by Nazri Noor
Crystal looked between us, still glaring. “At least we have a game plan. I’m going to pack, real quick. Don’t anybody think about leaving me behind. It won’t be hard to track you down.” She fished around in her blouse, pulling out two little plastic sachets. “Especially not with these.”
I blinked as I recognized locks of my own hair in one bag. The other, presumably, contained a sample of Pierce’s. “You wouldn’t dare.”
She raised her chin triumphantly. “Collected them while you were sleeping. For my own peace of mind. And I was right to do it, too.” She stuck one finger out in warning. “Stay. I won’t be long.”
Before I could even answer, she vanished, teleporting somewhere upstairs. Pierce looked up, as if trying to find her through the ceiling. He rubbed his elbows, shuddering faintly.
“She scares me.”
22
Crystal lived up to her promise. Not five minutes later, she was back downstairs, a leather satchel filled with her meager belongings strapped to her back. She gestured outside.
“Those suitcases of yours were definitely ruined in the fight. Soaked to worthlessness in ice water if not slashed to pieces outright. Don’t bother.” She flicked her hand at the kitchen, the cupboards flying open, styrofoam cups of instant noodles and canned goods with scruffy labels floating towards, then into her rucksack. She caught me staring, then rolled her eyes. “Dabbler, remember? Don’t act like it’s such a big deal.”
It was clear that she wouldn’t stop hating me, at least not for a while. I glowered at her, knowing full well that I was in no position to spit back something cutting, being the catalyst of her woe. Dantaleon, however, thought that it was a fine time to interject, floating creepily close to my left ear.
“You see?” he whispered, his voice like crackling parchment. “Even human witches can diversify their arcane arsenals. But sons of demon princes? Curious.”
“Neither the time nor place,” I growled. I thought I saw Crystal smirking to herself. I was fairly sure that the two of them exchanged knowing glances.
Pierce got down on his haunches, putting himself at eye level with Mr. Wrinkles on the sill. “So, where to, Wrinkles?”
The cat sniffed at the air, his tail as vertical as an exclamation point as he turned in place. “There,” he said, extending his paw vaguely in one direction. “Forty miles, give or take.”
“We’re not walking that,” Pierce said, shaking his head, exchanging a glance with me, silently imploring me to back him up.
“Of course not,” Mr. Wrinkles said, turning until he found Dantaleon. “The book can take us.”
“Preposterous,” Dantaleon huffed. “I do not take orders from lowly beasts.”
Mr. Wrinkles hissed, baring his fangs.
“D,” Pierce said. “Be reasonable. You can hover there the whole way and never get tired. We can’t walk that. We have limited food, not enough water as it is. As for money? ” He glanced hopefully over at Crystal.
“Hell no,” she said. “What little I have left is for me. You buttholes figure this one out.”
Dantaleon sighed. “If it will get everyone to shut up, then very well. But I must caution you. The battle with the angels drained much of my power. If I teleport the lot of you, I will require rest.”
Crystal frowned at me, quietly demanding an explanation. I shrugged. “Dantaleon’s functionally immortal, but he still has limits to his magic, just like us. He draws power from his offices. That’s just how he works. In a way, both of us are bound to books.”
Mr. Wrinkles purred, licking the back of one paw. “And the sooner we arrive at our destination, the sooner the two of you will have access to everything you need.”
The cat hadn’t steered us wrong before – not that he’d ever had a chance to steer us anywhere, truthfully. But Mr. Wrinkles had saved my life once, slicing a rogue wizard in half with the searing beams emanating from his eyes. He was a cat, through and through, concerned for his own survival and comfort above all else. He knew that restoring my power would mean restoring his luxuries. We had no reason to distrust him.
“Very well,” Dantaleon said. “Gather close.”
We huddled in a circle. Dantaleon hovered above us, the rasp of his voice whispering faint incantations as a shaft of light suffused our bodies. The murky wet and broken concrete of Crystal’s former home vanished as the world turned unbearably bright. The light of Dantaleon’s teleportation spell quickly faded, and I blinked hard to take in our surroundings.
