What the Cat Knew

by P. D. Workman

  Reg rubbed her eyes. What had she done? How could she have been so naive and stupid? She had thought that he liked her, that he felt as passionately toward her as she did toward him, but his attraction was just like the sweet scent of a predatory plant, luring insects into its depths to be consumed.

  She didn’t know how she was going to manage with everything in her head suddenly so quiet. It was like waking up and finding her legs had been amputated. How did people manage day-to-day decisions and life without guiding whispers in their heads?

  Corvin drank the last sip of his tea and studied the leaves in the bottom.

  “I need to talk to Reg privately,” he told Sarah.

  “So you can take advantage of her more?” Sarah accused.

  “What else is there to take from her?” Corvin countered unsympathetically, raising his brows.

  Sarah looked at Reg, waiting for her to object. But Reg had nothing else to say to her. It was hopeless. What Corvin had taken from her would never be restored.

  Sarah shook her head, shot one more dark look at Corvin, and turned toward the door.

  “Don’t run away,” she told Reg. “Stay here until you get your bearings again. Don’t leave without talking to me first, understand? I don’t want you disappearing. I have some things to do, but I’ll be back.”

  Reg sat down on the couch, clutching her head. How did Sarah know that was exactly what Reg wanted to do? She wanted to get in her car and drive away and leave Black Sands and Corvin Hunter far behind her.

  Then Sarah was gone. Reg was once again alone with Corvin, but this time she felt no attraction to him. She felt violated and bereft.

  Corvin closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at her. “All of these images… these memories… they’re from Warren?”

  Reg nodded slowly. “When he was getting too tired… I tried to get all he could give me before the connection broke… I thought it would make more sense than trying to explain it all with words.”

  “It’s all a jumble. I can’t figure out what is what.”

  “Yeah.” Reg breathed shallowly. “I was trying to get it into some kind of order… but it’s like a jigsaw puzzle… I wasn’t having much success.” She raised her eyes to him. “But you know Black Sands better than I do. Do you know the places in his memories…? They must have some meaning to you.”

  “It’s a lot more to manage than I expected,” Corvin said. “It’s going to take me some time to integrate everything properly…” He smiled. “You didn’t think you were very gifted. You thought it was just a little intuition, a little imagination…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You sold yourself short. You had very powerful psychic gifts. So much more than I was expecting.”

  Tears started to leak out of Reg’s eyes. She was powerless to stop them. She’d had something. She’d had a gift, and she’d thrown it carelessly away. She hadn’t had any idea what it was like to live like a normal person. How incredibly lonely and isolating it was.

  “Tell me your ritual for contacting the dead,” Corvin instructed.

  Reg shook her head and sighed. “Nothing special… just have a cup of tea with the client… ask a few questions about the person who died to get a good feeling for them. And then… reach out with my mind and… feel for them…”

  “Is there anyone you would like to talk to?”

  “No.” Reg’s head had been full of dead people. They had talked to her all the time. She’d never had the need to seek one of them out for her own purposes. They were always there.

  “Tell me about… Polly.”

  “Just a little girl I used to play with. I didn’t ever know her when she was alive. She just… lived near me when I was little. Or… died near me.”

  “Who is Norma Jean?”

  “Who?”

  “She has a very strong attachment to you,” Corvin said. “She watches over you. Did you want to talk to her?”

  “No.”

  Corvin’s eyes rolled up so that only the whites were visible. “Well, look at you,” he said in a breathy voice. “Is this little Regina? All grown up?”

  There was a lump in Reg’s throat. The cadence and accent were so familiar. They had lived in the corner of her mind for almost as long as she could remember, but it had been many years since she had heard it in life.

  “Norma Jean…?” she said tentatively.

  “You can call me momma,” the voice said, “my dear, sweet girl.”

  “No, stop!” Reg told Corvin urgently. She grabbed his arm and shook him to bring him out of it. “I don’t want to talk to her!”

