My Cat is The Antichrist

by J B Trepagnier

  “Bash, you make drinks for your friends and Lizzie can make mine. She knows what I like, and she works at a bar with me.”

  Pretty soon, we were all sitting on the huge sectional with drinks. I shooed Drake off Lizzie’s lap when he went to curl up there. My twin was apparently a creeper. Zed leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

  “I’m sure you have a million questions, Tabitha. Where should we start?”

  “All I was told was that none of the families knew about Drake and me and there’s some urban legend about my parents missing. Does that urban legend have something to do with the cat having telepathy?”

  “You were given background about the tribe and families? The families are all descendants. Your father’s family, the Lambs, they descended from Judah. The original tribe mostly stayed the same, but they took in other families. Your mother’s family, the Rothledges, they are descendants of Judas. The reason the two families were told never to mix was that at least one of their offspring would be the Antichrist.”

  “If Drake and I are twins, what does that mean? And why didn’t my parents bother with fucking condoms if they knew one of their kids was going to be the damned Antichrist?”

  “Your parents watched you as you grew. Drake was the Antichrist, and you were the Lamb of God. Drake can’t open the seals. Only you can do that. Your parents knew. They saw you loved him and you followed him everywhere. They worried about what would happen when you were older. Drake would know who he was, but you wouldn’t. They worried Drake would convince you to break all of the seals because you loved him. Your parents were scared one night. You and Drake were playing. He put a pillow over your face and sat on it. If they hadn’t come in, you would have suffocated. You were both only two. They used old magic to put Drake in the cat and sent you away. I don’t think they realized you’d grow up so strong-willed,” Zed said, smiling.

  “That still doesn’t explain why Drake and I were born in the first place. I’m not even supposed to be giving birth to the damned Antichrist, and I double up on birth control, so I don’t get pregnant.”

  “They did. The elder that gave your parents her blessing to marry did it with the condition your father get a vasectomy. This apocalypse, it’s not right. It was forced. It was always supposed to happen in its own time. Elliot Lamb is not your father. Someone else with Lamb blood was aware of what would happen and raped your mother.”

  I already knew. He didn’t have to tell me. It was the entire reason I was here. “Mattan,” I growled. “It’s the reason he’s been trying to get me to trust him and the reason Drake likes him so much.”

  “Yes,” Bash said, nodding. “The world is not ready for the apocalypse. It’s not time yet. We come when the seals are broken, but what happens next it up to you, Tabitha.”

  “Why me and not Drake? Don’t you answer to him?”

  Chase grinned. “Actually, no. You and Drake are two sides to a coin. The Horsemen are not from hell like you seem to think. Drake has no control over us. It’s up to you whether you break the other seals and start the apocalypse. Drake is here to trick you and make you doubt your judgment, so you do break the seals. The entire goal of the apocalypse is to create a new heaven and earth. Drake is here to prevent Satan from being bound and for the two of them to rule the new heaven and earth. We carry out your orders, not his. If you don’t want us to do a thing except sit here and look pretty, we’ll do that.”

  “So, what do we do with Drake? He apparently wants back in his body to creep on my best friend who isn’t even interested in men.”

  Gideon cleared his throat. “Lizzie isn’t just your best friend. None of us have any idea how this happened, but you and Lizzie are so close and have stuck together because Lizzie is part of the apocalypse too.”

  “What? I’m just an orphan from Kentucky.”

  “Clearly, not. You’re one of the Witnesses. There’s another one out there, and I’m guessing they ended up in foster care somewhere too. You probably have ties to Salem and the original families.”

  “You’re not seriously going to tell me there are more than three secret babies here?”

  “Not at all,” Zed said. “Family members have left Salem, been disowned, and ended up all over the place. You could have been the child of a sixteen-year-old runaway or someone who left and couldn’t take care of a child.”

  “How do we find out who Lizzie’s parents are?” I asked.

  Chase grinned at me. “We train and prepare while we wait. Conquest and War, in the modern age, aren’t done much on the battlefield anymore. It’s done from behind a computer. Between Gideon and me, we can hack anything because this wasn’t supposed to happen right now. We can find out where Lizzie comes from. She deserves to know.”

