High Steaks

by Daniel Potter

  A Terrible Hand

  Five cards fanned out before me, their bottoms wedged into a plastic holder attached to the table with a wide suction cup. Three cards were absolute trash, but the pair of nines held a glimmer of promise. I lifted my paw from the bench I perched on, spread my fat digits wide, and grasped the short stem that extended between the holder and the suction cup, steadying it. Carefully, I extended my neck, gripped the very corner of one card with my lips, and lifted it from the holder. With precise and practiced motions, I set it down in front of me without exposing the contents to my compatriots. I did the same with another useless card before setting my paw over the pair and pushing them toward Alice on the other side of the table. "Gimme two," I said.

  Alice snorted through her wide nostrils and flicked her ears in annoyance. "We're playing stud."

  I couldn't stop my tail from lashing in amusement. "You forgot to call that. Default's five draw."

  Alice's massive head shifted to look at the black goat to her left, the cowbell around her neck ringing once with the motion. "J-e-e-e-t!" she whined at him. Her silver horn covers twinkled in the dim light.

  The goat's half-closed eyes fluttered open, and he let out a small bleat, freeing the card that he had been absentmindedly chewing on for the last five minutes while waiting for Alice to finish dealing. The mangled card fluttered downward like an injured butterfly. I squinted to catch its pattern as it flickered between red and white. Black - a five, but I couldn't make out if it was clubs or spades before it slipped beyond the lip of the table. He tilted his head to look up at Alice, regarding her with a single golden eye. "Thomas is right, Alice, you didn't call." His head dipped under the table and returned with the mangled card in his lips. He placed it on the table before adding, "Thankfully."

  Alice gave a moo of distress and stamped a shod hoof on the floor. "Fine." Alice managed to combine the word with a snort and sigh at the same time, as if I had assigned her an odious task while calling in a life-long favor. Teenagers.

  Rudy, perched at the place to my right, chattered irritably, his tail flicking back and forth behind him so rapidly that I felt the breeze from three feet away. "Rotten peanuts! Cut the dramatics and deal! This is the longest poker hand in history! I'm watching my whiskers go white over here!"

  "Okay! Okay!" Alice said before I could make a crack about Rudy's age. She stared at the deck of cards in front of her as if they had personally ruined her life. Her lips closed around the tip of an unsharpened pencil in a red plastic cup in front of her. She lifted it from the cup and worked the pencil so it pointed out in front of her wide muzzle, the pink eraser pointing out from her nose. "Is it straight?" she asked out of the side of her mouth.

  "As an arrow." Jet nodded encouragingly. I held my breath. Thanks to the way Alice's bovine eyes and muzzle were placed, she couldn't see that pencil at all and had to do all of this by touch. That was the point of the game, not the poker chips in the center of the table. Four others had been set up in the aisle of the Stables, where residents practiced manipulating cards with mouths, hooves, and sticks. Compared to many, Alice did well. She tilted her head down to see over her nose and centered her head on the deck. Then she stabbed at the cards with the pencil.

  Missed by an inch. Alice mooed in frustration before tapping the pencil up and down, her eyes narrowed to slits in concentration as she used the pencil like a blind person uses a cane until she found the cards. Then, very carefully, she placed the eraser dead center on the top of the deck and, with a slight push forward, flicked a card from the top.

  "That's one," I said.

  She huffed and repeated the gesture, but a wee bit too hard, sending the card shooting towards our fifth player. Gus slammed a paw down on the card, stopping it like an upstart mouse. He blinked in surprise and stared at his paw as if he wasn't quite sure how it had gotten there.

  "Nice catch, Gus," I said, reaching my paw out toward him to claim the wayward card.

  "No prob, boss." He grinned uneasily at me, showing me his little feline fangs, and pushed the card beneath my waiting paw. I caught the momentary twitch of his ears and the ripple along his spine. I knew a suppressed hiss when I saw one. For myself, moving my viewpoint to belt level had been adjustment enough. I couldn't imagine going to ankle level, where each shoe is a potentially lethal missile.

