Matagot
Exactly how long does it take to open a tin can? Forever, if you’re my girl. First, I had to hop on the table as she tapped on her metal box with the glowing screen. Usually, that’s enough to get her attention and a “TC, down!” Today, she’s so engrossed in her tapping that I had to walk across the keyboard before she noticed me. Even then, she only grabbed me—grabbed me!—and tossed me down. The tossing part was insulting enough, but it was the grabbing that still rankles. I do not like to be grabbed.
I considered biting her ankle, but that rarely gets a positive result. So I yowled. That got her attention, and she strode into the kitchen to placate me with a can of tuna. Then her other metal box—the smaller one—erupts with its earsplitting wail. The can is half open, the smell of the fish wafting out, and she’s leaning against the counter, talking into the metal thing. Talking, talking, talking . . .
I’m ready to start yowling again when she sees me.
“Hold on,” she says. “My cat’s waiting for his tuna.”
Finally. Thank you.
My girl finishes opening the can and dumps it into my dish. Then she’s back to talking into her metal thing. It’s a phone. I know that. I might look like a common house cat, but I am a matagot. I can think. Yes, yes, common cats can think, too, but have you ever tried carrying on a conversation with one? Even for me, it’s like a human adult trying to converse with a baby. And don’t even get me started on dogs.
I understand what a cell phone is, but I cannot understand how humans communicate on them. I don’t mean the mechanics, which do not interest me at all, but I fail to comprehend how anyone can properly carry on a conversation without seeing the other person, without being able to read their body language, without being able to look them in the eye. It would be, I believe, like talking to a common cat.
My girl likes it, though. She’s always on the thing, chattering away. I suppose I shouldn’t call her a girl. She has a name. She has many names, nearly as many as I have. Olivia, Liv, Eden, Matilda, Mallt-y-Nos. She is also, apparently, a grown woman. To me, she is a child. An infuriating yet tolerable girl child.
I prefer girl children. I find myself gravitating toward them in this life particularly, perhaps because I owe this life to one. I was born sickly, as happens when your spirit is as old as mine, forced into yet another mewling, puling, weak body. Sensing I was different, my littermates would not let me feed, and my mother asked a girl child to take me. The girl—who could understand the language of beasts—picked me up gently as her friend helped. There’d been another child there, too, a boy, but I do not remember him fondly. Not fondly at all.
The girl, though, had been special, as was her friend. I still visit that friend, who is great-aunt to the boy who comes around to see my girl. Rose Walsh does not recognize me as her friend’s cat. Why would she? Fifty years have passed, and I cannot possibly be the same creature, can I?
As my girl talks on her metal box, I eat, and I pay attention. I don’t listen for words. I understand them, naturally, but it is her body language that I’m paying attention to. She leans against the counter, laughing, her voice alternating between girlish highs and womanly lows. Those lows—an octave beneath her already contralto voice—tell me it is a man on the other end of the line. This is the early stage of a mating dance.
That’s what gets my attention. I’m hoping it’s Rose’s Gabriel. The Gwynn to this Matilda. The right and proper choice of mate. But I haven’t seen Gabriel since an angry call between them, and while I might hope this is a reconciliation, I know she wouldn’t speak to Gabriel this way. Not yet. Those two are feral cats circling one another, uncertain of their welcome.
So who is on the phone? I move closer and hear a young man’s voice that I don’t recognize. I pay attention to her words and hear her call him Ricky.
Ricky? Who’s Ricky?
A chill slides over me, the hair on my back rising. I’m overwhelmed by a sense that I know who this is—not the boy himself, but what he portends, the role he plays, and that is what chills me to the marrow.
I move closer, hoping to hear clues. Then a breeze wafts through the window. It’s so faint even a dog wouldn’t notice. I do. My nose is attuned to this particular scent.
Fae.
Smelling fae in Cainsville is hardly unexpected. It’s a town founded by them, both a refuge and a breeding ground as they sow their seeds among the human population. The everyday air is ripe with the rich, earthy scent of fae and the lighter one of fae-blood humans. However, I know the individual smell of each full-blood fae, and this is a full-blood, and not one I know. There is a strange fae right outside our building.
