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His eyebrows go up. “What’s yours is mine, pumpkin. Remember that.”

“You’re really going to keep calling me that, aren’t you?”

“Stop calling me Mr. Whiskers, and I’ll work on it, my dear Kate.”

“And I suppose what’s yours is mine?”

“You got it.”

I roll my eyes, though I can’t keep my lips from quirking upward. In fact, by the time we move away from the petting zoo (after Vincent stares down one of the baby goats, pats its head, then mutters under his breath as he searches for the hand-washing station), I’m smiling so much that my cheeks hurt, and that’s when the realization creeps up on me.

I’m having fun with Vincent. Not my fluffy Mr. Whiskers, but Vincent Marrow, the warlock who, yes, is almost Mr. Whiskers… but getting to know him as a man is so totally different that, somehow, I keep forgetting that he is my cat.

He’s funny. Shameless. Curious about everything, even though he tries to pretend that he isn’t. He knows what cell phones and social media are because he’s spent the last thirty-nine years living around humans, but he still stared at the tap-to-pay terminal at the cider stand for so long that the teenage cashier asked if he needed help. He makes outrageous declarations with so much confidence that I sometimes forget how ridiculous they are, and every time he catches me laughing at something he says, he looks ridiculously pleased with himself.

Then there are moments when he goes quiet.

Those are the ones I’m starting to notice the most as the evening passes us by.

We’ve drifted toward the edge of the festival by then, away from the thickest part of the crowd. The late afternoon sun is slipping lower behind the trees, casting everything in that hazy golden light that makes October in Shadowvale look absolutely stunning. A little girl in fairy wings races past us with her mother chasing after her, and when I glance at Vincent, I catch the strangest expression on his face again.

It’s gone almost immediately, but I know I saw it. More than that, I think I understand what it means.

“You really only get one Halloween?”

He turns to me. “What was that?”

“As a man. You said you’re only a man on Halloween.”

“That’s right. From midnight to midnight. Just the twenty-four hours, then I’m back to being a black cat until next year.”

Damn.

There’s an empty bench beneath one of the maple trees, and I head toward it. Vincent follows without question, dropping down on my left side, sitting close enough beside me that our thighs touch despite there being plenty of room.

That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that I… I don’t move away from him.

“So, if I trust that pamphlet you showed me, you’ve only been human for thirty-nine days since 1987?”

“Warlock, Kate. I’m a warlock.”

“I know.” I think about what he said. “And you’ve only been in this body for… what? A little more than a month? The rest of that was as Mr. Whiskers?”

I think he can tell that I’m seriously trying to understand. Instead of blowing past the question, Vincent looks out toward the festival and sighs. “When you put it that way, it sounds a little depressing.”

“Is that why you keep insisting you’re only thirty-one?”

Because he’s done that quite a few times already. He snickered when he mentioned I was thirty-three, telling me that I was the cougar to his kitty cat, when the reality is… is he really younger than I am if he was thirty-one before I was born?

He immediately looks offended again. “I don’t insist that I’m thirty-one. I am thirty-one.”

“You were born in, like, 1956.” If I did my math right.

“So?”

“That means you’re really seventy.”

His brown eyes narrow. “You read the pamphlet, pumpkin. I warned you that aging me up makes me cranky.”