“Oh!” Sherry said, then winced, put a hand over her own mouth, and scurried to her bags of New Age supplies to get the special salt. She held it out to the cat, who narrowed his eyes and pawed at the air to remind her that he didn’t have hands to take it with. She blushed. He jumped off the arm of the sofa and began trotting around the coffee table counterclockwise. Around and around. She stared. He stopped, gave a disgusted yowl, then stared pointedly at the salt. “Oh, right!” she said. He started trotting in his circle again. She followed him, pouring salt as she went, and thinking sadly about how she was going to have to move the coffee table if she wanted to drag the rug outside to really shake all the salt out. Once the circle was complete, the cat jumped onto the coffee table. Sherry eyed it, then very carefully sat, hoping that the legs would hold up.
The cat cleared its throat. “Now that we have blessed this altar,” he said, “we may speak more freely.”
“Oh, good,” said Sherry. She waited for a moment. The cat stared up at her with his lemon-lime eyes. She stared back at him. “Well?”
The cat hunkered in closer. “I would like to suggest that we strike a bargain.”
Sherry frowned. “What kind of bargain?”
“She has tasked me with making sure that you play your part in her game,” Lord Thomas Cromwell said. “She wants you to investigate her latest little killing.”
“Not little,” Sherry said.
Lord Thomas blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Not little,” Sherry said. “It wasAlan. His death wasn’tlittle.” She felt slightly sick. “Noneof them were little.Allof them mattered. I was just—in a play. In a dream. Until it was Alan. It wasn’t real until it was Alan.” Shame was dripping down her throat. It should have been real to her before. It was a child’s morality to only care about things that happened to her, personally. Her ex-husband had always said that she thought like a child. “Don’t call it little again,” she said. “None of them. None of them were little deaths.”
“Very well,” the cat said after a pause. “She wants you to investigate this latest murder. She has tasked me to chivy you into obeying. And what doyouwant?”
“For the killings to stop,” Sherry said. “For her to go away.” And for Alan back, but she wasn’t going to say that aloud to a possibly evil talking cat. There was the chance that he could take her seriously. She shivered.
“Precisely,” said the cat. “I know her, as much as a thing like her can be known. If she can be destroyed, that is a thing thatisn’tknown. That is a secret that has been forgotten. But creatures like her can be beaten back, for a time, by creatures like you.”
“Likeme?” Sherry asked, and looked down at herself, in a dreadful stupid moment of imagining that her life might have turned into enough of a piece of supernatural fiction for her to have transformed into something special as well, somethingyoung and fit and attractive, wearing lots of black leather with a weapon strapped to her thigh. No such thing had occurred. She was still just herself, just ordinary Sherry. Too old and plump and badly dressed to be a heroic demon-fighting protagonist. It was unfortunate that she was the only person around available to take on the role. There was no one in Winesap, as far as she could think, who wouldn’t look very silly in leather pants. But maybe the cat saw something in her that she couldn’t see in herself? That was the sort of thing that sometimes happened to protagonists.
“Yes,” said the cat. “A human creature like you.”
“Oh,” Sherry said, slightly embarrassed. “Human. Yes, I am…that. Absolutely. What can Ido, exactly? I don’t have any, you know. Special skills.” She imagined herself wielding, possibly, nunchucks. The image was a dispiriting one.
“Have you heard of the creatures calledvampires?” asked the cat, in the tone of voice of a specific type of man asking a woman if she’d ever heard of a particular very obscure and sophisticated band.
“Yes,” Sherry said. “I’ve read lots of books about them. Why?”
“Oh,” said the cat, in the tone of voice of the same man who has discovered, to his great disappointment, that the woman has seen the obscure and sophisticated band perform live on several occasions. “I see. Then you know that they are said to sup upon human blood.”
“Sup upon,” Sherry repeated. “Yes, I know. What does this have to do with me fighting demons?”
“The vampire,” Lord Thomas said, “has great strength and the power of flight. But the human has theblood.”
Sherry frowned. “So,” she said, “the human—me—I have something that she wants.”
“That sheneeds,” he said. “Your mind. Your attention. Yourbeliefin her.”
“But Idon’tbelieve in demons, or spirits, or—whatever she is. I mean, I didn’t, until the sheriff tried to spin his head around and my cat started talking to me. Should I justignoreyou? How’sthatsupposed to work?”
“You may notthinkthat you believe in things that hide in the dark,” the cat said. “You do, though. It’s in the hollows of your bones. Your heart quickens when you see a shadow through the window.Allhuman creatures believe in the older things. All human creatures were raised with their own understanding of them. It is your understanding of such spirits that has altered much of her behavior already. Fortunately for you, I am a creature well-versed in the sorts of fairy stories that you were fed upon as a whelp.”
“Now you’re just beingrude,” Sherry said. “I don’t even know what kind of animal has whelps, but I know that it isn’t people. And I have no idea what you’re actually trying totellme.” It had occurred to her, in a burst of misery, that this could all be nothing but some sort of weird trick or mind game—or, even worse, that she really had simply gone crazy. If that was the case, then she truly was in trouble. Everything about her life had become so strange and frightening that it was difficult to say what, exactly, was likely to be a figment of her imagination, and if she had gone so far as to imagine an entire string of murders that she had solved, then she was so utterly disconnected from reality that there was probably nothing that could be done to help her. Unless it was LSD in the water supply or ergot at the local bakery, she supposed. At this point, she could only hope for ergot.
“I am trying to offer you a deal,” the cat said, clearly happilyoblivious to the crisis Sherry was undergoing. “You will continue to investigate, so as to appease her. In this way you shall keep her, as the saying goes,off of my sleek, soft back. In return, I shall offer you guidance…in yourgreater understandingof her.”
Sherry frowned. “What does that mean, exactly? What will you do, specifically?”
The cat lowered his voice to a whisper. “Don’t speak so loudly! Your emotions call to her. What I will do, exactly, is advise you on how it is that she might be defeated. If you have questions to ask, it might be that I will be able to answer them.”
“You know how to defeat her?” Sherry asked. “So tell me, then. Won’t that solve both of our problems?”
The cat hissed at her. “Not so loud! No, I cannot simply tell you. To fight a creature like her is a matter of subtlety. The right weapon for one man might be the undoing of another. You must use your own discernment to discover which weapon calls to your hand. I may advise you, but I may not tell you the way.”
