SS The Poop Thief (v5.0)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “With the help of your finely honed sense of the possible.”

  “That too.” He tilted his massive head and looked at me through those slanted brown eyes.

  My heart rate increased. Occasionally I still did feel like prey around him.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Have you ever thought that your culprit isn’t human?”

  “No,” I said. “Demons don’t care about familiars. Only mages do.”

  “Really.” He extended the word as if it were four. “Humans generally ignore scat, don’t they?”

  “Generally,” I said. “We try not to think about it.”

  “And yet those of us in the animal kingdom find within it a wealth of information.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But the amount of power it would take to complete this spell tends to rule out anything that isn’t human.”

  He made the same hairball sound that Fiona did. They were closer than they liked to admit.

  “You humans are such speciest creatures. It doesn’t help that the mage gods allow you the choices and we have to wait until you make them. It leads me to believe that the mage gods are human—or were, at one point.”

  I wasn’t there to discuss religion. “You’re telling me, then, that your finely honed sense of the possible leads you to the conclusion that a familiar has done this.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “A creature then. A magical creature of some kind.”

  He slitted his eyes, the feline equivalent of yes.

  “But you have no evidence,” I said.

  “I have plenty of evidence. Consider the timeline. It took you forever to discover this theft, and yet no bomb has exploded. No one has made threats, and no mage has suddenly gained unwarranted power.”

  “That’s not evidence. That’s supposition.”

  He lifted his majestic head. “Is it?”

  “So who do you suppose has stolen the poop—and why?”

  He rested his head on his paws and continued to stare at me. “That’s for you to work out.”

  “In other words, you don’t know.”

  “That’s correct. I don’t really know.”

  “But you’re not worried.”

  “Why should I worry? From my perspective, removing the scat is a prudent thing to do.”

  I hadn’t expected him to say that. “What do you mean?”

  He heaved a heavy, smelly sigh. “I’m a cat who lives in the wild. Think it through.”

  Then he jumped and I cringed as he headed right toward me. He landed beside me, chuckled and vanished through the tall grass.

  He’d gotten me again. He loved that. He’d probably been planning to jump near me through the entire conversation, his back feet tucked beneath him and poised, even though his front half looked relaxed.

  He wasn’t going to give me any more. He felt he didn’t need to.

  Cats in the wild.

  Cat poop in the wild.

  Hell, cat poop in the house. Cats were all the same.

  They buried their poop so no one could track them.

  The problem wasn’t the poop thief.

  The poop thief was protecting the wanna-bes from something else. Something that tracked through scat.

  Something that wasn’t human.

  I swore and bolted out of the habitat.

  I needed my research computer, and I needed it now.

  ***

  Very few things targeted familiars—or perhaps I should say very few non-human things. And I’d never heard of anything that targeted wanna-bes, because a wanna-be’s power, while considerable, wasn’t really honed.

  Wanna-bes were, for lack of a better term, the virgins of the familiar world.

  And nothing targeted virgins (not even those stupid civilian terrorists. They got virgins as a reward).

  So when I got out of the habitat, I had the computer search for strange creatures or things that targeted virgins. I got nothing.

  Except the search engine, asking me a pointed electronic question:

  Do you mean things that prefer virgins?

  And I, on a frustrated whim, typed yes.

  What I got was unicorns. Unicorns preferred virgins. In fact, unicorns would only appear to virgins. In fact, unicorns drew their magic from virgins.

  But the magic was pure and sweet and hearts and flowers and Hello Kitty and anything else treacly that you could think of.

  Except if the unicorn had become rabid.

  I clicked on the link, found several scholarly articles on rabies in unicorns. Rabid unicorns were slightly crazed. But more than that, they had no powers because no virgin (no matter how stupid) was going to go near a horse-sized creature that shouted obscenities and foamed at the mouth.

  That was stage one of the rabies. Unlike rabies in non magical creatures, rabies in unicorns (and centaurs and minotaurs and any other magical animal) manifested in temporary insanity, followed by darkness and pure evil.

  The craziness, in other words, went away, leaving nastiness in its wake.

  Minotaurs, centaurs, and other such creatures attacked each other. They stole from the nearest mage—or enthralled him, stealing his magic before they killed him.

  But unicorns…

  Unicorns still needed virgins.

  And the only solution was to steal the powers of wanna-be familiars.

  Provided, of course, that the unicorn could find them.

  And unicorns, like most other animals, hunted by scat.

  ***

  I wish I could say I got my giant unicorn-killing musket out of mothballs and carried it through an enchanted forest, hunting a brilliant yet evil unicorn that wanted to devour the untamed magic of wanna-be familiars.

  I wish I could say I was the one who shot that unicorn with a bullet of pure silver and then got photographed with one foot on its side and the other on the ground, leaning on my musket like hunters of old.

  I wish I could say I was the one who cut off its horn, then snapped the thing in half, watching the dark magic dissipate as if it never was.

  But I can’t.