My tail puffs, and my girl looks down as she disconnects her call. “Smell something, TC? I hope it’s not another mouse.”
Mouse, no. Rat? Possibly, and like her, I hope not. I dart to the door and meow.
“In a sec,” Olivia says, voice muffling as she disappears into the bedroom.
It is more than “a sec.” It’s well over a hundred seconds, and I’ve meowed twice more before she appears dressed in her server’s uniform. She picks up her purse. Slips on her shoes. “Oh, wait, my phone . . .”
I suffer through every additional second where, apparently, just opening the door for me would be too inconvenient. Finally, she’s ready, and the door opens, and I dart through, nearly tripping her.
“You have a litter box!” she calls after me.
I ignore her and keep running down the hall.
“You need me to open the stairwell—”
I leap onto the open windowsill.
“TC! No! Wait—”
I jump as her footsteps pound behind me. Such a fuss for a mere three stories. I land on my feet—naturally—and stand there, sniffing the air. Above, my girl has her head out the window, exhaling when she sees me trotting away. She may also aim several epithets my way. I pay no attention to those. The relief underscoring the words tells me she doesn’t mean them.
I jog behind the building. I catch a whiff of the strange fae there, but he’s gone. It is a he—I can tell that, too. A spriggan. When it comes to fae, my nose has a palate as refined as any bloodhound’s.
Spriggans possess the power of camouflage, which might explain why I don’t see this one. He can’t hide his smell, though, and that tells me he’s gone toward the front. I follow his trail.
As I trot around the building, my girl calls, “Oh, don’t you dare tell me you want back in now, cat.”
A woman snorts. It’s the one who is always on the front porch. Not a woman at all, but a fae, a bogart. Grace, owner of my girl’s apartment building.
I sniff the air.
“That cat’s bad luck,” the bogart says.
“No,” my girl says. “Black cats are good luck.”
“Has he brought you any?”
“He’s saving it for a special occasion. I know he is.”
The bogart snorts again. I don’t see the spriggan. Don’t smell him on the wind, either. I run over and hop onto the front stoop railing.
“I’m not letting you back in,” the bogart says. “Bad luck you are.”
I narrow my eyes and fix her with a baleful stare. It’s a game the old bogart plays—the more she tells my girl to be rid of me, the more determined Olivia will be to keep me. The bogart knows that. She wants me close to our Matilda so I can protect her. When she calls me bad luck, I know she’s only playing the game, but a tiny whisper sounds in my ear, one that says I am indeed bad luck.
I squelch that voice and flick my tail, and when my girl hops down the steps, I follow. This is my job, and I will do it right.
This time, I will do it right.
I trot alongside my girl. That always makes her smile.
“Walking me to work?” she says, and I stop to clean one ear. She laughs at that. “Oh, no, human, I’m not walking with you. I just happen to be going the same way.”
She continues on, and so do I. I know where she’s going—along the
passage between buildings, past the park and then through to the diner—so I alternate between lagging behind and scampering ahead. Dogs walk with people. Cats merely accompany them for a change of scenery, in the hope that something new and interesting lies ahead.
I spot the spriggan. My girl does not, and I don’t blame her for that. He is but a blur against a brick wall. I stop to clean my other ear and surreptitiously observe. Her path won’t take her past him, so she’s safe enough.
As she leaves the passage, though, the blur of the spriggan moves. I pause, muscles tensing. He creeps along the wall. He’s watching my girl, and my tail bottle-brushes at that. I let out a hiss. Then I aim another hiss at the sky, for the owls and gargoyles who should be there and are not.
A strange fae has come to Cainsville, drawn by rumors of our Matilda. He may come in mere curiosity, but that cannot be presumed. The town guardians—the owls and the gargoyles—should be watching out for her. They are not. Only I am, and that little voice whispers that I am not enough.
This time I will be enough.
I slink into a bush to watch. There’s a gargoyle just ahead. If my girl is in trouble, it might notice. Might is the key word there. The damnable stone guardians are unreliable, and it’s impossible to tell whether they are even awake.
