Authors: Annette Curtis Klause
The Silver Kiss (3 page)
I held out Grimalkin.
“Cat sick?” she asked, the space between her eyebrows creasing with concern.
I nodded, still unable to speak.
“Bummer,” she said. “I dunno, tho'. We don't do pets.”
I folded Grimalkin back to my chest, and swallowed a scream. The weight of the crucifix somewhere over my head seemed to bear down on me and take away my thoughts. I didn't know the question to ask next.
The girl did, however. “Jerry,” she called through a door to her right. “Where do we send people with cats?”
A tall young man in a white coat over jeans and T-shirt poked his head through the door. He looked me over and winced. “You sure it's not you that needs the help?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He sighed and came over. “Hi, baby,” he said to Grimalkin, gently stroking her head. “It's okay, it's just Dr. Jerry. I've got two like you at home.”
Unlike so many, he then looked me in the eyes. I saw compassion there and, for a moment, it took the weight from my chest.
“Listen ⦠uh ⦠sorry, what's your name?” he asked.
“Simon,” I answered before I could help it.
“Simon,” he repeated, and I felt a slight shock as someone spoke my true name to me for the first time in
years. “I don't know anything about sick animals. I don't even know what the normal heart rate of a cat is, but I know a vet,” he said, “a friend. She lives near. I'll call her. Maybe she'll come over.”
I waited in that clammy basement, stroking my cat, overhearing words like
clap, knocked up, bad trip
, and
pain
. Someone cried loudly in another room for a while. Patients went in the back, emerged again, and left. Others came in from the street to take their places.
“You'll be better, 'Malkin,” I whispered to my cat over and over. “You'll be fine, little queen.” I warned away the talkative with venom in my eyes.
A black woman in a long print dress came through the front door. She wore bangles and short, sculpted hair like a fine, dark dandelion. She scanned the room, then approached me purposefully. Why me? I wanted to flee, but it was too important to stay.
“I'm Avis,” she said, sitting down beside me. “Jerry called me about your cat. Let me see.”
This was the vet, then. Reluctantly I let her take Grimalkin on her lap as the skin on my back twitched from the scrutiny of the bored and curious. The cat lay limply in a hammock of bright fabric as Avis prodded and probed. The vet lifted Grimalkin's lips and studied her gums.
“I'm afraid you have a really sick kitty,” Avis finally said.
I know that, I thought angrily. I know that. But the words wouldn't leave my lips.
The vet patted my knee as if she read my thoughts and understood. “Her kidneys are enlarged,” Avis continued. “And she's in shock. My best guess is that she's been poisoned.”
I rose to my feet faster than a mortal, ready to kill whoever would dare, and the vet cringed, surprise and fear on her face. “N-not on purpose,” she stammered. “Something she found. Like antifreeze. It's sweet, cats like it, but it causes permanent damage.”
Antifreeze. I thought of the cans I'd moved to a corner of my den when I first took possession. It was possible. Why the hell hadn't I thrown them away?
A tremor passed through Grimalkin's body, and the cat let out a yowl, causing me to drop to my knees. Avis let me reclaim her. “I'm sorry. I think she's dying of kidney failure,” the vet said gently as I buried my face in Grimalkin's fur.
“There's nothing you can do?” I asked, raising hopeless eyes, already knowing the answer.
Avis shook her head. “It's best now to put her out of her pain. I can take care of it if you likeâno charge.”
“No!” I cried. And I ran from there, ran all the way home.
Back in my den, I held Grimalkin in my arms. She was alternately stiff, then limp, racked by tremors.
I couldn't save her, and I couldn't turn her into one such as me, even if I wanted to; there was only one thing I could give herâpeace.
I had calmed wild animals in my timeâsoothed
them a little so I could feedâbut I had never turned my full power to mesmerize upon a beast. I wasn't even sure I could. But now was the time to try. I could lull her to sleep slowly and peacefully, lure her into gentle dreams and let her go to a place where I could never follow. Trapped in this world, I would never walk a long, white tunnel and find her waiting. I would live centuries more and never see her again. At least her blood would make her part of me. A mote of her would live in me awhile.
It hurt to unsheathe my fangsâit had never hurt before.
I held her close, and rocked her, and whispered love until I heard a tiny purr. “Brave girl,” I said. “Brave, brave, sweet girl.” Then I bent my head as if in prayer.
I didn't mind the fur in my mouth, it was precious to me, but the first taste of blood nearly choked me. I carried on, anyway, and wove the spell. It didn't take long. She relaxed against me, she kneaded my chest, for a moment her purr grew large, and then it was gone. The blood ceased to flow, and she was but a shell.
I hadn't known that I could cry.
It was time to move on, I knew that now. I had to go far from this place that had seduced me. If not for a little cat, I would have become the demon I had fought so long not to be. But she had ruined me. No matter where I went, I would yearn for love now I remembered what it was, and where would anyone such as I find love again?
HE
S
ILVER
K
ISS
1ZoëT
he house was empty. Zoë knew as soon as she walked through the front door. Only a clock ticking in the kitchen challenged the silence.
