by Jack Truxton
You would have thought that the twins were kids on Christmas with the way their eyes lit up. Jimmy guffawed and pumped his fist, while Bimmy clapped his brother on the back and beamed with child-like glee. “Good boss!” he grunted. “Okay, Ny! We go!”
Jimmy glanced over at his brother, rubbing the back of his head. “We can visit mama, yeah?”
“Yeah!” was Bimmy’s immediate reply, but even though Nyala had already given them free license, the giant still gave her a sheepish, pleading look. “If it okay with Ny and boss?”
“It’s okay,” I found myself saying automatically, even though I wasn’t in the room, Nyala saying it almost simultaneously with me. Bimmy and Jimmy both cheered enthusiastically and, I kid you not, scampered out of that room like someone had just rung the recess bell at school.
As they beat feet, giving us a bit more time to plan our next move, I already realized that maybe Nyala’s idea of turning this organization around to use for our little revolution might be easier than any of us expected. It was obvious that Mario had found ways to sink hooks into the twins, manipulating and controlling them.
“Nyala, start compiling all the records Romine kept on everyone under him,” I said the moment Annie and I stepped out of Mario’s old playroom. The business Kat turned on her heel to look at us, tail twitching inquisitively at my request. “I’m going to guess that Mario was a real manipulative asshole, and I want to see what he’s done to everyone here.”
“Oh!” Annie cried. “You’re going to clean out the closets!” She mimed a sweeping motion as she twirled around the office, and both Nyala and I stared a moment in confusion.
“Wait,” Nyala said as she tilted her head to one side, “are you talking about skeletons in the closet, Annie? Because if you are, I don’t think what you’re saying still makes much sense …”
“Right!” Annie grinned at Nyala, clasping her hands behind her back. “Well, wrong, because it totally makes sense if you think about it, but yeah, skeletons in the closet!”
I chuckled as I shook my head. “I’m with Nyala in that I think you’re mixing metaphors or maybe completely scrambling them, but you’re also not entirely wrong.” Turning back to Nyala, I gestured to where the twins had just been. “What I’m thinking is that if Romine had something on Candy, the twins, Colonel Mustard—”
“Colonel Mustard?” Nyala asked with a quirked eyebrow, her lip curled up in an amused smirk. “You mean, Richard, the doorman that went home sick right after he escorted you upstairs?”
“That’s him!” Annie supplied happily. “Jake’s not as persuasive as we are, Nyala, but he’s not bad either!”
I raised my hands to silence both of them. “What I’m trying to say is that if Romine did even half the horrible things to his staff I think he did, then we have an easy way to get them on our side.” I looked from Nyala to Annie and back with a smile. “We free them, just like I freed you two.”
17
I couldn’t have known just how far the rabbit hole things would go with Romine’s past dealings until Nyala started going through the employee records and the dead criminal’s business over the past few months. With a pot of coffee and some Doughnut Emperor take-out that had been delivered to the office by Candy at Nyala’s request, the business Kat and I sat down at a side table to go over it bit by bit, Annie adding her input while she cleaned up the bloody aftermath of our brawl.
Though I wasn’t paying attention to her every movement, I noticed some of the more disturbing bits from the private bedroom made their way down the incinerator chute.
“God, now I wish I had been wrong,” I said with a sigh, rubbing my hands over my face. Though my stomach should have turned with all the horrible things I was learning, I couldn’t resist taking another bite of mouth-watering Chocolate Crown Kruller. “But look at all this.” I swiped the integrated terminal in the tabletop. “Mario has blackmail material on Candy’s son’s drug problem, Richard’s gambling debts, and is the sole person financing Bimmy and Jimmy’s grandmother’s cancer treatments. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Nyala nodded slowly as her tail hung low as her shoulders sagged. “I’m sorry, Jake. I wish I did more to thwart Mario’s excesses, but … he was my Master.” She bit her lip with one of those cute fangs. “I tried to at least show dignity and respect to the people I could, but if I ever went too far … well, let’s just say a Control Wand was only the start of what he would do to me.”