Dantaleon groaned, then floated downwards, settling into the crook of my elbow. He wasn’t exaggerating about spending the last of his power to transport us. Dantaleon was silent, motionless, an inanimate book instead of my mouthy, sometimes murderous mentor. For a split second I was almost tempted to leaf through his pages, until I recalled that this was the same Dantaleon who liked to boobytrap his offices. For all the times I’d stolen scrolls and single pages from his study, I was genuinely lucky never to have had my fingers blown off by one of his explosive wards.
“This is a city,” Pierce said, glancing around. “Wait. It’s the same city as before. Valero?”
“Correct,” Mr. Wrinkles said, splaying his front paws out against warm asphalt, relishing a stretch that bent his body into a graceful, boneless curve. He turned in a circle, searching for something, finally picking one direction and padding towards a squat building.
Four stories, at most, and residential, if I had to judge by the laundry hanging on the balcony of more than one apartment unit. It wasn’t the priciest place, either, given that the front gate didn’t appear to be locked. No automatic doors, nothing. I trailed after Mr. Wrinkles, feeling absolutely ridiculous for letting an actual cat take the lead.
“Wrinkles? Mr. Wrinkles?” It was stranger calling him by his full name, knowing now how much power he had over me. “This hardly looks like the font of magical power you were talking about.”
He looked over his shoulder, glaring at me chidingly, answering only with an annoyed “Mrrow.” He really was a clever cat. It wouldn’t do well to have him speaking normally out in the human world at all.
Nobody stopped us as we walked into the apartment building. The units were clustered close together, the air filled with the clamor of too-loud televisions and the smells of several dinners being prepared all at once. Mr. Wrinkles stopped at a door that looked like any of the others, with one small distinction. Close to the ground, on a weathered little table that might well have been a stool in a past life, sat a porcelain figurine of a smiling cat, one of its paws held up in the air in greeting. It looked like it was waving, perhaps beckoning.
Pierce stared at the figurine in mixed curiosity and confusion. Crystal pushed past him, grumbling. “It’s a maneki-neko,” she said. “You people really are demons. Never seen one? It’s a Japanese lucky cat.” She rapped sharply on the front door with her knuckles, then looked down at Mr. Wrinkles. “Just who are we supposed to ask for?” He looked up at her with huge, vacant eyes, then meowed coyly.
The door opened to a chorus of even more meowing. I stared wide-eyed into the apartment. It was plastered in cats, of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Every available surface was covered in them: the couches, the coffee table, even what was still visible of the kitchen counter. And yet, for a place that appeared to be home to at least two dozen of the creatures, the apartment was very clean, almost spotlessly so. It even smelled nice, like home cooking, like a kitchen.
Mr. Wrinkles sashayed into the apartment, the mewling of furry dozens falling silent as he went among them. The other cats sniffed at him with reverent curiosity, rubbing up against his flanks in feline solidarity. Did they acknowledge him as one of their own? It was so odd, seeing him go from an authoritative, no doubt very magical creature, to something as conventional and innocent as a domestic cat.
Pierce was the first to enter the apartment, sitting on the ground and immediately being swarmed by six of the smaller cats. He made cooing noises as they clambered all over
him and batted at his fingers. He was clearly happy to make the acquaintance of feline friends who didn’t fire lasers out of their eyes or attempt to claw him skinless at the slightest provocation. Crystal stepped in next, hovering at the threshold, looking around the apartment for its human occupant.
I did the same, shutting the door behind me, letting out a tentative “Hello?” It wasn’t lost on me. There I was, the heir of Asmodeus, in a tiny apartment somewhere on earth, a deadly, centuries-old sorcerer sleeping dormant in my arms, with nowhere to go, nothing to my name. To say that I’d been humbled by Mother’s excommunication was an understatement.
Beads rustled in a shimmering curtain from a gap to the kitchen I hadn’t noticed. The curtain parted and a woman poked her head out, her tight curls of black hair shaped into a perfect cloud, her skin dark and luminous. She fixed each of us with a look that spelled irritation. It wasn’t quite anger, something closer to eye-rolling resignation. She looked me up and down, from head to toe, then tutted in annoyance.