Fear uncurled within her. Mommy, she thought like a child. Is it the hospital againâor worse? She dropped her schoolbag in the hall, forgetting the open door, and walked slowly into the kitchen, afraid of what message might await her. There was a note on the refrigerator:
Gone to the hospital. Don't worry.
Make your dinner. Be back when I can.
Love, Dad.
P.S. Don't wait up.
She crumpled the note and flung it at the trash can. It missed. She snorted in disgust. It seemed that lately all her conversations with her father had been carried on with a
banana refrigerator magnet as intermediary. The banana speaks, she thought. It defended the refrigerator, stopped her from opening the door. She couldn't eat.
Zoë the Bird they called her at school. She had always been thin, but now her bones seemed hollow. Her wrists and joints were bruised with shadows. She was almost as thin as her mother, wasting away with cancer in the hospital. A sympathy death perhaps, she wondered half seriously. She had always been compared to her mother. She had the same gray eyes, long black hair with a slight curl, and deceptively pale skin that tanned quickly at the slightest encouragement. Wouldn't it be ironic if she died, too, fading out suddenly when her look-alike went?
Zoë drifted from the kitchen, not sure what to do. How could she wash dishes or wipe counters when God knows what was happening with her mother at the hospital? She shrugged off her coat, leaving it on a chair. Dad kept on saying everything would be all right, but what if something happened and she wasn't even there, all because he couldn't admit to her that Mom might be dying?
She tugged at her sweater, twisted a lock of hair; her hands couldn't keep still. I should be used to this by now, she thought. It had been going on for over a year: the long stays in the hospital, short stays home, weeks of hope, then sudden relapses, and the cures that made her mother sicker than the pain. But it would be a sin to be used to something like that, she thought. Unnatural. You
can't let yourself get used to it, because that's like giving in.
She paused in the dining room. It was sparsely furnished with a long antique trestle table and chairs that almost all matched, but the walls were a fanfare to her mother's life. They gave a home to the large, bright, splashy oils that Anne Sutcliff painted; pictures charged with bold emotions, full of laughing people who leapt and swirled and sang. Like Mom, Zoë thoughtâlike Mom used to. And that's where they differed, for Zoë wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It's not even good poetry, she thought. I don't have talent, it's her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. “You're a dark one,” her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. “You're a mystery.”
I want to be like them, she thought almost pleadingly as she stroked the crimson paint to feel the brush strokes, hoping maybe to absorb its warmth.
The living room was cool and shadowed. The glints of sunlight on the roof she could see through the window resembled light playing on the surface of water, and the room's aqua colors hinted at undersea worlds. Perhaps she'd find peace here. She sank into the couch.
Just enjoy the room, she told herself; the room that has always been here, and always will; the room that hasn't changed. I am five, she pretended. Mom is in the kitchen making an early dinner. They are going out tonight to a
party, and Sarah is coming over to baby-sit. I'll go and play with my dollhouse soon.
But it wouldn't last, so she opened her eyes and stretched. Her fingers touched the sleek cheapness of newsprint. The morning paper was still spread on the couch. She glanced at it with little interest, but the headline glared:
MOTHER OF
Two
FOUND DEAD
. Her stomach lurched. Everyone's mother found dead, she thought bitterly. Why not everyone's? But she couldn't help reading the next few lines. Throat slashed, the article said, drained dry of blood.
“That's absurd,” she said aloud. Her fingers tightened in disgust, crumpling the page. “What is thisâthe
National Enquirer?”
She tossed the paper away, wrenched herself to her feet, and headed for her room.
But the phone rang before she reached the stairs. She flinched but darted for the hall extension and picked it up. It was a familiar voice, but not her father's.
“Zoë, it's horrible.” Lorraine, her best friend, wailed across the phone lines with typical drama. It should have been comforting.
“What's horrible?” Zoë gasped with pounding heart. Had the hospital phoned Lorraine's house because she wasn't home?
“We're moving.”
“What?” A moment's confusion.
“Dad got that job in Oregon.”
“Oregon? My God, Lorraine. Venus.”
“Almost.”
Zoë sat down in the straight-backed chair beside the phone table. It wasn't her father. It wasn't death calling, but ⦠“When?” she asked.
“Two weeks.”
“So soon?” Zoë wrapped and unwrapped the phone cord around her fist. This isn't happening, she thought.
“They want him right away. He's flying out tonight. Can you believe it? He's going to look for a house when he gets there. I got home and Diane was calling up moving companies.”
“But you said he wasn't serious.”
“Shows how much he tells me, doesn't it? Diane knew.”
Zoë grasped for something to say. Couldn't something stop this? “Isn't she freaked at the rush?”
“Oh,
she
thinks it's great. It's a place nuclear fallout will miss, and she can grow lots of zucchini.”
“What about your mom?”
“She wouldn't care if he moved to Australia. But she's pretty pissed that he's taking me.”
“Can't you stay with her?” Please, please, Zoë begged silently.
“Oh, you know. That's a lost battle. Cramp her style.”
“Lorraine! She's not that bad.”
“She moved out, didn't she?”
No use fighting that argument again, Zoë thought. “Oregon.” She sighed.
Lorraine groaned. “Yeah! This is hideous. It's the wilderness or something. I'm not ready for the great trek. I could stay with you,” she added hopefully.