  Technically, I’m not allowed to leave the store.

  So I had to call in the Homeland Security—Magical Branch anyway. I could have called the local mage police, but I wasn’t sure where this unicorn was operating, and HS-MB had contacts worldwide.

  They found four rabid unicorns all in the same forest, somewhere in Russia, along with a few rabid squirrels (probably the source of the infection) and a rabid magical faun that was going around murdering all the bears for sport.

  The unicorns died along with the squirrels and that faun. The poop reappeared in my computer system, and went back through the normal channels. That week, we made double our money on magical fertilizer, which was good since we’d made none the week before.

  All seemed right with the magical world.

  Except one thing.

  I dragged Fiona to her habitat so I could confront both her and Roy.

  They usually didn’t spend much time together. They blamed it on not really having a pride, but I knew the problem was Fiona. She hated having to hunt for him, then watch him eat the best parts.

  She hated most things about feline life and once muttered, as yet another well adjusted young mage took a domestic cat as her familiar, that she wished she were small and cute and cuddly.

  She had to fetch Roy. He wasn’t going to come. He hadn’t even attacked me as I entered the habitat—probably because Fiona was with me.

  I waited as he climbed to the top of his rock, then assumed the same position he’d been in before he jumped at me. Only this time I was prepared. I had my sunglasses and my water bottle.

  I also stood a few feet to the right of my previous position, a place he couldn’t get to from the top of that rock.

  Fiona sat at the base of the rock, beneath the outcropping, in the only stretch of shade in this part of the plain.

  “You want to tell me how you did it?” I asked when Roy finall
y got comfortable. He sent me an annoyed look when he realized that I had stationed myself outside of his range. “You knew that there was a rabid unicorn after wanna-bes, and you somehow got the entire group at Familiar Faces to cooperate with you, all without leaving your habitat.”

  Then I looked at Fiona. She had left the habitat. She left it every single day.

  The tip of her tail twitched, and she tilted her head ever so slightly, her eyes twinkling. But she said nothing.

  Roy preened. He licked a paw, then wiped his face. Finally he looked at me, the hairs of his mane in place, looking as majestic as a lion should.

  “I am king of the jungle,” he said.

  This is a plain, I wanted to point out, but I didn’t for fear of silencing him. Instead I said, “Yet some of the other familiars don’t live in habitats like yours. The snakes, for example.”

  He yawned. “The unicorn wasn’t after them.”

  “But the animals?” I asked.

  He closed his great mouth, then leaned his head downward, so that his gaze met mine. “The Russian Blues are refugees. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  I got two domestic cats—purebred Russian Blues. Most purebred cats aren’t familiars—they have the magic bred out of them with all the other mixed genes—but these Blues were amazing. And pretty. And not that willing to talk, even when they knew it was the price of gaining a mage.

  “Refugees?” I said. “They were adopted before?”

  “Their mages murdered by the new secret police for being terrorists. I thought you checked all of this out.”

  I tried to, but I never could. Animal histories weren’t always that easy to find.

  “They’d heard rumors about something rabid getting into an enchanted forest somewhere in deepest darkest Russia. Then some young familiars—what you call wanna-bes—withered and died as their powers were sucked from them over a period of months.”

  He tilted his head, as if I could finish his thought.

  And I could.

  “So the Blues suspected unicorns,” I said.

  “There were always rumors of unicorns in that forest,” he said, “but of course, none of us had ever seen them. For normal unicorns, you need virginal humans. None of us had encountered abnormal unicorns before.”

  I did the math. The Blues had arrived last Thursday, which was the last day Carmen had worked before Tuesday, when she discovered the problem.

  “You went into protect mode immediately,” I said.

  “It is my pride, whether you admit it or not.”

  I didn’t admit it, but I understood how he thought so. He needed a tribe to rule, so he invented one.

  “I still don’t understand what happened. You don’t have the magic to make other animals’ poop disappear.”

  “But they do,” he said.

  “I know that.” I tried not to sound annoyed. He was toying with me again. I hated being a victim of cat playfulness.

  “So how did you tell them what to do?”

  He opened his mouth slightly, in that cat-grin of his. Then he got up, shook his mane, and walked back down the rock. He vanished in the tall grass, disappearing against its browness as if he had never been.

  “He could tell me,” I said.

  “No, he can’t.” Fiona hadn’t moved.

  I let out a small sigh. He hadn’t been toying with me. She had.

  “You did it,” I said.

  “Me and the bees,” she said. “They’re creating quite a little communications network with those hive minds of theirs. They send little scouts into the other habitats every single time you go from one to the other. The ants too. You really should be more careful.”

  I felt a little frisson of worry. I had had no idea. I didn’t want the bees to get delusions of grandeur. I already had to deal with Roy.

  “You told them to spread the word.”

  She nodded.

  “And you told them how the animals could hide their poop.”

  She inclined her head as regally—more regally—than Roy ever could.