“Well? Come in. We’ve been waiting for you. Stop dragging your feet. Tsk, tsk. Lucky, lucky me.”
I looked around the apartment, bewildered. We? Did she mean the cats?
“Sorry for the intrusion,” I said, keeping my face serious, my voice hard, because I had no way of delivering what I had to say next. “My – my cat brought me here.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me, giving me another once over. I half expected her to burst into laughter, or to kick us out of her apartment before she called the cops. But she only sucked on her teeth and tutted again as she retreated into the kitchen, the curtain of beads clacking behind her.
“Yes, I know him. We all know him. Come into the kitchen where I can see you. And bring the book.”
I looked down at Dantaleon, then followed her through the curtain, the beads tickling at my skin as I stepped through the doorway. I didn’t feel anything beyond the physical as I entered, no telltale buzz in the air, no faint electricity of ambient magic on my skin. Yet I knew, instinctively, that something here wasn’t simply of the mortal realm. The woman’s kitchen looked normal enough, replete with spices and fresh ingredients, an enormous skillet on the stove bubbling with pureed tomato and gorgeous eggs.
“You like shakshouka?” the woman asked. “Because it’s what’s for dinner.”
I nodded, taking the opportunity to study her. The green of her eyes pierced me each time she looked at my face, her own features so sharply sculpted that she put me in mind of a cat herself. Her afro did, in fact, evoke the image of a lion’s mane. The numerous bangles running down her arms and the silken, lustrous yellow of her robe made her more than just beautiful, more than just elegant. She was regal. Almost like –
“A goddess,” Dantaleon croaked.
I looked down at him, puzzled at his sudden consciousness, then back up into the woman’s face. Surely, not?
“A goddess?” I said, echoing Dantaleon.
The woman set down her wooden spoon, folding her arms and shaking her head at me. “Didn’t you know? I thought that was why your cat brought you here.” She made an expression with her lips that was somewhere between a frown and a knowing, resigned smile. “My name is Bastet. Today’s your lucky day.”
23
The Egyptian goddess of cats, tucked away in some rundown apartment in Valero?
I wasn’t surprised by her mere existence, no. A world with celestial and infernal forces running amok has plenty of room for the greatest powers of the earth: the ancient gods of myth themselves. Entities, as they were known, collectively. I just wasn’t expecting to find an entity in such, shall we say, humble trappings.
Maybe my expectations had been raised too much. I’d never had a necessity to curry favor from a god, and so my interactions with them were limited at best. We’d been taught well enough at Madame Grayhaven’s academy that meeting an entity was very much a grandiose affair. Accessing their home realms or domiciles involved complex rituals and offerings, and those strange dimensions were often as eldritch as the deities themselves. A goddess of the hunt might live in a verdant forest, a god of fire in the heart of a volcano.
By those standards, I suppose it wasn’t entirely bizarre to find that the cat goddess of old Egypt was, in fact, surrounded by a horde of cats.
Bastet narrowed her eyes at me. “I know what you’re thinking, princeling brat.”
I shook my head, wishing that my spoiled upbringing wasn’t so evident in virtually every aspect of my being. “I highly doubt it.”
She clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Times have changed. You think all the gods have it easy? Hah. We’re not as famous as your bog-standard Greek and Norse gods. Nobody makes movies about us, you know? It’s Thor this, and Loki that, and maybe sometimes, they’ll throw old Zeus a bone. But Osiris? Hatshepsut? Ra? Who gives a shit, right? Not Hollywood, and certainly not humanity.”
I set my jaw, trying not to look so caught off guard. “I didn’t say anything.”
Bastet pointed her wooden spoon in my face. “But you were thinking it. We’re just like fairies, if you want to simplify things. If nobody believes in us, worships us, we lose our power. Just like that.” She went back to poking at her skillet. “That’s why those two angels are so desperate to develop their own followings. Imagine that. An angel cult. The people upstairs must be too busy to notice what they’re up to.”
