Catopolis

I had to get away from Father, to get back to The Coachlight, and I had to do it fast!

Now there was irony, if you wanted it: the failing, hungry-for-life undead, and the cat who has taken so many lives already and has blood afire with life. Yet surely AnkhesenAkana would long ago have wrung his neck and taken the energy within him if it could use that energy. So the lives of cats evidently helped sustain undeath not at all…

It had been AnkhesenAkana who got Father his magic. She had no skill for it herself, but from her, er, first life knew where ancient texts were hidden and remembered some details seen when watching others cast spells.

He was a slow learner, it seemed; he kept undoing the incorporeal thing by indulging in his bloodlust. Contact with blood-any sort of blood-turned him corporeal even if he didn’t want to become solid.

Which gave me an idea. I had to get to a place I’d visited only once, a place any cat would hate fervently for its noise and perils and overwhelming smells. The city’s recycling sorting plant.

I used my best spell again, to get myself out of the damned marquee and away from Father. Steve couldn’t wait much longer.

I’d never much appreciated the pale gray begi

No, nothing can describe this smell. It was like being blinded.

For a moment I feared Father would turn back, but no prey had ever eluded him before, and having found me after so long, he wasn’t going to let me manage to be the first.

Good. I knew exactly where I wanted to be and got there.

The place was full of rats, who sneered at me as they waited for me to fall afoul of one of the many murderous pieces of machinery that were crushing, spi

I raced past my umpteenth rat-and then whirled around and bit its neck, clamping my own jaws down hard. It died.

Rat in mouth, I turned to face Father.

He’d been following me rather gingerly, and no wonder: I’d reached that rat by ru

So we couldn’t hear each other, couldn’t smell each other, and were poised above one of the deadliest butchering contraptions I’d ever seen. Luckily, Father’s reluctance told me he’d never been here before, which meant my desperate plan just might work.

There was a weight-sorting mechanism at the head end of this, to keep contaminants out. If it worked, I’d live. If not…

“Sorry, Steve,” I mumbled, around the rat. It didn’t taste any too good, but I didn’t plan to have it in my mouth for much longer. Putting my head down, I ran right at Father.

He reared to swipe at me with his claws, but I stopped just out of reach-and he obligingly doomed himself, lunging forward to really get his claws into me.

I slammed into him and drove us both off the pipe, scrabbling at it just long enough so that we fell separately into the waiting chute.

The secret was staying still.

I landed on a good big piece of cardboard and sat there like a stone. Which made the cardboard too heavy, tripped a sensor, and the metal “lifts” rose between the knives to thrust up my cardboard from underneath and shunt it sideways, out of the chute, for hand sorting.

At the last moment, I spat out the rat, and watched it tumble down in front of Father. Who had seen his peril and struggled furiously, churning the cardboard until he could turn incorporeal.

As I got put onto the sorting belt, he was gri

Until the rat struck the knives right beside him, its blood spattered in all directions, drenching him-and the knives got him.

By then I was tearing down the iron stair meant for workers to unjam the knives when necessary, trying not to cry. He was, after all, my Father.

“So passes Montuhotep,” I murmured aloud, stopping under the metal that was now dripping blue blood. I stayed still again until his gore had soaked the fur down my back, then did the one last thing I needed to do: I found a small, sharp-ended shard of old metal I could carry in my mouth. Thus laden, I got out of there and gave in to my grief.

I had hated and feared him, but he was my Father. And a cat who had in his day made many tremble. A royal tomcat, the likes of which the world would not see again.

Feeling glum, I hurried back back across the awakening city as fast as I could drag my weary body and got back to The Coachlight’s windows in time to see that I was… just in time.

Darling Steve. He had worn himself out searching the building top to bottom for me and had finally fallen asleep, all smudges and cobwebs. AnkhesenAkana needed mouth to mouth-and preferably more-body contact to take over his body and had awakened him to try to get him undressed and into bed.

It seemed even ancient Egyptian undead could seethe with frustration. She was trying to make love to a man too sleepy to stay awake and do anything, who was much larger and heavier than she was.

I decided to put her out of her misery by ringing her bell with Father’s special code.

And pouncing on her head when she snarlingly opened the door, bounding on from that lofty perch into her lair before she could even pummel me off.

She followed. I did a lot of clawing in the frantic moments that followed and managed to make Jethana Walkingcorpse brain herself against one of the gilded posts of her own bed, hard enough to awaken Steve.

Who stared in bleary astonishment as I rolled across the dazed woman’s throat, smearing her with Father’s blood-and then, rather awkwardly, pricked her with the shard, in the midst of the gore.

Whereupon Montuhotep’s “blood of many lives” started to mix with that human body’s own blood… poisoning the resident AnkhesenAkana.

Inside the now-writhing woman, it started to burn. She wailed helplessly.

“What-?” Steve contributed in astonishment. “What’d you do to her?”

By then, we were both looking at a blood-smeared but quite alive mindless living human woman. Who had seen better days and had a body no longer really suited to the negligée she was-mostly-wearing.

“Let’s go,” I snarled at my partner. “Get your clothes and everything, and let’s get out of here!”

Steve blinked at me, and I sighed, took on human form to start dressing him, and snapped, “Or can you think of some way to make the police believe all of this?”

CAT CALL 911 by Ja

The rumor that proved to be no rumor at all began with a no-account rat. Scamper encountered the creature, lean as a snake, twitching its whiskers over the rim of the dumpster. No one else was abroad in the midnight alley, just behind the respectable shop front housing Cat-A-Combs hair parlor. Madame Persian’s haberdashery was locked. The darlings who sparkled in diamond collars never stirred from their penthouse comforts past sundown.

The gleam in the rat’s shifty eyes sparked like sulfur as it bared yellow teeth.

“Hey, Copper!” it taunted. “A dark-doing’sss at large in the city again. Made a moussse eat her newbornsss from dessspair. Ssso also, it missled a dog that ssstrayed and drowned in the river.”

“Feckless folk, dogs.” Scamper jerked his tail in contempt. Rat’s gossip! He dabbed a lick on his orange shoulder and prowled on, supremely dismissive. “Don’t have to be puppies to howl and run riot. And mice eat their young in the lean times without any dark-doing’s help.”