I slide through the bushes as the spriggan eases along the wall. My girl glances back. When she doesn’t see me, she rolls her eyes with a sardonic, “Bye, Liv! See you tonight! Have a great day at work!”
The spriggan appears, a flash of a man, but she’s already turned away. His figure wobbles and then fades again, and he heads down another passage. He’s walking away from her. I keep watching both of them as they get farther and farther along their respective alleys. When my girl veers onto the main sidewalk, I scamper after her. The spriggan can’t possibly circle around and reach Olivia before she gets to the diner, but I’m still worried.
At the mouth of the passageway, I sit, watching while a human leaving the diner holds the door for my girl. They exchange greetings the way cats exchanges sniffs. Oh, it’s you. Hello. Goodbye.
The human leaves the diner, and my girl goes inside. I exhale, relieved. I’ll wait a moment to be sure she doesn’t come back out—she’s terribly inconsistent that way—and then I’ll go follow the spriggan’s trail. He is probably only here to catch a glimpse of Cainsville’s new Matilda. Still, I need to—
Hands grab me. They scoop me up so fast I don’t realize what’s happening until I’m in the air. I twist, biting and clawing, but the hands shove me into a bag—a thick canvas one, stinking of mildew. I yowl then. I yowl for help—I’m not proud—but the bag wraps around my head, stifling my cries and making me gasp for air.
I fight with tooth and claw, but I can’t do more. As a matagot, I have the greatest defensive power of all: if I die, I will return, reborn into a new feline body. Yet when it comes to offense, my weapons are only those of this feline body. And my superior intellect. Yet as proud as I may be of that, it does me no good when I’m scooped up, dumped into a bag and carted off.
Still, I fight. Fight and try to yowl, until the bag opens, and I see the face of the spriggan. I snarl and scrabble against the canvas, my claws digging in for purchase, propelling myself toward the opening. He drops in a cloth and closes the bag, and I’m left with a cloth that stinks of . . .
I go still. I know what that cloth stinks of, and I have no defense against that, either. I snarl and hiss and give one great yowl before I slump, unconscious, to the bottom of the bag.
I wake smelling must, and I think it’s the bag again. No, the bag smelled of mildew. Must is a very different thing. Groggy, I stretch one paw, claws sliding from their sheaths, like a human might pat his fingertips on the floor. My claws rake through hard earth.
I open one eye. It’s dark. I blink until my night vision ignites. That’s slower than usual, my mind swimming from the drugs. While my eyes adjust, I inhale. Must. Dirt. Brackish water. I lift my head, and a mouse squeaks, and tiny paws scamper over the dirt.
Another deep breath as I ignore the rodent. Dirt suggests I’m outside, but the musty smell says I’m not.
More blinking, and I can see my surroundings. Walls. Cement walls with one filthy window. A basement room. Something about it, the smell of it, the feel of it . . .
“Felix?”
Small feet pad down the wooden stairs. The open door swings wider, and my girl comes in.
“Felix, there you are.”
She smiles for me, and I take nearly as much pleasure in that smile as I do in the treats she brings. Or perhaps it is more satisfaction than pleasure. My girl is a somber child, not given to smiles, but I coax them from her simply by existing.
She crouches in front of me, as she always does. I remember Hannah and other girls who scooped me up as if I were a toy, slung over a shoulder or cradled in their arms. I allowed it if, like Hannah, they were still gentle. If they were not, well, such a girl wasn’t the sort I’d favor with my company in the first place. This girl never scoops me up. She is too cautious by far. I would say it’s respect, but it feels like reticence. She fears I will refuse her attention, and so she does not want to offer it. A proud child who expects nothing from anyone.
She crouches and meets my gaze. I rise and meow, and that’s the answer she needs. She lifts me with care and cuddles me and scratches behind my ears. I snuggle against her long dark hair. My girl. My Matilda. My Olivia.
I stop.