  Lizzie and I exchanged glances and didn’t have to say a word. Nothing came for free, and no one helped you unless there was something in it for them. Even this house didn’t come for free. It came with the fucking Antichrist, and I had no idea if I was supposed to house and feed four Horsemen who looked like they could put away epic amounts of food or if I would be breaking some sort of heaven or hell protocol if I told them to get a hotel room. Did the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have debit cards?

  All four men seemed to be able to read Lizzie and me just as well as we could read each other. They were all looking at me like they knew I thought they were full shit and I was figuring out how to give them the boot. I wanted to punch all four of them in the face because they were looking at us like they felt sorry for us.

  “You and Lizzie need each other, and you both need all four of us to protect you from Drake,” Zed said. “Mattan too. No one is happy Mattan jumped the gun on the apocalypse, but Mattan is going to try to help Drake. Drake will try to trick Tabitha, and it is written the Beast kills the Witness.”

  “So, why don’t we just have the cat put to sleep?” I asked. Twin or not, I didn’t know him, he’d been lying to me this entire time, and no one killed Lizzie except me.

  “Because Drake can’t be killed by a vet or anyone in this room. It’s safest to keep him in the cat for now.”

  “Where is Drake?” Lizzie asked. “He’s always been pretty reactive when we say anything about him. He would have mauled someone by now for plotting to kill him.”

  Lizzie was right. While we were talking and I was worried about that damned cat killing my soul sister, we’d all lost track of Drake.

  Gideon stood up. It was like this wind developed that blew his hair back and don’t ask me where the fuck that huge sword came from. Chase was sporting a huge bow. Zed and Bash both had nasty looking guns on them. They all had some sort of wind blowing their hair back, and I guess I couldn’t deny they were actually who they said they were now. They looked the part, and there was only one place Gideon could have been hiding that sword, and he wouldn’t have been able to sit.

  “Spread out. Check the room Drake’s body was in. Now that Drake knows Mattan is his father, he could have called to him. If Drake knows any of the secret ways in and out of this house, then Mattan does. Bash, stay with Tabitha and Lizzie while we check things out.”

  Bash went to stand in the archway and Lizzie, and I just stared at each other.

  “Girl, just when I think our lives can’t get more fucked up, your twin is the Antichrist stuck in a cat and now he might be on the loose.”

  Chapter 14

  Well, we were certainly fucked. Sure, I had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse here with me, but Drake, both in his cat form and human form had shit the bed and disappeared. I was certain he was with his, well, our father and Mattan was trying to put him back together again like if Humpty Dumpty was the Antichrist. The problem was, no one knew if Mattan had that ability.

  Everyone seemed to think I was safe. Mattan and Drake needed me to break the other seals to start the apocalypse. Lizzie voiced my opinion without me having to. I totally wasn’t safe, and neither was Lizzie. They could capture both of us and force me so they wouldn’t hurt her. T
he beast was supposed to kill Lizzie, and I wouldn’t put it past Drake to turn her into some sort of sex slave first. Drake was technically a virgin and Lizzie was hot as shit. Everyone loved Lizzie, even if she mostly hated everyone and everything except blondes with big boobs who treated her like shit.

  It had been two days since Drake disappeared. The Four Horsemen were both growing on me and annoying me. They all had totally distinct personalities. Chase had his baggage about how people saw his role, but he was Conquest all the way. He was a huge flirt, but he managed to do it in a way that didn’t set off my creep radar at all like he did the first day. It was more this playful banter, and I’ll be honest, it was working. The fact that he wore his white hair long and looked like an elf from a movie wasn’t helping me keep any type of resolve not to fuck him.

  Gideon was on guard the most with his sword, but he also insisted on helping Lizzie learn what she was supposed to be doing as a witness. I wasn’t shocked when he told us both she was supposed to have the gift of prophecy, but we both thought it was totally badass when we found out she could breathe fire. Lizzie always seemed to know when to dump someone before they could dump her and she seemed to know with my relationships too. She also could have made bank predicting the weather.