“That’s terrible!” Annie shivered, hugging herself at the very thought of it. “Why are so many Masters and Mistresses so mean?” Her blue eyes lit up though as she cracked a smile. “At least, thanks to Jake, you don’t have to worry about those mean old pheromones anymore!”
Nyala shook her head, the perfect bob of red hair bouncing as she did so. “I know that should be a comfort, and it is, but … none of this excuses what I let happen.” She looked up at me with those golden eyes starting to water. “And that’s not the worst of it.”
“Before you go any further,” I began softly, soothingly, reaching out across the table for her hand, “you have to stop blaming yourself, no matter what Romine made you do. He was a monster, and with the chains that Katsukami put inside of you, there was nothing you could really do. The fact that you tried at all speaks volumes to me about how good of a person you are.”
Unable to keep that cool professional demeanor, Nyala sniffled, unable to hold back her tears, but she did grasp my hand with both of hers, trying to find comfort there. “Thank you for saying so, Jake. I know you’re right, so many times I tried to do something only to have my body and mind betray me, but …”
I put my free hand over hers and squeezed comfortingly. “Stop. Stop right there.” Her golden eyes met my brown ones, and I could see both the pain there and the desire, the need for something to soothe away that pain. “If you go down that hole, constantly chase your tail in guilt, you won’t help anyway. All you’ll do is hurt yourself for no reason … and you’ll hurt anyone who cares about you.”
“But who could care about me? Really?” Nyala tore her gaze away, squeezing her eyes shut. “I know you said you do, and I think that you believe that, but …” Her ears fell, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I have a hole in me, Jake, and I don’t know how to fill it. I’ve been Romine’s plaything for nine years, and I don’t know what that makes me now.”
Annie’s tail was twitching as she looked on, her eyes glimmering as she looked at, well, me to fix this. I gave a brief sidelong smile of reassurance before I stood up, drawing Nyala up with me.
“It makes you a person, just like the rest of us,” I said softly, walking around the table and never letting go of Nyala’s hands. “And all you need, well, as sappy as it sounds, is tender, loving care. The same thing we all need.”
We were close now, practically chest to chest, her body warm, tense, and she looked up at me, her eyes opening again. “I … I would want that, Jake, to be loved. I wasn’t lying when I said that I owed you everything … that I would do anything to fulfill your desires.”
Annie was practically vibrating, her tail quivering and her eyes wide with anticipation. “Milk and cream, this is just like a romance vid!” Well, if I had any worries about how Annie would feel about this, they were gone now, and Nyala was still regarding me as if Annie hadn’t spoken a word.
And, much like Annie, Nyala and I just seemed to fit together. I couldn’t deny the draw of her sharp beauty and need to be loved, and the quivering of her tail and bright eyes made her own want for me obvious. She rose up on her toes and I bent down, our lips meeting in a soft, tender kiss.
After a long moment of bliss, we parted our lips, a soft smile on the business Kat’s lips. “Thank you, Jake,” she murmured, tears gone now.
I nodded, matching her smile. “And thank you, Nyala. I’m not going to leave you, and I’ll always take care of you.”
“Not just you, Jake!” Annie cried, literally vaulted the oak desk to hug Nyala, almost takin
g her and, by connection, me to the plush carpet below. “Oh, Nyala! I thought I had it bad, but I was only going to get melted into goo! I’m so sorry! I’ll help take care of you too, nurse’s honor!”
Fortunately, between Nyala’s cat-like balance and my grip on her arm, no one tumbled to the ground, and, well, the tackle-hug did the last bit of work needed to break the business Kat out of her slump. Flushing a bit as Annie rubbed into her cheek-to-cheek, Nyala tried to squirm out of Annie’s grasp while still keeping a hold of me.
“Okay, okay, Annie, I’m fine now,” she gasped, “but thank you.”
Annie gave Nyala a skeptical look, then flashed a sidelong glance at me. “Jake?”
I flashed her a confident smile. “I think she’s going to be okay. Job well done, Nurse Annie!”
With my assurance, Annie let go her death grip of love, bounced to her feet, and snapped off a salute. “I never lose a patient!” She rubbed her chin as she daintily walked back to where she was cleaning. “I still think we need cool names. Nebula Nurse? Maybe.”