“So you know about the angels?”
“I know lots of things. We’ve fallen on hard times, but you can’t say that we aren’t resourceful.”
I looked around the apartment. “You keep saying ‘we,’ and I’m guessing you’re referring to all these cats.”
She pressed her lips together in annoyance, pointing towards one end of the living room with her spoon. “I meant him.”
I hadn’t noticed the older man before. He must have been in his sixties, his housecoat the same brownish gray as the upholstery, blending him into the sofa. A pair of glasses balanced precariously on the bridge of his oddly thin and hooked nose as he hunched over a huge book, squinted accusingly at its pages. If he realized that he and Bastet had guests, he made no indication.
“Not another god, surely?” I said, keeping my voice low.
Bastet nodded. “The very reason your cat brought you here. Where is that little rascal, anyway?”
Mr. Wrinkles leapt up onto the counter, cautiously pawing at the steam rising from the stovetop. “Bastet,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
She broke into a smile for the first time, lighting up the drabness of the apartment as she favored Mr. Wrinkles with a scratch behind the ear. “You old fool. What name do you go by these days?”
Mr. Wrinkles gave me the evil eye, and I glared right back at him. “This one calls me Mr. Wrinkles.”
Bastet burst into laughter. “You have to admit, it isn’t exactly inappropriate. Pretty fitting, if you ask me.”
The cat harrumphed. I never thought cats could harrumph, but before that day, I didn’t think that they could talk, either.
“Looks like you two go back a long time,” I said.
Bastet laughed softly. “This one, especially, has been around a very long while. It’s pretty common knowledge, isn’t it? That they were beloved, back in the old kingdom. Still are, apparently, which just works in their favor.”
I gestured at my face, especially around my eyes. “That doesn’t quite explain that thing he did once. With his eyes, I mean, the lasers. Surely not all cats can do that. Is he blessed, or does he have special powers because he’s one of your special ones? One of your chosen?”
Mr. Wrinkles tilted his head at me. “Imagine, a cat being chosen. Who said that I was one of hers?” He glanced at Bastet quickly, the two of them sharing a brief, sardonic smile. “I could just as well have been blessed by another god.”
“Enough chitchat,” Bastet said, taking the skillet off the heat, setting it down on a pad. “Quilliam, right? You go have a talk with my roommate over there. I’ll save you
both some dinner.” She glided over to the beaded curtain, parting it and sticking her head through. “You two cuties hungry? I made some food. Come sit down and introduce yourselves.”
I frowned at the back of her head. “I don’t mean to complain – well, I suppose I do – but how come they get to be cuties? And I’m just a brat?”
“But you are a brat.” She turned to me with a grin, then made an expanding gesture with her fingers, working outwards from her cloud of hair. “Your head is big enough. We’ve only just met, sure, but I know plenty about you.”
“As do I.” Mr. Wrinkles licked at the back of his paw, then made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a purr. “I know that he likes to take long showers sometimes, when he gets – excited. What he does in there, however, we’ll never know.”
Bastet burst out laughing, and I was sure that I went beet red. Stupid traitor cat. I excused myself, walking over to the man, Dantaleon still clasped in my arms. I must have looked like some idiot schoolboy, clutching a book that was far too big and far too complex for me to grasp, both in size and in breadth.
“Greetings,” I said, scolding myself on the inside for sounding so awkward and dumb. I was the son of Lust, one of many. It struck me that I knew how to seduce, how to charm and cajole, but that I didn’t know the first thing about how to approach someone with respect and deference.
Wow, I really was a brat.
The man grunted, hardly looking up at me, turning the page with an expression that told me he was far more interested in reading than in whatever I had to say.
“Bastet told me to come speak to you,” I said. “I’m not entirely sure why, but it has to do with magic. And books.”
Something tensed in the man’s face, and I could tell he was trying his best not to look so curious. He tilted his head slowly to glance up at me, and I stared into his eyes, beady and black, like some bird. I tried not to focus on his nose, or the tufts of white hair at his temples, features that only made him look even more, well, birdlike.