The Ones You Love
Katerina Degratte
Chapter 1
Maori
I re-awaken in a way too brightly lit room, making it hard to see anything. Everything is coming out in blurry globs of color, like I’m a human in critical need of glasses. Or maybe that’s just the effect of whatever was in those needles that those assholes gave me. I detest feeling so helpless. I loathe being weak.
"I wouldn't have done this to her if she would have just let my original experiment be." Susan's voice is like nails on a chalkboard. I've never liked it, never understood the appeal. I’ve always opted to hide under the bed or in the closet when Cat wasn't around.
"Lady, if you're searching for sympathy, that's not something you're going to get from me." I narrow my eyes at her, wishing them to resemble those of a fierce tiger, but she doesn’t appear fazed.
"You were optimal from the start, though."
I wince as another liquid of some sort is shot into me. I wish I wasn't detained and could slash killer claws at her. My body tingles before pain shoots through me. . My limbs feel like they're about to burst as they grow ten times their natural range.
"You talk so very special for a cat. You and I can be something together, Maori."
Damn, if I was more of a people person, maybe I could delay matters a bit. I was never one for small talk, though.
"Can you feel it making you stronger?" Susan asks, her voice sounding far away yet dangerously close, almost like it’s echoing.
"It makes me feel …" I attempt to stand up, but I instantly fall to the side. Chemicals reverberating through me prevent me from feeling any pain, as I hit the cool aluminum floor.
"The chemicals work their course through your veins, making you undefeatable.” The immense agony, causing me to pass out. “The perfect soldier." I hear the words faintly, before my vision is gone.
"Maori. Maori. Maori." I hear her voice ringing out. "Come on, you can't pass on me. Please wake up and see me." The voice chokes. I'm pretty confident it's Cat speaking to me. It isn’t clear how that’s feasible because I'm pretty sure she went out on her date tonight and wasn't around. "Wake up. You can't let yourself die from this. We can work through this."
What happened to me?
I blink my eyes open, feeling the golden light surrounding me as it envelopes me in its warmth. "Cat?"
She's standing there in a glowing abyss. She looks bigger than she used to look. When I see reflection in a nearby mirror, I realize I’m the size of a kitten. Cat’s clothing looks far from date wear; she’s in her beloved torn Beatles shirt and pajama shorts. I was the runt of the litter, a little thing, in the conditions she found me in. Fleas hoping from ear to ear, eyes sick.
"Mommy?" I try to go towards her, but my progress is slowed. My legs feel as if they're being jabbed with a million tiny needles every time I struggle to go forward a step.
"Maori, you can get through this. We can get through this together," she cries to me, running towards me with her arms outstretched. I'm so close to reaching her, but as soon as I'm about to, she starts to vanish. "Don't forget that I love you," she mouths before withering away altogether.
I groan as I wake up, savoring the cool floor against my fur. Stretching my limbs, I blink my eyes open, and everything is a haze like I’m on one of those lousy drug trips. It’s been a while since I had one of those on accident. Cat swiftly kicking that roommate out to the streets and seeking me immediate help.
The room is large, I only take up a third of it. Had to be a lab of some sorts with the pristine cleanness, and the tables full of needles. Two exits, a garage door I assume for other test subjects, and a human sized exit to the right of the room. A large glass panel, probably used to see how test subjects are doing, if its not safe enough right away to be around them. Some water dispensers at the top of the ceiling, but they must be for chemicals. To drug someone if they got too rowdy.
"Finally, she stirs. I was growing worried about you." And the bitch decided to be in here, instead of safe haven. Underestimating me much?
That's not Cat's voice. It’s too much like a witch's cackle, while Cat's is soothing. Well, most of the time, unless she’s having a meltdown. It’s never directed towards me, though, as I always lay beside her until she feels better, lending my strength.
"Can you get up?" Susan tries to sound sympathetic, but there's underlying irritation. A rush to do something of some sort. "Come on, kitty?"