Olivia does not have long, dark hair. Nor is she a child. She is proud, yes, and reticent, in her way, but she’s no stranger to smiles. Smiles and laughter, as constant as a bubbling brook. She doesn’t cuddle me, either. We’re both too dignified for that.
My mind wobbles in confusion, past melding with present. I feel the girl’s arms, warm around me. Smell the sweetness of her breath. Hear her murmured words at my ear.
Not Olivia.
Pamela.
I blink, and I’m thrown to the floor. I leap up in alarm. Pamela would never throw—
Pamela is not here. I’m in a dark and empty basement. Yet there’s a reason my foggy mind wove that memory for me. I’ve been here before. In this basement, when it was not so dark or so dirty, when I had a bed here, when Pamela was my girl. Years ago.
I can also be forgiven for confusing the two. Pamela is Olivia’s mother. I’ve not seen her in decades, since before my girl was born, but I recognized their kinship the moment I saw Olivia. My new girl, born from the old. My new Matilda, born from a girl who’d never been a Matilda, who, like Hannah, was simply a child with fae blood. A girl in need of a matagot. Coincidence that one of my former girls grew up to give me a new Matilda? Of course not. There is no such thing as coincidence. That was fate.
I prowl around the basement. I know exactly where I am. Pamela’s great-grandmother had owned this house, and while Pamela herself hadn’t lived in Cainsville, she’d often stayed here, and I’d been “her cat” while she was in town. This house has been empty for years. Abandoned, though kept up by the fae elders. Awaiting new owners when the elders decide some human half-blood is worthy of such a grand old abode.
As I sniff and poke about, I think of the spriggan. He dumped me here. His trail leads in and immediately out again, with no sign he lingered. He couldn’t know I had any association with this house, so I shouldn’t say there is no such thing as coincidence. I’m not convinced this qualifies, though. He left me here because the house stands empty, and I know every empty building in town, have some association with all of them.
So the spriggan captured me and dumped me—
I stop. There is only one reason he’d put me here. Not to keep me for himself. I’m no prize, even if he realizes what I am. No, he hasn’t taken me—he’s shoved me aside. Gotten me out of the way. His true goal is . . .
Olivia.
I leap for the door, reaching it in one pounce. It’s shut. I press against it. Throw myself at it. It holds fast.
I turn to the wi
ndow. It’s small and grimy, barely letting moonlight through. I don’t smell any night air seeping in, and it looks shut, but if I can get up there, I might be able to push it open.
When dawn comes, I’m still trying to reach the windowsill. I’ve spent hours jumping at it, trying to scramble up the wall, then looking for other ways out. That last is pointless. There is a window, and there is a door. Nothing else.
At one point in the night, a mouse streaks across the room, and that gives me an idea. Being a matagot, I have the ability to reason, as humans do. If a mouse is in here, it has found a way in and a way out. I follow the scent and discover its holes. That’s all they are, though. Holes barely big enough for me to slide a paw into, and when I do, I can’t even reach the other side. The mouse isn’t darting through short passages to another room—it’s diving into long tunnels, ones I couldn’t escape through even if I clawed a bigger entrance.
The next time the mouse races through, I catch and eat it. Then I force myself to lap at the stagnant puddles of water on the floor before I resume my mission to get out of here and get back to my girl.
If I seem to be going about this calmly and methodically, that would be a lie. My girl is in danger, and I need to get out of this room, and I cannot. That is the truth I will not face. One door. One window. No escape. I am trapped. A spriggan has targeted Olivia, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
When I fall into sleep, I fall into dreams. I know that will happen, and so I avoid slumber for as long as I can, but eventually, panic exhausts me, and I collapse into the corner, and I dream. I dream of my girls. I dream of my Matildas.
I know where they will arrive. I cannot say when it will happen, but the where comes to me as a sixth sense, a force that drives me there, even if I must die and be reborn before I reach my destination. Then I wait.
While I wait, I watch over other girls, and sometimes, like Pamela, they are linked to my Matilda. Sometimes, they are mere stand-ins I protect in her place.
Waiting, endlessly waiting. Lifetimes spent waiting.
Portents Page 16