  Corvin went rigid. It was a moment before he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Your mother?” he asked.

  “I never knew my mother,” Reg said. “She died when I was just a little girl. I don’t want to talk to her or anyone else.”

  He chuckled. “A little disconcerting to be on the other side of the reading?”

  “Just leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “I’m just trying to figure it out. How you used these gifts… what I can do now.”

  “Why don’t you just go away? Go back to your house and leave me alone.”

  “I couldn’t do that. Then I would miss your visitor.”

  “What visitor?” Reg demanded, worried about Corvin channeling someone else she knew.

  “The one who’s going to be here in a few minutes.”

  ⋆ Chapter Twenty-Four ⋆

  Reg had long been able to predict the unpredictable. She just knew when things were going to happen. She knew when the phone was going to ring before it did. She knew when she was going to get moved to another family, though probably anyone with a little experience could have worked that out. Other things, like what cards she was likely to pick up in a poker game or what song was going to play on the radio next. She just took it for granted, assuming everyone had similar experiences. Like deja vu.

  It wasn’t until Corvin said she had a visitor coming that she realized she would have known that, if she’d still had her powers. Instead of a sense of knowing what was coming, there was a blank. Just nothing but the emptiness of eternity.

  They both sat there for a few minutes in silence, Corvin listening to the voices now in his head, and Reg listening to the expanding silence. She would sooner die than listen to that silence for the rest of her life.

  There were footsteps on the cobbles outside the door, amplified by the quiet of the room. Reg got up to get the door, not sure what else to do.

  “Be careful,” Corvin warned suddenly. “Do not tell him anything.”

  “Who…?”

  “Keep it under wraps,” Corvin insisted. “Don’t tell him what you—we—know.”

  There was a hard knock on the door. Reg knew what that knock meant without any gift of prescience. Cops.

  She opened the door, expecting Jessup and her partner, but she only saw Jessup’s partner. The man whose name she could not remember. She studied his name bar. The letters still swam. Apparently, her learning disabilities were not tied to her gifts. It was something she had wondered.

  Hawthorne-Rose. Officer Hawthorne-Rose.

  “Uh… yes? Can I help you?” She didn’t invite him in.

  “I’d like to talk to you, Miss Rawlins.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’d like to come in.”

  Invite me in.

  She really didn’t want men intruding on her space. She should have told Corvin to take a hike the night before. She should have gone home, left him at the restaurant or in the yard outside with no way to get in, and gone to bed.

  “It’s not a good time.”

  Why didn’t Corvin want her to tell Hawthorne-Rose anything? Was he involved in Warren’s accident after all? Had Reg’s first instinct about the cloaked man been right? Had it been another manifestation of her gift, not just a random connection?

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist,” Hawthorne
-Rose said. He put his foot in the door and put his shoulder to it, pushing it open the rest of the way. He didn’t need to be invited in. Had Sarah’s spell only been to keep Corvin out? Or had Reg broken it when she had let Corvin in?

  Hawthorne-Rose looked around suspiciously. He saw Corvin sitting there and his eyes narrowed.

  “What business do you have here?” he demanded.

  “I could ask you the same,” Corvin said mildly.

  Hawthorne-Rose took a walk around the living room and kitchen, peering back into the bedrooms to make sure that it was just the three of them.

  “Where’s Detective Jessup?” Reg asked, uncomfortable with the two men in the cottage. She would feel a lot better if there were another feminine presence to balance them out. Corvin and Hawthorne-Rose both felt predatory, with Reg playing the part of the prey trying to stay away from their claws.

  “Detective Jessup is… tied up. She asked me to come over to get some more information from you.”

  “I don’t know any more than I did the last time you came over,” Reg insisted, wrapping her arms around herself. Why hadn’t she dressed as soon as she got out of bed? She felt exposed.