  Gideon was patient with both of us as we cut up and weren’t acting as seriously as we should be while he tried to help us. Gideon was pulling double duty. He took turns not sleeping at night guarding the house, and when he wasn’t helping Lizzie train, he was helping Chase find out where she came from. He was doing all of this for Lizzie, but I felt his eyes on me when he thought I wasn’t looking.

  Zed was Justice through and through. When it was his turn to guard Lizzie and me, we got an earful, and we knew he was an ally. Zed thought what happened to both of us growing up was horrible. Zed’s rants were like my inner thoughts I hadn’t said out loud yet. None of this would be happening right now if my parents had gotten me out of just one of the shitty situations I ended up in and prepared me for this. Drake would never have been able to trick me into breaking those seals if I had been warned about Drake. The child that followed Drake around like a puppy died after a few years growing up in the foster homes I ended up at. There were plenty of good foster homes, I just didn’t get sent to any of them, and neither did Lizzie.

  Zed was angry about our situation, but he kept saying my parents just didn’t know better with what they had thrust on them. He blamed everything on Mattan. Zed was planning some epic justice for Mattan. He had several ideas, but he hadn’t settled on one yet. He just kept saying Mattan fucked up the scales and he couldn’t let that pass. He also wanted my permission for when Mattan got his due. They all wanted permission for everything. Having four hot men asking my permission for everything was going to give me a fat head.

  Bash was not how I pictured Death at all. He looked like he could kill someone just by giving them stink eye, but he cut up more than Lizzie and me. Bash was fucking hilarious. Lizzie and I decided he was part of our tribe after a few hours of him guarding us, even if he wasn’t a girl and didn’t even remotely act like one. Bash may have even had a sicker sense of humor than I did and his favorite subject right now was hairless cat jokes and making fun of Drake being stuck in a cat for so long.

  I thought we should be on the offensive, not the defensive. Lizzie and I both thought we should storm Mattan’s house, kill Mattan, and stick Drake in a frog this time. We were all gathered together, and I was voicing that opinion again.

  “Tabby, love, if we storm Mattan’s estate, he’s probably got security cameras. We’d be playing right into Mattan and Drake’s hands. Mattan and Drake could get control over you and Lizzie,” Chase said, massaging my shoulders.

  “Not if Mattan is dead and Drake is in a frog,” I groaned, trying not to enjoy Chase’s massage.

  Lizzie was technically the only person allowed to call me Tabby, but all the guys had started, and I found it didn’t piss me off.

  I heard a deep, sexy chuckle behind me that could only belong to Bash. His voice did things to me. “If I’d known a backrub was the solution to get her to argue less, I would have tried that the first day she broke the seals.”

  Zed just rolled his eyes. “If you laid a hand on her, she would have made good on that threat to put her boot up your ass.”

  “The three of you have gotten a little too fond of flirting with Tabby instead of worrying about Mattan and Drake,” Gideon said. I wished he would let loose every once in a while. “Tabby is right though. Just because they haven’t come here yet doesn’t mean they aren’t plotting. Mattan is a lawyer, and Drake is the Antichrist. Between the two of them, they could be coming up with anything.”

  “Do any of you know enough about the law to read the papers Mattan had Tabby sign?” Lizzy asked. “What if there’s something in there that Tabby has to share this house with Drake? That’s what the two of them could be up to — trying to get Drake back in his body and planting him in the house. None of you have explained how Drake got into the cat in the first place. Figuring that out would tell us if they managed to make Drake a real boy again.”

  I finally saw a grin from Gideon. His facial features were sharp and angular. It was nice to see a grin on his face, especially a goofy one like that.

  “Finally, the witness contributes something useful. Give it a few more days, and you’ll be spewing prophecy and fire.”

  I knew Lizzie liked the Four Horsemen. Well, Lizzie liked me with the Four Horsemen. She thought with everything going on, I needed to get laid, and any one of them would do.

  Lizzie just smiled sweetly at Gideon. “I wear taller heels than Tabby does.”