If I could drop dead, I would just to spite the bitch.
I try to stretch my legs to get up, but it hurts far too much. I want to get up for myself, for Cat, but it's like a million blades are being jabbed into my body at once. "I can't," I mutter, my eyes deciding to close again. Is this what Cat meant by not giving up, not dying? Or would giving up mean becoming part of Susan's reign? It’s a damned if I do, damned if I don't sort of situation. Where is that human when I need her?
No. Cat meant for me to stay alive. Cat would never wish death on Maori Lucky Salvatore, her savior.
"I suppose I may have given her too much. She's the same size as my last creation, but I upped the dose because she was the runt of the litter," Susan says to someone.
"That was reckless, Susan," a man's voice replies. His voice is velvety, assured, sounding different than the beast that seized me. If the brute that took me was a bull, this man was a snake. A cobra or something of the sort. "If anything, you should have given her less."
"I was just trying to get her ready before Cat got back to the apartment.” A cool metal is placed against my coat. "Fuck! The pulse is going down. No, no, no! It can't end like this. I didn't mean to kill the cat. I tried too hard for it to end like this!" Susan blathers. It’s almost possible that she believes in guilt. Cat moving things around must have disrupted her usual rational thinking. Love tends to do that. "What are you doing?" Her banshee-like screech is nearly enough to make me open my eyes.
"A little adrenaline to get things going in Miss Tuxedo over here," the man answers in a tone as if to say it's obvious. As if Susan would be senseless for pondering such a thing.
"What if it causes unexpected backlash?" she frets.
It takes a moment, but I start feeling the energy and strength coming back to me. Tenfold to what I’m used to, not that I’m a weakling. Slow waves until I'm fully charged, like a cell phone on the cord charging up. My legs are not as on fire anymore, but my vision is foggier than ever. And this unmistakable urge, or hunger, is coursing through my veins …I can practically touch it to inspect what it is. What the heck?
"Maori? Are you in there?" Susan tentatively approaches me as I do nothing other than stare, my teeth baring in a snarl. The insatiable hunger screams to my mind, and I can hear her heart race. A game of cat and mouse? It would fit with all the mice she experimented on. Imperfect human knows she fucked things up massively …
No, I’m better than this. I’m not just some killer. Why would I want something other than cat delicacies? Humans would be too much of a mess. "Get away from me!" I bare my fangs at her, and she takes a few steps backwards, nearly tripping over her own feet. It’s like I’m the Beast in that one flick, who was Beauty then?
"And give her a little of this." The man sticks something else into my veins that makes my brain go haywire, with straight thinking going right out the window. All the rest of the world is in a red furry.
"What the hell are you doing, Jack?" Susan screeches. The rest of the world is melting away. All I feel is the urge to track that perfume of blood and demolish it.
"I'm leaving. You can stay here."
My head jerks towards the figure
of the man leaving. The door shuts, sealing behind him before I can attack. That sultry scent, though, the mix of musk filling my nostrils After making me this monster, by injecting me with those vials! I won’t forget his treachery, and if we cross paths again, he won’t live to tell the tale.
"Why?" Susan yells at him in desperation through the sturdy glass. "I paid you well. We were going to go into this new world as rulers."
"You were getting too close to the answer of what happened to your parents.” I strike my paw against glass just to get an electric shock through my foot, then everything goes black. Ouch. “And I can't leave loose ends hanging." That's the last seen of his smug face for the time being.
"Jack, don't!" I scream out, a pair of cool hands petting my fur. He was killing her because she was getting too close to finding out the truth. A memory that took a few days to drudge back up after the backlash of everything.
I hear the voice again. “Maori.”
"Go away, Jack!" I wave an uneasy paw at the arm. I’m not aiming to really hurt whatever it is in my sleeping phase, but I’d prefer to get this thing off me. He supercharged me just so I would kill Susan? Not that I liked her. Despite that, he was what goaded me to kill her?
"Maori," the voice calls again.
