by Kate Elliott
“Where is my Coco?” cried a booming female voice from within. “Where is my little chub’ums? He’ll take his death if you force him outdoors to do his widdle business! Really! Why you cannot let him do his business under your cots as he likes to do for it’s safest and warmest there in these cold winter nights . . . Girls? Girls? Where have those lazy sluts gone?”
“Hide!” said Felicia. “Behind the troughs.”
“What about—?” He shook the limp body with a hand rather as he had earlier shaken its living self in his jaws.
“Hurry!” Ami leaped down to grab him by an elbow and drag him to the prickly shrubs.
He’d grown up in a pride of saber-toothed cats ruled by his mother’s implacable will, so he simply never argued with females. With the oozing pug still in hand, he dashed behind the shrubs and crouched. The stone was like ice against his bare feet. The needles scratched him most painfully. But when a woman dressed in a robe of flowing gold swept out onto the patio at the top of the steps, bellowing about her chub’ums and her ungrateful servants, she did not see him. Another small dog was tucked in the angle of one of her arms. This one was even fatter and uglier than the corpse he held.
“Where is he?” she demanded.
For a moment he thought she had seen him, but then he realized her only thought was for the missing dog.
“We just saw him run inside through the parlor curtains, Your Highness,” said Ami with a smile so false it would have curdled milk.
“My poor frightened Coco! You chased him! You heartless beasts!” The highness happened to be standing closest to plump Felicia. She slapped her. The pug on her arm snapped at Felicia, teeth catching on her sleeve. Felicia took a step back, and the highness grasped her sleeve and wrenched her back toward the growling dog. “Don’t try to run away from your crime!”
A snarl escaped Rory, and he shifted forward to his toes and would have leaped up to pounce on her but Ami pounded the metal poker into the stone once in what he took as a warning to stay put. The pug began to huff out a wheezy cascade of barks. Its beady black eyes were fixed on the shrubbery, for it had clearly smelled Rory or the blood of its missing companion.
“We have not seen him, Your Highness,” repeated Ami with a false smile.
Yes, yes, obviously they were lying to protect themselves; he could understand that. But that awful woman wasn’t being fair to them at all. Yet by the flash of Ami’s gaze toward the shrubbery, as if fearful he might spring out, he knew he had to stay hidden.
Felicia raised a hand to the red stain on her cheek. She spoke in a voice as smooth as cream. “Your bath is ready, mistress. We were just coming to tell you when we discovered that Coco had to do his business. Ami will be glad to take His Highness the Exalted Ramses inside, for the cold air has startled and discomforted him. I will escort you in to your bath.”
“How can you think I can think of even having a bath at a time like this, with my little chub’ums so scared and likely shivering and cowering with fear! You are heartless and devoid of feeling, but no doubt you cannot help it being a bastard’s bastard child. Only my devotion to your grandmother keeps you in my service.”
“I cannot express my gratitude, Your Highness.”
“Of course you cannot! It is inexpressible, what I have sacrificed for you!” She lifted a hand to the heavens as if exhorting some personage who lived in the clouds. The gold bracelets on her arms jangled as they slipped to her elbows. The pug in her arms nipped at the bracelets, clearly as ill-tempered as the highness and fortunately as distractible. “But the gods lay their claim on us to be generous. That is our princely lot in life.”
The speech exhausted her reserves. She swayed as her lips pinched together as if to trap all the things she did not want to lose. She had an otherwise pleasant face soured by the expression of a person accustomed to slapping all underlings who did not accede quickly enough to her demands.
“I shall faint!” she decreed with the certainty of an oracle.
Felicia dabbed the woman’s forehead with a scrap of fine linen, carefully avoiding the pug as it struggled to shift close enough to fasten its stubby muzzle around her fingers. “Take my arm, Your Highness. I shall help you inside to your couch.”
“How can you think I would abandon my sweetling so! It is your flawed nature that twists your heart so cruelly. You must find Coco and bring him to me! I must lie down.” She snorted out a copious sob, a sound similar to the honking of the big wild cows he with his mother’s pride of saber-toothed cats sometimes hunted. “I haven’t even the strength to feed poor Exalted Ramses his supper. You can see he is starving! But I do not doubt that you care nothing for his suffering!”