  I had no idea this was possible for him, but Gideon fell out laughing. “So, we need to explain Drake, the cat first,” he said when he calmed down. “People didn’t just make up witches and start burning people for no reason. They never actually burned a real witch as far as I know, but the families here in Salem kept several witches safe during the witch trials. Have you heard of familiars?”

  Lizzie and I both grew up poor, but we had active library cards and read all the time. Nothing that would have prepared me for the apocalypse and Drake, but we both loved a good witchy paranormal story. We both nodding emphatically. We both knew various fictional theories, but I had a feeling Gideon was about to ruin our favorite genre and tell us the truth.

  “The way familiars are normally made is by calling forth the spirit of an ancestor and asking the animal permission to allow the spirit in. Your mother broke several laws of nature putting Drake in the cat, but she kept Drake and Mattan apart. She should have picked another animal. It was Drake that tripped them when they fell down the stairs,” Gideon explained.

  My mouth was hanging open, but Lizzie was furious. “Just when I was starting to like you. You can’t drop that bomb while you're trying to explain how Drake got into the fucking cat. Save the parricide until after we’ve got a full picture of how Tabby’s twin got into a fucking cat in the first place. Got it, asshole?”

  Gideon just sat there, looking shocked. He looked like he didn’t know what to say. Bash walked over and walloped him over the head.

  “Gideon, I’m Death, and even I have more sensitivity in my pinky than you do in your entire body. I’m putting you in time out. Let the rest of us talk for the rest of the day. How are you, Tabby? Do you need something? Waffles? A group hug? Do you want to punch Gideon?”

  I don’t know why I wasn’t reacting that Drake killed my mother. I was pissed Gideon chose to drop it in the middle of the explanation of how Drake ended up in the cat, but I wasn’t exactly shocked he committed murder. He was the Antichrist, and I was looking at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because he tricked me.

  “I’m not a baby, and I can mourn my mother after Drake and Mattan are taken care of. We still don’t know how Drake got into the cat without anyone knowing about it. Drake said his body was in a coma in another room. That’s not a spirit. Drake was a toddler when he wa
s put in the cat. What exactly was taken out of the toddler and put into the cat and how?” I demanded.

  Chase went back to massaging my shoulders. I guess they thought I was going to lose my shit because Zed grabbed my feet and hauled them into his lap. I wasn’t wearing my fuck me boots today and was barefoot. Zed was just as good a foot massages as Chase was at backrubs. Gideon decided not to speak after Bash smacked him up the back of the head. Bash finished the story.

  “What your mother did to Drake, it was in a book she burned as well as how to reverse it. What they did to Drake was not the first time it’s been done. Sometimes, a witch will go dark. If they are spurned by a lover or someone shorts them in a deal enough to piss them off, they’d stick them in a toad and bury their body. Ever been told the wicked witch will turn you into a toad? There’s some truth to that.”

  “So, why didn’t my parent’s bury Drake’s body? Why did they keep in in a coma?”

  “I suspect because they didn’t know what would happen to it. Drake is only supposed to be able to die by being thrown into the lake of fire. But with him being put into a cat like that, I suppose they thought they neutralized him.”

  “So, that solves that with some unnecessary drama from Gideon. Do all of the families know the same spell my mother did? Does Mattan know?”

  “I think it’s safe to say if Mattan doesn’t, Drake will. Drake made his move now because he had all the pieces,” Zed said. “The Antichrist is cunning. Drake has always known who he was, even as a baby. You didn’t. He was trying to gain your trust and love when you didn’t know better. Your parents knew this. They didn’t know you yet. I think you would have grown into a badass even if you stayed here and you could have been warned about Drake.”

  “If you don’t want us storming Mattan’s place because of security cameras and you claim you’re such badasses with computers, why don’t you just hack his system, so we know what’s going on in there?” Lizzie asked.

  All four of the Horsemen were grinning. Chase nearly threw me off the couch jumping to get to his computer. “If one witness is already helping, thinking about what we could do with the other one? Gideon, you work on trying to get into Mattan’s security system. I’m focusing all my efforts into looking into Lizzie’s past and trying to find the other witness.”