  I transferred the final card to my holder and found to my utter delight that my junk had transformed into three of a kind. Not junk, but not a guarantee, especially with nut-breath's luck. The squirrel appeared to be some sort of ace magnet tonight. Every time I called his bluff, he'd throw down a stupid crazy hand, four of a kind or a full house. I'd swear he was stashing cards somehow, but a two-pound squirrel doesn't have sleeves, and it would be pretty obvious had he shoved one into his cheek pouches.

  Maybe this hand I'd get him. The thought had a well-worn track in my head now. "Raise you all fifty," I said, selecting a chip from the edge of my dwindling pile with a claw and brushing it toward the center.

  "HA! Big, tall, and clawy got himself a pair of nuthin!" Rudy crowed. "I'll take three, Alice, and call!"

  "You haven't even looked at your cards!" I snarled at Rudy before I could stop myself.

  "I know that these two cards are better than anything you got!" Rudy stood a chip on its edge and expertly sent it rolling across the table. As it reached the center, he pulled a peanut half from his cheek pouch and flung it. The peanut struck the chip and toppled it, dead center on the table.

  "Ew! Now the chips have squirrel drool on them," Alice groused.

  Rudy bounded across the table and retrieved his three cards from the deck before Alice could pick up her pencil again.

  "Rudy, that's—" Jet started to chide.

  "Not the point, yeah, yeah." Rudy waved off the goat's objections. "I just want to see Thomas lose sometime tonight!"

  Jet did not look mollified but didn't press the issue. He nosed his crumpled card towards Alice. "One, please, Alice."

  Alice gave him his card. Jet called, and Alice gave herself two cards.

  "I think you both got nothing but sawdust in your gas tanks." Gus grinned. "All in!" he declared and then scrabbled to push all his remaining chips into the table, about the same amount that I had. This meant one of two things with him: he'd either hit his limit with us fairly early in the evening, or he actually had a killer hand despite the fact he'd drawn no cards at all. Matching him would nearly wipe me out.

  Screw it; this was my best hand so far. I counted Gus's pile up and matched it with all but two of my chips. "Call!" I declared.

  I knew I'd guessed right when his tail went all puffy.

  "Ha! Nice bluff, Thomas!" Rudy pushed in half his wealth.

  "Fold," Jet said, already munching on another card.

  Alice looked at her hand then at the pile of chips on the table and back again. Her eyes narrowed in a calculating gaze. The sound of her hoof tapping on the floor echoed as she counted the chips and finally nodded to herself.

  A shiver passed through her as a distant scream rolled into my head. The wail of pain stretched out into a painful ringing in my ears.

  Alice's mouth moved. "Fo-" The word became stuck. "Fo-" she said again. She blinked; her ear flicked as confusion clouded her eyes.

  "Alice?" Jet looked up at Alice with concern.

  "Ffffffffffffooooooooooooooooold!" The word blended into an animal bellow as Alice threw her muzzle up like a wolf baying at the moon. At the end of the note, she pitched forward, head falling onto the cheap card table like a falling log. The table snapped in half, launching cards, chips, and Gus up into the air.

  Gus released a feline yowl as he desperately flailed at the cord that held the lightbulb. His claws found no purchase, and he fell back to the earth with the grace of a fledgling punted out of a nest too soon. The bulb popped as he streaked downward, and in the darkness, a soft fhump was followed by a mortified feline screech. I listened to the sound of tiny claws on concrete as the pain in my head incre
ased, reaching around my brain and weighing down my very thoughts.

  "Alice? Alice?" Jet's voice echoed. Distantly, I heard the metallic crash as Gus slammed into someone's water bowl. Alice's form emerged from the gloom surrounding me as Rudy's weight impacted my back. The cow had fallen onto her side, legs splayed out straight from her body. A low-grade rumble of a moo evidenced that she still breathed.

  Jet hoofed Alice's cheek. "Somebody get the doc!" he bayed down the tunnel as the heads of various ungulates began to poke out of the stalls that lined the walls. "Alice! Come on, girl! Wake up!"

  Panic and fear rolled off of Jet like the scent of frying bacon, and a surge of animal hunger sliced through the heavy fog that sat on my mind. I started to rise to all fours, but Rudy gave a sharp tug on my neck fur. "Don't move," he hissed. My body froze as more fear odors joined the parade in my nostrils. One false move and I could cause a stampede.