And this time, I've had enough. I roughly pin the figure to the ground, ready to rip out its throat.
"Maori!" the voice cries out. "I'm not Jack. I'm Cat."
I think the voice says it's Cat, and it has a feminine ring to it. Or maybe it was phat, rat … So many words rhyme with Cat, and I am so very sleepy this morning. It feels like I’m in the memory, if not for Cat’s voice beckoning me.
"Maori, you're making it hard to breathe," the voice gasps out, and I get a better, more awake sense of my surroundings. My eyes widen in terror when I see I have Cat pinned down on the ground.
"Shit. I'm sorry." I jump off of her, taking a few more uneasy steps back.
I don’t want to hurt her. Even now, she has some slight claw marks on her shoulders. And if I hadn’t woken up when I did, who knows what would have happened? Did they have therapy for twelve-foot-tall cats? Probably not. Most humans aren’t daft enough to put themselves in that much danger. Or I’m more likely to be killed by a hunter as a mantle price. Who kills without reaping the reward? That's just senseless.
"It's okay, Maori." She takes a step towards me, but I back up so much to the point that my rear end is butting against the cave wall. "Please don't run from me." Her despaired expression pulls at my heartstrings, so I wander over to her. The least I can do is heal up the damage I caused.
She giggles, feeling my sandpaper tongue against her skin. "It's okay, baby. I know you didn't mean to."
But that doesn’t change what I nearly did.
She scratches behind my ear in the spot she knows I can't resist, the damn bitch. "Who's Jack?" Cat went right towards the juicy tidbits. Jack. Jack. Jack. The guy who captured me. No, he was the guy who messed enough with the formula to make me a raging killer.
"That's classified," I tell her. She gives me such a pissed-off look that it’s a miracle my fur doesn’t melt off from those flames in her eyes.
I don’t want to open up about the time when I was weak. That time I had to rely on someone else. Relive that memory of tearing Susan's body to shreds, like she was a damned chicken bone.
"Where's Charming? You didn't bring the runt with this time?" I'm slightly surprised, as he's been attached to her hip since they met. Not that I'm complaining. It just means I won't have to be on all toes, waiting for him to get himself into life-threatening mischief.
"Maori, I can see you're trying to change the subject," she says, and I huff. "I'll let it drop for now, but I want you to know that I'm here for you." She makes me purr by giving me more loving scratches behind my ear. Her brow furrows as if putting two and two together. "Is Jack the one that killed Susan?"
"No." I immediately chide myself for answering far too quickly. I don’t want Cat to mess her life up, going on some revenge fantasy for some girl who ditched her. Please, just don't. "If you decide to do something stupid, just remember you have a cat, a kitten, and an autistic brother who counts on you. You can't be throwing that to the side for some piece."
She gawks at my description of her lost love, and my trauma, throwing Tiger some shade. "You've been hanging out with this one too much, Maori." Well, there’s few other options when we’re the only two monstrous-sized cats. The spiders certainly don’t want to be friends after one of their kind gets the boot for making Charming an all-you-can-eat buffet. "Besides, if I fuck my life up, I can just live out here with you!" She hugs me against my side as I groan. I'm sure Colin wouldn't appreciate the lack of Wi-Fi. Movies and TV shows are his thing. This would be hell for him.
"You wouldn't last a day out here, Cat,” I tell her matter of fact. I couldn’t watch her all the time, the other creatures of the forest knew better then to harm a hair on her head. Cat once again, gawking. "And be careful you don't want your face to stay stuck like that. My resting bitch face is much more flattering than yours." To be honest, mine was impossible to beat.
She shakes her head, slightly laughing.
"So why did you decide to come out here and disturb my beauty sleep?" I yawn. I could for sure take down a few more hours of much-needed rest before nightfall. Sleep is the good shit.
"Your bird worked. I'm back at HQ. Though, I'm on surveillance,” Cat explains, scratching the back of her head awkwardly.
