognizable, but younger, Archibald with a large staff ornamented with a gem the size of my paw. They had a variety of costumes, ranging from business suits to monks’ robes. Most of the Archies were accompanied by a small cat, but some had other animals with them. They seemed likely candidates for the type of statues that come alive and try to kill you when you’re not paying attention. Whenever I stepped close, I saw glints of color flicker over their stone eyes.
Fortunately the statues did not seem to have any interest in killing me, although I swear a few of them shifted slightly to get a better look. If they were any more than decoration, then apparently the Archmagus had added me to the guest list. Or perhaps they needed the Archmagus alive to function. I kept my eyes peeled for any rips in reality or a tentacled monstrosity skulking around, but the garden seemed determined to keep its sunny disposition in the face of my paranoia. As I continued to trot for what was surely several miles along the hedges, I did not see a single living creature—not a bird, not bug, just plants and statues. As I drew close to the central maze, the hedges themselves animated. The leaves rustled as if something unseen moved through the leaves.
I talked at them and said hello, but they steadfastly refused to engage me in conversation. The old “rustle once for yes, rustle twice for no” suggestion produced zero rustles. I did provoke a reaction when I attempted to jump over a hedge in the maze. The plants grew about five feet while I set up for my jump, the branches reaching up and curling around each other like frenzied tentacles. The bushes were so intent on blocking my air that they left their bottoms defoliated enough for me to scoot through. The hedges turned a bit surly after that, aggressively putting dead ends in my way and forcing me to jump over them. Had you watched me from the house, I'm sure I looked a bit like a jackrabbit in deep snow, punctuated by a few cries of surprise as I jumped over a few hedges and into a fountain. By the time I flopped onto the ground beyond the maze, my tongue had become a tripping hazard.
I did what came naturally. I took a nap.
* * *
It
had not been my intention to take a nap, but the sun had been warm and my paws wet, and my muscles argued against further movement. A blink, a deep sigh, and the sun had moved most of the way across the sky and threatened to duck behind the house. Yawning and stretching, I moved towards the building, my ears catching scattered threads of conversation. I could hear a woman’s and a man’s voices coming from inside, but I couldn’t make out the words. The distorted voices sounded like the adults from Charlie Brown cartoons but far angrier.