“Let me assist you into your chambers, Your Highness,” said Ami.
“Aurea!” the highness bellowed.
A moment later a girl not yet full-grown scurried out onto the porch. She had the look of a mouse sure it is about to be gulped down, and she cringed as she made a clumsy courtesy.
The two serving woman again exchanged glances.
“I can help you in, Your Highness,” repeated Ami. “Let me take the Exalted Ramses.”
The highness shoved the growling pug into young Aurea’s arms. It bit, mouth fixing over the girl’s scarred fingers as its growl rose in pitch to a shrill frenzy.
The girl shrieked.
The highness slapped her. “How dare you abuse Ramses so!”
With a practiced swish of her sleeve, Ami got cloth in the way of the pug’s next snap as she snatched the dog from the girl’s arms. The beast squirmed impotently as Ami swept inside without a word, fabric muzzling its head.
“Come here, Aurea!” commanded the highness, holding out an arm. Blood dripping from her bitten finger, the girl scuttled under the outswept arm with its jangling bracelets. She physically sank as the highness settled her weight on her, but as the highness moaned, the girl staggered inside with her. A curtain swished down behind them.
Wind rattled through the branches. A crow swooped overhead as if to investigate the altercation. Ami returned, without the pug, shaking out a damp spot on her sleeve and carrying a shawl.
“I put him in his bed and took away the stairs so he can’t get down,” she said. “How I hate that foul stinking beast. He peed on my arm!”
Felicia hastily shut the glass-paned doors.
“The way she torments that child by pretending to favor her makes me want to smash her head in,” added Ami with a flourish of the poker.
“That’s a stabbing weapon, so it wouldn’t do well for smashing,” Rory said. “Can I stand up now? My right leg is falling asleep, and my feet are cold.”
“You can’t stand up until we’re sure she won’t come back. Put this on.” She tossed the shawl over the shrubbery.
“Cat would make sure I had shoes,” he muttered as he tugged the shawl around his shoulders.
Heartlessly, Ami turned away from the bushes to confront her companion. “We must do something or she’ll kill poor Aurea. The girl has become nothing but bones and skin. And for her to prate on about her devotion to your grandmother, Fee! That nasty bitch bought your family’s debt purely to hold it over a woman who was prettier than her when they were young. Not that your sweet old grandma would have ever shoved it in her face back in those days.”
“You don’t know my sweet old grandmother very well, do you?” Felicia’s smile, as sumptuous as gravy, distracted him from his cold feet. He licked his lips, wishing he could be licking hers instead. “They still hate each other. Every morning when I wake up I think of why I’m stuck here for seven years and I know that every time Her Royal Bitch sees me, she has to remember my gorgeous granddam. Let her stew in her own juices until she dries up! Rory? You can come out now.”
Ami’s hard glare softened as Rory cautiously rose to his feet. He held out the pug.
“What in the hells are we going to do with the cursed dog?” Ami muttered.
“Bury it?” Felicia studied the limp canine with a frown.
; Ami shook her head. “The gardeners will find it. You know how the prince hates anything disturbed except what he has given permission for. This time of year, any digging will be quite obvious, even if we try to hide it behind a shrubbery.”
“Throw the corpse in the privy?”
“She’ll have it raked. You know she will. One of the stablehands will be made to do it.”
“What will happen to you if the highness finds the dead dog?” Rory asked.
Felicia blanched, her magnificent bosom quivering.
Ami shrugged. “Fee will be whipped. So will Aurea, just for the pleasure the old cow gets in knowing she can command it.”
“Whipped!” If he could have laid his ears back, he would have. “Will you be whipped, too?”
“No. I’ll be sent home in disgrace. She dares not lay a hand on me for my family is too important. But one of my poor cousins will be sent to take my place. I don’t mind serving the bitch. Keeps me free from a marriage I don’t want. You must be freezing. We’ve got to sneak you inside.”