  “You’re the psychic,” Hawthorne-Rose said, stepping closer to Reg. She fell back, trying to put more space between them. He pursued.

  “No,” Reg insisted. And it was true, she no longer was a psychic. All the psychic power she had possessed was gone. “I play people. Cold read them. Tell them what they want to hear. I don’t have any real powers.”

  Hawthorne-Rose sneered. He grabbed Reg’s arm and jerked her up close to himself. “Don’t mess with me, girl.”

  Reg gasped and tried to jerk out of his grip. She hadn’t been expecting any physical intimidation. Corvin jumped to his feet. He knocked over a sheaf of Reg’s flyers and sent them skating across the floor. But they didn’t stop like they should. They took flight and swirled around Hawthorne-Rose and Reg in a mini-tornado. Reg covered her face. Hawthorne-Rose batted at them, catching some and knocking others to the ground, until the flyer tornado was gone. Reg frowned at Corvin. That wasn’t one of her powers. She couldn’t move things with her mind.

  Something niggled in the back of her brain. She remembered that day with Erin, stealing the cans and bottles from neighbors’ back yards. Reg had grabbed a couple of garbage bags and had left Erin to pick up the plastic bin. But Erin, gawky and awkward, had tripped and fallen with the bin, sending cans and bottles flying, bound to alert the entire neighborhood to what was going on when they crashed everywhere. Reg had seen what was happening, had reached for Erin and the box, and had prevented the cans and bottles from flying, settling them back into place in the bin without being able to reach them. An impossibility. There had been other times. Times when she thought it would be funny if a paper skittered away or a bully tripped over his own untied shoelaces, and somehow, what she had imagined had happened.

  But she couldn’t control things with her mind. That wasn’t possible. If she had once been able to, she had now given those powers to Corvin, and his little flurry of papers was not enough to deter Hawthorne-Rose from his purposes.

  The policeman glared at Reg as if the papers had been her fault. He crumpled and threw away the ones he had caught out of the air, and again grabbed her, even more roughly.

  “Enough of that!” he growled. “Do you think this is a game? I want answers out of you. Real answers!”

  “I told you what I knew already,” Reg protested, trying to pull out of his grip.

  “You’re going to tell me more.”

  Reg shook her head.

  “What did Warren tell you?”

  Reg swallowed. “Warren was unconscious the whole time I was there. He couldn’t say anything.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  Reg shook her head, confused.

  “I know he was unconscious,” Hawthorne-Rose said sharply. “You told me that. But he still communicated with you.” He grabbed her chin, staring into her eyes and not allowing her to look away from him. “Tell me what he told you.”

  Reg swallowed. She thought of Corvin’s words before Hawthorne-Rose came in. Do not tell him anything.

  “Nothing.” She tried to shake her head, even though he still held her in his grip. “How could he?”

  “I know what you are and I have heard what you do. I know you communicated with him, and I want to know everything he told you.”

  “Where’s Detective Jessup?”

  “Detective Jessup isn’t coming. She can’t help you this time.”

  This time? How had Jessup helped her before? She hadn’t done anything for Reg. She had asked questions, and Reg had done her best to answer them, but there had been no real trouble. Hawthorne-Rose had stayed in the background while Jessup had talked to Reg.

  Hawthorne-Rose pushed Reg back until her back was against the wall. His hand slipped down, and rather than holding her chin, his hand was clamped under her jaw against her throat, threatening to choke her.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Corvin said. “Leave her alone.”

  Hawthorne-Rose turned his head. “Shut up, witch.”

  Hawthorne-Rose had shifted his position enough for Reg to see Corvin over his shoulder. Corvin’s face flushed red. Reg didn’t know if he was angry or embarrassed at being called a witch. Was it a slur?

  Did Hawthorne-Rose know that Corvin was a warlock? And believe it? When they had visited before, Reg had thought both officers were unbelievers. Reg had done her best to convince them that what she was telling them was legitimate, but neither had acted like they believed anything she said.

