When they got home, later that night, his daddy led him to the root cellar in their rented house. And showed him the cage. It had a mattress, his sleeping bag, and two water bottles, one to drink from and one to pee in. “You’ll be sleeping in it for the next six weeks or so. It’s for your own good, son. If the devil got into you, and you’re possessed, then you put your mama and me in danger. Understand?”
Trace lifted his hand and touched his shoulder. His healed shoulder. Did devils heal? “I thought only God healed.”
“If God healed you, we’ll know it after the next two full moons.” Daddy tilted up the bottle and drank down more whiskey, stinking of sweat and whiskey and something else. Maybe fear. Not a smell Trace had ever smelled before. “Just through the two full moons,” Daddy said. “Get on in there.”
Trace got in. The cage door clanged shut.
—
Trace slept in the cage every night for two weeks until the next full moon.
The horizon was visible through the window set high on the root cellar wall. The glow of moonrise was brightening the sky. The first rays of the full moon shone through the window.
The moment the moonlight appeared, the pain started. It was a stabbing, wrenching pain in his shoulder, like his arm was being yanked off. The torment grew. And grew. Trace got so hot he thought he might explode. Bones popped and shifted around. He grew fur. His thoughts went all muddy and confused. And Holy God it hurt so bad he prayed, but God didn’t help.
That was the night of his first shift. His daddy watched the whole thing, sitting in a broken-down chair, drinking whiskey, silent.
The next morning, his daddy didn’t let him out of the cage. Didn’t give him clothes to replace the ones he’d torn up and peed on during that long, terrifying night. Daddy didn’t give him nothing, even though he was human again and so hungry he thought he’d die. Instead, near sunset, Daddy bumped and carried the cage up the rickety stairs and outside, to the truck that smelled of dogs and cats and horse manure. And Mr. Rodrigues. It was odd how Trace knew that the smell belonged to Mr. Rodrigues. Odd but not so scary as what happened the night before.
As the moon rose, round and silver and beautiful, the transformation began again, and Trace understood. The cat that bit him was a demon. The cat bite had put the demon into him and now Trace was a demon cat. He’d be a demon cat forever.
And the world fell away.
—
He watched as the man who stank of whiskey, the human named Daddy, took a tray, tarnished and black, and slid it in under the bottom of the cage. It stank and it hurt. It hurt in every bone of the cat’s body. He started to pace to try and get away from the tray and the pain. He paced and paced, snarling. Wantingout. Wanting toeat. Hungry. Hungry.Hungry!
But the human named Daddy didn’t feed him. The human named Daddy drove him all night, far away. And sold him to the man at the traveling carnival. Sold him for twenty-five dollars.
“Don’t never take away the tray in the bottom. Not never,” the human named Daddy said.
“Why?” The carnie man spat in the dirt.
“The tray controls him. Take away the tray and he’ll attack.”
Cat who was once a human heard and smelled the lie. The tray was danger.
“What’s its name? For the sign over the cage,” the carnie man said.
“Oakum. Just Oakum.”
Oakum. The cat held on to the sound of that word. His name. His name before he became a demon and the human named Daddy sold him.
The carnival man gave him a steak and Oakum tore into the meat and his belly stopped hurting.
The dawn came. The pain hit his bones and his skin and his teeth. Pain like nothing he’d ever felt before. But it passed. And the carnival man put a sign over his cage. It said, “Occam’s Razor, Devil Cat.”
Shiloh and the Brick
First appeared as a serial short in 2016 for the release ofBlood in Her Veins. In the timeline, Jane is an Enforcer for Leo Pellissier.
“Yes. You are going, Shiloh Everhart Stone,” Molly said, enunciating every word with pitiless determination. “You and your blood-servants. You do not have the control you need, as evidenced by your reaction yesterday.”
A man had pinched Shiloh at a bar-and-grill near dawn, and she had come within a hairsbreadth of biting him. Unasked. And when her blood-servant stopped her, she nearly set the woman’s hair on fire with aninflammaturwitch working. Shiloh was a major incident waiting to happen. The girl whirled to me. “Are you going to let her do this to me, Enforcer?” Shiloh demanded.
Ohhh.Nice move with the Enforcer title. Too bad I’d seen it coming. And too bad she used it. Making me choose between witches and vamps sounded good on the surface, but calling me Enforcer decreased her possible avenues of argument and backed her into a corner she hadn’t seen yet.
I shrugged. “You’re a witch, as powerful as anything I’ve ever seen.” I crossed the fingers hidden behind me. I had seen Angie Baby. So... liar, liar, pants on fire. “And a vamp. And you lost control. Therefore, yeah. I’m letting your aunt and uncle send you to witch training camp.”