He was shivering, but his honor was on the line: He had created the problem that would cause them to be harmed. So it was up to him to solve it.
“I could eat the dog,” he said.
Ami looked thoughtful. “The whole body?”
“Not the bones and skin. But the flesh and insides.”
Felicia was clearly a tenderer soul. She pressed a hand to her mouth. “How could you do that? Wouldn’t it be nasty?”
“I would have to change back. Then I could eat it. You’d have less to get rid of.”
“Are you experienced at that sort of thing?” demanded Ami.
He considered the pug with a frown. “I’ve never eaten this sort of creature exactly . . .” Her eyebrows had drawn down, so he paused.
“Changing back and forth at your own will, I mean,” she said.
“It’s something I didn’t know I could do until recently,” he temporized, for he wasn’t sure how much he ought to tell them. But he liked the way they were looking at him with hopeful, interested expressions. A man who did a good deed to make up for his bad deed would surely be rewarded. He might even hint at the sort of reward he would like most. “You would have to help me. You’d have to be very brave. I would have to become a cat and eat as much of the dog as I can. Then you’d have to persuade me back, to remind me how much I would rather be a man than a cat.”
“You wouldn’t just eat us?” Ami asked, but she was biting her lower lip as she considered.
He smiled, flashing a gaze at Felicia. “Not in that way, anyway.”
Felicia gave a most gratifying gasp and blushed bright red.
The music of Ami’s answering laugh was so seductive that his man part stirred alarmingly, even in this tremendous cold.
“Oh!” said Felicia. “My!”
“You think we might coax you back from cat to man?” murmured Ami.
“I think you’ve already had your answer,” he said, not bothering to hide because even though Cat would likely have told him it was very rude to stand naked in public in such a state, his two new friends were not troubled by it. “But my feet are very cold. Could we make a decision quickly?”
The two women looked at each other. If his feet hadn’t been quite so cold he would have enjoyed the way their expressions spoke in emotions instead of words. Ami’s lips quirked up in a half smile as her eyebrows rose as if with a question. Felicia’s mouth parted as she exhaled, and she ran white teeth over her lower lip in a way that made him want to nibble that luscious mouth right there.
“All right,” said Ami, turning back to him with the poker slightly raised and slightly trembling, rather as he was. “We’ll do it.”
He set down the pug on the stone. Hands at his side, he considered his man body and the memory of his cat body and how the two things were the same body but different in texture and movement. Deep inside himself there flowed a current like the stream of a river. He let his awareness sink into the current; he dropped into the flow where his cat body waited, ready to pour back into his flesh. He let the cat out and put the man in the river.
He changed.
A shiver flew through him. His body curled forward as it bristled with fur and claws and teeth. He huffed out a breath and brushed his whiskers along the pug’s body. It smelled better than he had been thinking it had smelled. Lots of nourishing fat! But not much time!
He pinned the body with a paw and carefully opened up the belly with a sideways tear. Blood oozed. He licked it up and pulled out flesh and liver and the fatty heart, leaving aside the intestines, working around the bones and spine. It was a pleasant morsel coming after the less appetizing peahen, which had been scrawny and dry. Sour blood and bits and scraps of fat and liver dribbled from his mouth. He settled onto his haunches and began cleaning himself. Then felt the sting of cold snow on his hindquarters, and wondered if there might be a more sheltered place to settle down.
Suddenly two larger morsels slipped in on either side of him. He sniffed. They smelled very tasty in a way he could not quite identify. He didn’t want to devour them, precisely; he wasn’t hungry, or at least, not in that way. A hand brushed his neck, then kneaded down the line of his spine. He rumbled, then began to purr.
“He’s so tame,” whispered the plumper one to the more muscled one.
The muscled one with the cloud of hair bent so close her breath misted along his muzzle and caressed his nose. The tips of her hair mingled with his whiskers, making him shiver with delight. “I don’t think he’s as tame as all that. If he would just change back into a man, we could find out.”