“We’ll discuss that later, Annie.”
“Okay, because I’ve got a couple others too.” She covered her eyes with her hands, so she was peeking between her fingers. “I could be Night Nurse. The terror that heals in the night.” She bounced. “Or, what about the Nursinator!” She fixed me in her gaze. “I’ll be back!” She paused. “No… that’s not right… hmm…” As she started to mumble names to herself, I shrugged and looked back to Nyala.
“So, because you brought it up, what is this worst of all thing? Please don’t tell me that Mario ran a puppy mill, but instead of puppies, it was babies or something sick like that.”
Nyala’s eyes went wide, her ears shooting up in alarm as we sat back down at the table. “Oh, whiskers, nothing quite that loathsome, but not that far off either.” She let out a low, long sigh. “Romine did freelance work for Katsukami … as a Kat Katcher. That Mr. Johnson Candy mentioned when I had her cancel the appointments? That’s Romine’s contact with the company.”
Deviancy in Wonder Kats wasn’t an unknown thing, even as the design process achieved that lofty 97% degree of accuracy. The official line was that when Kats went bad, Katsukami-licensed Kat Katchers went out to collar the deviants for reprogramming and retraining at one of the company’s clean, modern, and humane facilities. Now that I knew what reprogramming really meant, the rest of it was likely a crock of horseshit as well.
Especially with an asshole like Romine being one of those Katchers.
“Wow,” I muttered, letting Nyala’s hand go after one last squeeze as I settled back into my chair. “I guess that explains why you never had to follow protocols to call the police for Mario’s crimes, doesn’t it?”
Nyala nodded slowly, folding her hands delicately in her lap. “Yes. Mr. Johnson, as a company representative, had the required access to give me certain overriding directives. As long as Romine did what they asked, Johnson kept those commands on me. It’s one of the things that let that … monster … do what he wanted to with … me.” She looked up at me, eyes pained as the fur on her tail started to stand on end in anger. “And Johnson let him have his way with the Kats he caught before turning them in.”
Annie hissed with more venom than I thought her bouncy heart could produce, and I matched it with a growl in the back of my throat. My fists clenched into hammers, and the irrational part of me wanted to drag his fat ass back up out of Hell to kill him again. It was Nyala leaning forward, putting a soothing hand on my thigh that made the red in my eyes clear away.
“But you stopped him, Jake,” she said softly. “And this Mr. Johnson might be someone we can get information out of so we can free more Kats. He has to have access to company databases, locations of collection points where the Katchers drop off ‘deviant’ Kats, and intelligence on Katsukami’s plans.”
I nodded fiercely. “You reschedule this Mr. Johnson’s appointment, and then he’ll come right to us. We catch him here, then find out everything he knows.”
“And then we can free more of our sisters,” Annie intoned, that rarely-heard, dead-serious tone in her voice as she clenched a hand into a fist that she placed over her heart. “The first real blow in the war for freedom!”
“Exactly,” I said with a nod, giving Nyala’s hand a pat as I leaned forward once more. As she smiled at me, I tapped the table’s display, bringing up a tiled series of windows detailing Romine’s leverage on the rest of his employees. “If we want to make this work, we definitely need everyone on board. While I don’t think there’s anything they could do to stop us from getting to Johnson, if they aren’t working with us, they might wind up disrupting our interrogation of him, either on purpose or accident.”
“Agreed.” Nyala sat back in her chair, doing that absolutely mesmerizing crossing of her seemingly endless legs again. “We will only have one shot at this. If Mr. Johnson manages to somehow escape from this meeting once we have sprung our trap, Katsukami will be after the three of us before you can say catnip lollipop.” As if that reminded her of something, she pulled out another lollipop from her jacket pocket, delicately plucked off the Katsukami-branded wrapper, and popped it into her mouth.
Annie eyed that candy hungrily for a moment before Nyala rolled her eyes and tossed the nurse Kat one of her supply. Mewing happily, Annie ripped off the wrapper with a fair bit less finesse and stuffed it into her mouth, sucking on it hard. “It’s sooo good,” she managed to mouth between sucks on the lollipop.
