His stomach growled.
He hadn’t eaten any of the food she’d given him.A bowl of milk with something in it did not sound appealing to him.Eventually, he would probably be hungry enough to eat it.
“You’re a more considerate cat than Ginger.”
“Thank you,” he said, though she couldn’t understand him.
“I don’t need to be considerate,” Ginger said, licking her paw.“I’m the cat, and she’s the human.She’s the one who should be nice to me.”
“She loves you just the way you are,” he told her, “but it wouldn’t hurt to be nice once in a while.”
The cantankerous feline didn’t say anything, just licked her paw again and ran it across her face before she began to knead the carpet with her paws.
Nat curled up in a ball at Thea’s feet, looking up at her as she told them stories of her day, her fingers moving busily.
He felt a strange sensation in his paws and a flare of hope burst through him.Was he turning back into a human?Was this nightmare going to be over and he could tell Thea about the man who had turned him into a cat?But as he looked down at his paws, nothing happened.In fact, his paws were involuntarily kneading the carpet, just like Ginger had been doing.
He let out a frustrated growl, and Thea looked down at him.
“Is everything all right?”she asked him.
Nathaniel resisted the urge to growl again.He didn’t need to upset her, and she didn’t know that he was himself, trapped in the form of a cat.This was the most frustrating thing he had ever been through.
How long would it last?Would his children at the orphanage be worried when he didn’t come back?While he had no concern for their welfare—his staff were excellent—they would be missing him.
Hopefully they wouldn’t even notice.Hopefully he would wake up in his own body once again and would be back in the morning.But the thought of him simply disappearing on them made his stomach uneasy.
Or maybe that was just the smell of the cat food.
But the children had already been through so much loss, and he didn’t want to be yet another adult who left them.
What if the man made his way to the orphanage?
He had never spent the night away from the orphanage since they’d moved into their new building, and while he didn’t expect anything to happen, they’d never had a man running around town turning people into cats before—at least as far as he knew.
He should go and be there.But what was the point?It wasn’t as if he could do anything if the man did show up.He was a cat.He was completely helpless, and all he would do was get in the way.
The idea gave him pause.Perhaps he could trip the man.But then again, if he had the power to turn people into cats, who knew what else he had the power to do?And perhaps it was better to be a cat than to be dead.
“I wonder what Guinevere was thinking when she left,” Thea said, looking down at him with a frown.“She was acting oddly when you arrived.”
Nathaniel tried not to grimace.Could cats grimace?What would his face even look like if he did?
“And of course, we had a visit from Nathaniel today, didn’t we, Ginger?”Thea said.
Nat’s ears perked up, and he looked up at Thea.This was something he hadn’t expected—a moment to hear directly from the source what Thea thought of him now.
Did she still hate him the way she once had?
“Nathaniel is our landlord,” Thea said, looking down at him with a kindly smile.“Don’t worry, you’ll learn everyone’s names soon enough.”
Nathaniel fought the urge to grind his teeth.He was not just her landlord, and he didn’t want to be described as such—even to himself.
“I know you always love when he comes to visit,” Thea told Ginger, who purred happily.
“He always scratches me the right way,” Ginger said smugly.“I have taught him well.”
Nathaniel bit back the laugh that surely would’ve come out sounding like he was dying.She had trained him, hmm?