Just when she got off …
"Brian tried to accuse Charming of being some sort of criminal," she gives a light laugh, still feeling the effects of fatigue from the past few days.
Ha, the dude barely has two brain cells to rub together.
"And there's a bit of a surprise." With that uneasy smile of Cat’s, it can’t be something good. "There was no way I could get out of telling them you mutated."
How many more moments of life do I have? How long before their troops started marching down here? I wouldn’t put my ass on the line with the others to protect them.
"So I got the pity vote from you being my cat. And they decided that having a talking cat on the inside might not be the worst idea,” she finishes. Stretching her back against my body as she lays back. Me giving her a slight glare from the action. I wasn’t a pull-out couch.
Chapter 2
Cat
"Hi!" I wave as I walk in through the door, the bell chiming behind me. Something that was installed on the door many years ago so we could hear as someone entered the store. Charming is strapped to my back in the kitty book bag. That was fun to set up. And by fun, it was hell in a handbasket.
I shake my head as I walk through my apartment door. The doors are still off the hinges. There is no call from the landlord yet. Though, there is a message from one of the neighbors asking if I'm okay. Or if I got myself in a challenging situation. I would bet on the neighbor across the hall. She's a nice lady, along with one of the neighbors in one of the downstairs apartments. The guy's apartment directly below mine is a dick, though. Old white guy with nothing better to do in his life than harp on others’ lives. It’s a favorite activity of mine to do something preposterous to my appearance just so I can hear him bitch downstairs about how I look like a lesbian, or boy, or whatever. Not that it matters; my body isn’t around for the entertainment of others.
"What adventure are we going on today!" Charming jumps up on my sadly destroyed couch. His mouth immediately goes for the stuffing inside. He’s at the age where everything can be food. I give him a light shove away, attempting to expel his ‘if it fits, I eat it’ philosophy towards noms. The entire place was in shambles while HQ was trying to search for me. Hopefully, they’ll have someone else clean up this mess, but I can’t count on it … I’m lucky my apartment didn't kick me out.
I shake my head, giving him a rub behind the ears. "No adventure today, pipsqueak, I have to go to work." My eyes want to bug from my head as I see my beloved signed
memoir in ruins. The sharpie autograph is in bits and pieces. I'll kill whoever was here fucking with my valuables. And the photo op that Colin and I had with that vampire character, that I treasured so much in smithereens. I have to stop looking around or else all I’ll be able to see is red. But as I make a few steps towards the kitchen, I see my beloved unopened bottle of bourbon in shatters. Monsters!
Charming eyes a piece of glass like it’s an adventure. "What's that?" God no, I didn’t need a bloodied crying kitten.
Charming soon to be scooped up, to be taken out of harms way. "No playing with broken glass." My voice is flat, but his kitten desires don't seem to notice the difference in tone. "Work."
The repeated word 'work' excites him, as it should for someone who won’t ever have to face that endeavor. He’s never experienced something quite like it. "We're going to work today! What's that like?"
I don’t recall telling him he can go. But even if it weren't for the broken windows, the doors that won’t close, and the trashed apartment, I’d feel skeptical leaving him alone. He’s still too young, and it’s been less than seventy-two hours since Maori was captured. How can I ditch him with that going on? Tears come to my eyes at the thought of Susan's dead body. I don’t know if those monstrous humans had anything in mind for the little one, but alas too risky to put in front of danger.
"You'll get to watch it from your bag." He tilts his head to the side in that permanently cute kitten expression, as if wondering what I could possibly mean.
When he finds out, it's less than ideal for His Highness, though.
"What? No!" He makes a feeble attempt at waving his paws as I put him back in the kitty bag. He really hates it there. "Why can't you get me a leash or something so I can explore things more?"
So his young neck can easily slip out and he can run up the nearest tree? No thanks, I’m not a big fan of heights. And I believe I've had enough excitement in the past few days, as is more likely to come if my track record had anything to show for it.
The One's You Love (Cat Johnson Chronicles Book 2) Page 1