  “Why?” I asked. “You had no guarantee of a threat.”

  “This is the biggest gathering of the Hopeful on the globe,” she said. “Of course we are a target.”

  She was right. I sighed, took a sip from my water bottle, and frowned. This entire event had opened my eyes to a lot of scary possibilities, things I had never considered.

  We were going to have to rethink the way we handled waste. We were going to have to protect the poop somehow, and I didn’t want to consult HS-MB about that. They’d have to hold hearings, and the wrong someone could be sitting in.

  I didn’t want us to become a magical terrorism target, nor did I want us to be a target for every rabid unicorn in the world.

  I would have to set up the systems myself.

  “You need me,” Fiona said, “whether you like it or not. You can’t have pretend familiars. You need a real one.”

  She was making a pitch. Cats never did that. Or they only did so if they believed something was important.

  “Why here?” I asked. “I’ve found you some pretty spectacular possible mage partners, and you’ve turned them down.”

  She wrapped her tail around her paws and stared at me. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

  Then she said, “This is my pride. Roy might think it his, but he’s a typical lion. He thinks he’s in charge, when I do all the work.”

  She raised her chin. That tuft of hair that all lionesses had beneath looked more like a mane in the shade than it ever had. It made her look regal.

  “Well,” she added, “I’m not a typical lioness, content to hunt for her man and to feel happy when he fathers a litter of kittens on her only to run them out when they threaten his little kingdom. I don’t want children. And I want to eat first.”

  “You can do that with other mages,” I said.

  “But I won’t have a pride. Don’t you see? I’m the one who spoke to the Blues. I’m the one who keeps track of those silly mice—even though I want to eat them—and I’m the one who calms the elephant whenever she has the vapors. No one credits me for it, of course, but it’s time they should.”

  No one, meaning me. I hadn’t noticed, and Fiona was bitter. Or maybe she just felt that I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain.

  “Besides,” she said, “it’s hot in here. Can we go back to the air conditioning?”

  I laughed and stepped out of the habitat. She followed.

  “I’ll petition the mage gods,” I said.

  “I already did.” She was walking beside me as we headed toward the front room. “They said yes. I put their response under the cash register.”

  We went through the portal. The mice were having a party on top of the cheese books. One of the snakes was dancing too, trying to come out of its basket like a charmed snake from the movies. The dance was a bit pathetic, since the snake was the wrong kind. It was the tiniest of my garden snakes.

  They all stopped when they saw me. I looked toward mall’s interior. The customer door was closed and locked and the main lights were off. The closed sign sat in the window.

  Carmen had gone home long ago.

  I went to the cash register and felt underneath it. Some dust, some old gum—and yes, a response from the mage gods, dated months ago.

  “You took a long time to tell me this,” I said to Fiona.

  She wrapped herself around the counter. “You should clean more.”

  Come to think of it, a few months before was when she really started muttering her protests out loud. In English. She was doing everything felinely possible except blurting it out that she was now my familiar.

  I had never heard of a familiar picking a mage.

  Although that wasn’t really true. The familiars always made their preferences known. I knew how to read the signs. For everyone, it seemed, but me.

  “Do you regret this?” Fiona asked quietly.

  “Hell, no,” I said. “Your brillian
ce averted a major international incident and saved the lives of hundreds of familiars.”

  “Don’t you think that makes me deserving of some salmon?”

  I almost said I think that makes you deserving of anything you damn well please, and then I remembered that I was talking to a cat. A large, independent-minded, magical cat, but a cat all the same.

  “Salmon it is,” I said and snapped a finger. A plate appeared with the thickest, juiciest salmon steak I could conjure.

  I set it down next to her.

  “Next time,” she said, “you’re taking me out.”

  “Restaurants don’t allow animals,” I said. “At least, not in Chicago.”

  “I wasn’t talking about a restaurant,” she said. “I meant a salmon fishery or perhaps one of those spawning grounds in the wild. I heard there’s a species of lion who hunts those grounds.”

  “Sea lions,” I said. “You’re not related.”

  She chuckled, then wrapped her tail around my legs, nearly knocking me over. Affection from my lioness.

  From my familiar.

  However I had expected my day to end, it hadn’t been like this.

  Carmen was right. This day had been weird.

  But good.

  “So are you going to promise to take me to a fishery after the next time I save lives?” Fiona asked.

  “I suppose,” I said, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

  Fiona licked her lips and closed her eyes. The mice started dancing all over again, and chimpanzees came out of the back to see what the commotion was.

  After a weird day, a normal night.

  And I found, to my surprise, that I preferred normal to weird.

  Maybe I was getting soft.

  Maybe I was getting older.

  Or maybe I had just realized that I was a mage with a familiar, a powerful smart familiar, one I could appreciate.

  One who would keep me and my animals safe.

  One who would rule her pride with efficiency and not a little playfulness.

  I could live with that.

  I had a hunch she could too.

  First published in Enchantment Place, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2008.