  Instead, I swallowed carefully and spoke. "She's breathing, Jet. Give her some air. Rudy, give us some light." My voice sounded distant, as if someone else was speaking the words. The pain had settled like a leaden apron over my mind. Something had happened, something terrible, but I had no words to identify the cause.

  A zipper sounded on the right side of my harness as the squirrel retrieved his iPhone. The blue-white glare of an LED flooded the scene.

  Alice moaned, and her unfocused eyes blinked in the light. Jet stepped back, but only enough to give the young cow a hard head butt in the chest, forcing a grunt from her lungs.

  My body moved, and I found myself interposed between Alice and the goat as he stepped back, head bowed for another charge. In the light of the LED, the whites of his eyes shone as he pawed at the ground. I sat down, my tail lashing in agitation.

  "She's gotta wake up! We have to wake her up!" Jet spun in a circle and half-charged me, stopping himself with a feral bleat of panic.

  I nearly managed to keep my lips over my teeth. His loud exclamations were needles prodding my brain. I tried to pull together some order of words.

  "Dude! Smacking her with your horns is like using a squeaky hammer as a nutcracker!" Rudy exclaimed, far too close to my ear.

  Jet settled for nervous prancing in place. "I know, I know." Then he began to stomp on the concrete. "Useless! Useless! Useless!"

  Ordinarily I'd sympathize, but each strike of his shod hooves on the floor sent a bolt of lightning between my ears. I took my paw and not so gently pinned his head to the floor. "Stop," I hissed. "Wait for the vet." He panted and tried to pull his head free, but I hooked my claws around a horn, preventing his withdrawal. "Calm down," I said in a more even growl as I mentally probed the heaviness in my head. A sensation that felt familiar, somehow.

  Alice moaned behind me. "Trevor."

  The name instantly adhered itself to the thing inside my head, and I knew with a certainty clear as a freshly washed porch door what had happened.

  Trevor was dead.

  5

  A Chase

  "Hey. Thomas. I'm calm now. You can let up on my face," a muffled voice said several moments later once my mind recovered from being blown.

  I pulled my paw off Jet but didn't really see him. I couldn't really see anything but Trevor: an overconfident kid with big plans, a bright smile, and no idea how life worked. He was gone. How did I know that? What had done it? My eyes closed, yet the purple haze of bent realities shone painfully through my eyelids. Too bright. Far too bright. I wanted nothing more than a dark hole to curl up in. My feet began to carry me off.

  "Hey, Thomas. Where we going?" Rudy asked.

  I knew I should answer. I knew I should stay with Alice. Yet my feet did not stop, nor did my jaw open.

  A metallic clatter sounded. The soft drumming of tiny soft-pawed feet followed. A substantial weight impacted the middle of my back. Gus. "You guys are my ride! Where ya—"

  A fleeting blackness stole across my vision, and I broke into a run. My passengers hunkered down on my back, Rudy clutching pawfuls of my thick neck fur. Both made startled implorations as I leapt over the gate to the Stables without opening my eyes. I caught the blackness in my vision again, a thin thread of pain and grief.

  Trevor.

  He had been a frustrating student, wanting expertise without doing the work, but he had been my student. Now someone had hurt him, and that someone would pay. Once out of the Stables, I slowed to a rapid trot, using memory, my whiskers, and the sound of my protesting passengers to navigate the tunnels I threaded through. I can't run for very long, but cougars can maintain a brisk pace of ten miles per hour for entire days if we have to. And if it took that, I would.

  Yet as the thread led me up into the above-ground neighborhood, it began to fade, along with the pain and the certainty of Trevor's death. The same instinct that bade me track the thread also knew that the source of the pain was too far off to walk to. I'd lose the trail long before I got there. Instead I went upwards, seeking out a nearby apartment block. The cheap brick facade and bulky windowsills provided numerous clawholds and made it my favorite spot for looking over the city.

  "Rudy, let me know if I have a bad grip," I said at the base of the building. My mind had caught up with my body, but I didn't dare open my eyes or I'd lose the thread.

  With a soft chitter, the squirrel moved up my neck to grip the base of each ear. He'd squeeze if I was about to hook a flower pot instead of a ledge.