  Had Hawthorne-Rose been acting the whole time? Had he believed what Reg had been trying to tell them? Had he ditched his unbelieving partner and come back for more details?

  “You said he gave you pictures,” Hawthorne-Rose reminded Reg. “I want them.”

  “Not… physical pictures. Not like photographs. Pictures in my mind.”

  Corvin had said not to tell Hawthorne-Rose anything, but this was something Hawthorne-Rose already knew.

  “I know that,” Hawthorne-Rose growled. He pressed his hand into Reg’s throat. “Give them to me.”

  “I… I can’t!” Reg’s voice squeaked higher. Even before Corvin had taken them away, she wouldn’t have known how to share them with Hawthorne-Rose. She had been good at channeling the dead, and apparently even those who were unconscious, but telepathy with the living was much harder. It wasn’t like a Vulcan mind-meld on Star Trek. There were natural barriers. It would have been difficult to simply share the mental pictures with Hawthorne-Rose.

  He squeezed her throat, cutting off her air. Reg reached up and grabbed his hand, desperate to pull it away and to breathe. But he was too strong for her.

  “Let her go!” Corvin ordered. But he didn’t offer to Hawthorne-Rose that he was now the possessor of the memories. Don’t tell him what we know.

  Corvin moved forward like he would attack Hawthorne-Rose, but stalled in his tracks. Hawthorne-Rose barely gave him a glance. He was completely focused on Reg.

  “Give them to me.”

  Reg struggled for breath. The room started to go black. Hawthorne-Rose released his hold, letting her breathe. Reg sucked in oxygen, trying to kickstart her brain and understand what was going on. This wasn’t a police interrogation. She’d dealt with her share of angry police officers in the past, but Hawthorne-Rose’s actions didn’t fit any of the established patterns. This was something else altogether.

  It was then she felt Hawthorne-Rose pushing against her thoughts. He was inside her brain, banging clumsily up against her mental barriers, searching for the information. Even worse than what Corvin had done, tricking her out of her powers, he intended to take Warren’s memories from her by force.

  He wasn’t just a believer, he was a practitioner.

  Reg tried to push back against the intrusion, but without her powers she felt as weak as a newbor
n mouse. Corvin held all of her strength to resist such an assault.

  She looked past Hawthorne-Rose at Corvin. He was obviously struggling, trying to get past some barrier or spell Hawthorne-Rose had put up. But he had no experience with psychic powers and how to wield what he had stolen from Reg. She tried to communicate her thoughts to him, forgetting once again that she no longer had that ability.

  She struggled even to read his expression. For so many years, she had believed that her ability to cold-read someone was a skill that she had developed and honed, something anyone could do with some effort. In all that time, it had never occurred to her that her ability to read someone had really been a psychic gift.

  One that could be taken away from her.

  “Get out!” Reg told Hawthorne-Rose through gritted teeth. She tried to push back against him physically, unable to do it mentally. “Get out of my head!”

  He swore under his breath. “Where is it?” he demanded, pressing against her throat again. Reg struggled, unable to push him off of her.

  Hawthorne-Rose released his grip on her for a moment, but it wasn’t to give her a chance to reconsider and answer him. He bent down and scratched at his ankle, which Reg through was a bizarre thing for him to take a break for, until she saw him straighten back up with a knife in his hand.

  “You need a bigger incentive?” he demanded.

  Reg panicked and tried to break away from him. He pressed her against the wall with his body and stretched her right arm out beside her. He pressed the knife tip against her palm, holding it against the wall. She felt like a butterfly being pinned to a display board.

  “Let’s read your lifeline, shall we?” Hawthorne-Rose sneered, pressing the knife harder. “I’m thinking I might shorten it a little.” Reg felt him start to cut into the flesh of her hand and thrashed, trying to break free.

  But he was strong and had a good hold on her. He wasn’t going to let her go until he had what he wanted.