A man? What was a man? A man was shaped something like them, wasn’t it? Upright, a fast runner, but with flesh that was not very appetizing when it came down to it. He could be a man if he could just remember the way the river flowed and dive into it, even though water was not really to his liking. But their thighs brushing against his flanks made him think a swim might be worth it. Their hands petted him, and their voices murmured with crooning promises.
Anyway, he liked this new skill that was a sort of freedom. As a cub, he had learned to hunt. Hunting made him useful and gave him pleasure. Not being trapped in a single form gave him a weapon the poor creatures here in the Deathlands did not have, for they were confined into one form from birth until death. All they could do was grow, and die.
He twisted his thoughts inward and plunged into the current. The flow poured around him and through him and into him, and he made his thoughts take a man form. The change shuddered through him, and he became a man.
“That wasn’t too hard!” he said, rather delighted at himself for managing it so easily.
Think of what Cat would say! She would praise him, wouldn’t she? He was less sure of his mother’s opinion as she was always apt to give him a long reproachful look when he attempted to impress her as if to say ‘Why are you bothering me with these trivialities?’ He frowned. An unpleasant taste rimed his lips, and his paws—his hands—were streaked with blood and other more unsavory substances. He was sitting right by the ripped apart carcass of what had once been a small, fat, squashed-face dog. The intestines simply reeked, for although he had been careful not to puncture them, they had spilled anyway and the dog had voided in its last moments. His feet slipped in the mess.
He wrinkled up his nose, lifted a hand to his lips, and licked at it, but the taste made him gag.
“Hurry,” said Ami briskly, throwing the long shawl around him. “We have to get you inside before anyone sees you. But the dog . . .”
Felicia reached under her own skirts and pulled off her drawers. “I’ll wrap them up in these until we figure out how to hide them. The laundresses will just think I’m having my bleeding.”
He sniffed. “You aren’t bleeding, though. You’re not even in your fertile passage. Won’t people know it for a lie, if you say the blood is yours?”
She flushed. “How can you tell?”
“Can’t people smell here?” he
asked, astonished.
“That’s very rude to talk about people smelling,” said Ami in a kindly way meant, he supposed, to gently correct him. “But what did you mean, that she’s not in her fertile passage?”
Standing, he bent closer, pulling back his lips and brushing his cheek alongside Ami’s. She was attracted to him, that was obvious by her smell. “You’re not fertile at the moment either,” he said.
She drew back so sharply he thought he might have offended her, but when he examined her wide eyes and lifted chin, he thought instead she was merely startled.
“Did you want to be bred?” he asked. “If you’re not fertile, I can’t manage any breeding.”
“No, no, all the better,” she said with an arched eyebrow and a quizzical smile as she studied him. “Women would pay a lot to a man who could tell when they weren’t fertile. Especially one as attractive as you are.”
He almost said, “Am I?” but decided that since he knew he was and since he knew they thought he was, it might be unseemly to say so. So he merely smiled, to acknowledge what they all were happy was true.
Her smile sharpened, lips twitching up. “But I warn you, you’re a bit forward to say so, so bluntly, to two women you barely know.”
He coughed out a curt laugh. “Now you’re just teasing me. I can tell what your body is saying. But my apologies if I’m not to say so. I haven’t quite figured that out yet. My sister Cat is always correcting me. I have a lot to learn. As long as we don’t get caught with the corpse.”
Ami broke off to turn in the direction of voices sounding from inside.
He stepped back behind the row of potted shrubs as Fee bent to roll up the bloody skin and bones in her spotless white linen. The voices moved on, footsteps tap-tapping on wood flooring. No one came outside into the cold after all, like sensible people remaining indoors where there was warmth.
He was starting to shiver again. Out of the darkness, a voice called out a bellowing “halloo” and was echoed by a second, then a third, from farther out. A light swayed on the distant wall, a lantern being carried.
“Bright Venus,” said Fee, “you’re cold, you poor naked man. We’ve got a hot bath that the princess has rejected. Do you think we can sneak him in? She went to lie down, and she’ll want freshly heated water when she wakes.”