I won’t lie. I really wanted to be those lollipops right then. But managing to put that out of my mind with significant willpower, I said, “So, we have two options. We can either come completely clean with Candy and the boys, tell them who we are, what we’re planning, and just hand over their freedom to them.”
Nyala rolled her eyes at Annie as she now licked greedily at the mint green candy, her own lollipop shifting from one side of her mouth to the other with an expert flick of her tongue. “I’m guessing the other option would be to use all this collected leverage to make them do what we want.” She smirked a little, ears swiveling forward as her tail began to lash. “I’m also guessing that this really isn’t a choice at all, is it?”
“Not even if you gave me a hundred of these lollipops!” Annie practically shouted, falling back into the massive leather chair that Romine had lorded from. “No, wait, not even for a thousand lollipops!”
“Well, as usual, Annie’s not entirely wrong, but if you needed more emphasis on it, Nyala, not just no, but hell no.” I smiled over at Nyala. “But you don’t want to do that either, do you?”
“No,” she said simply. “I know these people seem rough around the edges, but so much of that is because of how hard life is for people in this part of town. Then you put them under the boot of people like Romine …” Nyala sighed. “What I’m trying to say is that these can be good people, and … I’ve always wanted to do right by them.”
“Don’t worry,” I said with a big smile. “We’re going to do just that. We’ll do right by these people, and hopefully, that will earn their trust to work with us.” I shrugged, then reached for my coffee cup. “And if it doesn’t, well, that’s fine. It’s still the right thing to do, they’ll be free to live their lives, and we’ll simply find another way to lure Johnson in.”
“Yeah! All hero all the way!” Annie cheered as she spun the chair about. “Milk and cream, this is a super comfy chair! You’ve got to try it, Jake!”
Nyala smiled softly at me, her eyes practically glowing. “I know we will, Jake.” She cast a sidelong glance at Annie still spinning in her chair. “Don’t worry, Annie. I think he’ll have his chance … because it’s his chair now.”
“Right.” I nodded and clapped my hands together. “Nyala, it’s about time we called an employee meeting. Mandatory attendance.”
18
The one upside of Romine’s iron-fisted approach to management and general fear-mongering was that when Nyala sent out the message calling
for the meeting, everyone was quick to reply and confirm. We’d have every member of Mario’s small crew here in the office in minutes. Well, almost every member. Bimmy and Jimmy were excused because I wasn’t that special kind of jerk that calls in somebody right after I gave them the day off.
Richard, our Colonel Mustard, wasn’t so lucky, mainly because I knew he wasn’t actually sick. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that Johnny and Luiz, Puke and Mauve, weren’t listed in Romine’s employee records anymore. Maybe he just fired them, but with the business that Romine was involved in, it was more likely he did something a bit more permanent. Well, that shit wasn’t going to happen anymore.
My mental preparations for the meeting were cut short by Annie leaning over the left arm of the imposing leather chair to stare me right in the face. “See, Jake? It’s really, really comfy!”
I only blinked through the smartglasses for a moment before smiling at her. “You’re right, it really is.” Gripping the padded armrests, I pushed into the buttery leather cushions. “Almost feels like it was made for me, you know?”
Nyala arched an eyebrow at that, having already dropped into super businesswoman mode, but Annie giggled and gave me a peck of a kiss on the nose. “Well, if you believe in fate, karma, and the Great Spirit Cat, Bast, then maybe it was made for you.” She straightened up and did a little twirl, taking her place on my left. “But it was probably just made by some robo-factory in China.”
I grinned at her for a moment, but a knock at the office door brought my attention back to the front of the room. Nyala stepped away from my right, clearing her throat as she came around the massive oak desk. “It’s time to be serious, Annie. A lot rides on this meeting for Jake and for us, sister.”
Annie snapped a sharp salute. “Duly noted! Nurse Annie is ready to go!”
“As endearing as that is, that is precisely what I’m afraid of,” Nyala said with a roll of her eyes, but she couldn’t hide the faint smile that cut through her professional mask. “Ready, Jake?”