  Gus wasn't so quiet. "What you guys doing? Where we going now?" Still, he didn't get off as I scaled the side of the seven-story building. By the time we reached the top, the thread was nearly gone. I fixed the thread in the center of my vision and opened my eyes.

  The blaze of the strip greeted my retinas. The neon glow made the sky bright with reddish miasma. A string of casinos clustered at this angle, making it impossible to determine which one the black string had pointed at. I closed my eyes, but I couldn't find the string again. Only a memory of that pain remained. It left me no less certain.

  "Soooo," Rudy started, "you gonna tell us what just happened? Or are you simply a nutcase tonight?"

  I lifted my nose towards the casinos. "Trevor died out there."

  Gus padded up the wall that rimmed the roof of the building and peered out towards the strip. "You, uh, tracking magic? I saw nothing on the way here. No more than usual, at least." He looked back at me, and I felt the prickly feeling of scrying along my spine.

  "You sure?" Rudy asked, jumping down from my back to join Gus on the ledge.

  "Sure as Alice is, I bet." I felt a twinge of guilt for just leaving Alice back at the Stables. Hopefully she was recovering now.

  The strand had pointed to the southern half of the strip, but its origin could have been anywhere from Caesars Palace to the Four Seasons, or anywhere that lay between. I closed my eyes to try to find it again, but there was nothing. No thread, no pain - even the dead certainty I had felt moments ago began to sink beneath waves of doubt. It didn't make sense. But then again, the logic of magic did not reveal itself easily to the likes of cougars.

  Gus peered up at me. "If you're going to whup somebody, can we swing by the tower and at least pick up Veronica first?"

  My lungs released the breath I was holding. "Not tonight, but I'll let you know when I figure out who." Turning, I offered my side to the little cat. "Let's get you home before Veronica worries.”

  "Appreciate it." He leapt up to his perch behind Rudy.

  "Hrrrm. A mystery," Rudy said as soon as Gus's black tail had disappeared into the dark hollow of the Morganna Tower. "Who do we know who might be good at investigating crimes or something?"

  "Well, I certainly don't know anyone who's subtle," I said as I turned away from the tower. "We should check on Alice first. Then maybe I'll go find O'Meara in the morning." And by morning, I meant late afternoon. Without a bonded human to anchor me, my body rapidly shifted to a nocturnal lifestyle.

  I heard the rustle of fabric and turned my head to see Rudy pulling on his own harness: a black nylon me
sh that had a sling in the back for his iPhone and pockets in the front for his mini Zippo and a few magically enhanced firecrackers. Two round smoke bombs hung from his waist. "Let's go check on Alice," he agreed.

  6

  Crossing a Line

  Alice's spell had passed as mine had, and the vet was herding her and everyone else toward bed by the time we got back to the Stables. The vet was quite convinced that it was nothing more than stress and lack of sleep. He shooed the two of us off, so we trekked back to our own den.

  Truthfully, I needed a nap, just a small one, to regroup. The sudden and painful premonition of Trevor dying gnawed at my mind. The fact that Trevor's phone went straight to voicemail did not ease my worries.

  Rudy's diurnal nature had finally caught up with him, and he emitted tiny snores as I picked my way through the streets toward our "office." Like most magical folks, we lived in an area nestled between the two strips of Vegas. A clear half moon shone almost as brightly as the sparse street lamps I avoided. Not that I had much trouble with the locals. Cats with a sense of purpose meant magi, and to the residents of Vegas, meeting a magus outside of the strips meant something had gone very wrong.

  The sound of high-pitched chanting greeted me as I neared the strip mall that contained our domicile. This being different from the usual companionable silence that usually greeted me at two a.m., my trot slowed to a silent stalk. Our office sat in the middle of a five-store strip mall, flanked by an accounting office and a tiny Thai grocery. Our sign shone pale in the moonlight: "Freelance Familiars" in a highly readable script. Below that sign, directly in front of our door, marched a picket line.

  "Hey, cute animal sidekick, check it out," I said, attempting to jostle the squirrel awake by walking toward the protest with a bit of swagger.

  "Wut?" Followed by a yawn. "Aw, crapnuts," Rudy cursed.