There were a few other things he could do, things on the borderline between legal and not, things that would at least prevent her from coming into contact with vulnerable creatures again.
“Ma’am,” Dex said. “Kittens this young need more than I can give them. You need to—”
“I don’t need to do anything,” she said. “They’re your responsibility now. Come along, Harold.”
Harold. Poor kid. Dex had known quite a few Harolds in his hundred years, but most had been born at the turn of the twentieth century. Kids who would make it in the twenty-first would see the name Harold as something to overcome.
The woman headed to the door. The kid followed, as if he were a prisoner being led by an invisible chain.
“I’m sorry,” the kid whispered as he passed Dex. And that was what decided him.
Dex did snap his fingers—that was one of the many ways he could do magic—freezing time around him, along with the woman, the boy, the fish, and the poor, mewling kittens. The woman’s manicured fingers just brushed the door handle and the kid was in front of the counter, the embarrassed and worried look still on his acne-covered face.
The kittens appeared even younger than they had a moment before. Dex revised their ages downward another week. Their eyes had probably just opened.
It was up to him. Look at what he’d become. Dexter Grant: Kitten Superhero. It wasn’t a title he minded, although it did lack the glamour of his past.
Still, he stepped into the role. With a delicate movement of his fingers, he opened a rip in reality, searching for the kittens’ mother. He found her in the woods outside an expensive house on Portland’s west side, plaintively meowing for her missing children.
How did he know that was what he was going to find? This cruel woman had taken the kittens away from their mother, seeing dollar signs. The cat didn’t even have a collar, and her coat was rough. She was probably a stray who’d ventured into the wrong yard.
Then Dex glanced at the boy. Or maybe she had become a companion to a lonely child.
He sighed. Maybe he wasn’t just a kitten superhero. Maybe he still had some weaknesses for human beings. Now he had to do more spells, just because this horrible woman had walked into his store.
He did the spells in rapid succession. First, he clapped his hands together, bringing the mother cat to her babies. She landed inside the box—and he had to do an emergency spell before she thought her frozen offspring were dead.
The kittens started mewling, and the mother cat heaved a sigh of relief. She didn’t even look confused about her sudden change of venue. She just seemed happy that she had found her brood.
She lay down and the kittens nuzzled at her teats. Dex smiled, relieved that this one would turn out all right. Then he spelled the boy, adding a memory. The boy would think he had managed to defy his mother and had brought the mother cat in on his own.
Then Dex did one last spell. He put a hex on the woman herself, making her seem poisonous to any domesticated animal that came to her for help. That, at least, would prevent this from happening again.
The kid wouldn’t be able to have pets while he was growing up, but given the mother’s insensitivity, that would probably be a good thing. No sense in teaching Harold how to mistreat animals. With his subtle rebellious nature and his tender heart, he might grow up to be one of those people who adopted animals instead of harming them, so long as he didn’t have his mother’s cold-hearted example.
The mother cat was purring. She looked up at him with warm, adoring eyes. “We’ll take care of you,” Dex said, wishing it would be as easy as those last few spells had been. He’d have to dig into his meager coffers to fix the cat and vaccinate her, and he’d have to do the same with the kittens.
Then he’d have to figure out how to give them away. He already had way too many animals at his house. He didn’t want to sell the kittens at the store, but he might have no choice. He’d have to use more magic in that case. He wasn’t about to let a kitten go home with someone he didn’t know.
Dex snapped his fingers and the “freeze” spell ended. The woman continued her way out the door. But Dex touched the kid’s arm as he passed.
“You did the right thing, bringing the mother and her kittens here,” Dex said.
The kid turned toward him, stopped, and touched the box. He peered in like a hungry man being denied food. “I wanted to take them to the shelter, but she wouldn’t. She said that was too far and they were just cats.”
And you couldn’t make a profit at the shelter.
“You know her attitude about animals is wrong,” Dex said, treading lightly. No matter how awful a parent, a child often refused to see it.
“How come you don’t have pets in a pet store?” Harold blurted out, as if he’d been bottling in the question.
Dex smiled at him. “I can’t bear to part with the animals.”
Harold nodded. His fingers dipped into the box and lightly touched the mother cat’s back. She closed her eyes and continued purring. Dex shouldn’t have worried about Harold; the cat was letting him know the boy was all right.
“I always wanted a cat,” Harold said.
“You’ll be able to have one,” Dex said, “just as soon as you move out.”
Harold’s smile left. “You noticed that too, huh?”
“It wasn’t hard to miss. You know, you could always volunteer at the shelter. They need extra help, particularly in the winter.”
The shop door opened. A bell tinkled above. The woman stuck her face back inside. “Harold!”
Her tone made Dex jump.
“Coming, Mom,” Harold said. Then he whispered, “Thanks,” as he hurried out the door.
Dex watched the boy and his mother through the shop window. They crossed the parking lot, the mother berating the boy. Dex had the magic to spell that relationship too, maybe even fix it, but such intervention in mortal lives wasn’t allowed. The Fates had already given him a warning, telling him that he was violating the rules made centuries before he was born.
He wouldn’t get another warning. They would zap him away from whatever he was doing—even if he were saving a life—and then they’d try him, and probably send him away for a millennium.
If he’d been a slightly different man, he would have continued intervening—after all, what was the point of magic powers if you couldn’t use them for all that was good and right?—but he couldn’t stand the thought of the Fates’ punishment.
He’d heard about some of the sentences the Fates had dealt out, like forcing master musician Apollo to listen to Wagner’s Ring Cycle for three hundred years, which would have been bad enough even if the singers hadn’t been nearly a half step flat. The last thing Dex wanted to do was be sent to some Fate-imagined hell, probably (for him) a place without any animals at all, just because he had done something he believed to be right.
So he’d had to rely on his own instincts, pushing where he could push and being subtle everywhere else. He’d done both here. If he had to defend his spells to the Fates, he’d tell them the truth—he’d hexed the mother so that no other animals would cross her path. And he’d tell the Fates the only reason he’d spelled the boy was to make certain the kid wouldn’t notice anything wrong when Dex had to bring the mother cat to her kittens.
All the things he had to do to pretend he wasn’t using his magic. He resented it. And he missed the days when he saw trouble and responded, using the gift he’d been given.
Dex leaned over the box of kittens just like Harold had. The kittens were still nursing, and the mother cat was still purring. Everything looked fine, but Dex had a lot of work to do if he was going to care for these cats—and he would be the one to care for them. The local shelter was overstocked with strays and kittens, and he didn’t want to throw more into the mix.
Someday he wished he could find someone else who cared as much about animals as he did. Someone who wasn’t a vet or a pet store owner, someone who had a warm heart and a good soul.
/> Someone female.
He smiled at himself. In a hundred years, he hadn’t met a woman who interested him. Even though his personal prophesy from the Fates said he would have a great love, he didn’t believe it.
No woman had ever interested him beyond a passing fancy. He was beginning to think he’d never meet the right one.
He picked up the phone and dialed his vet’s number from memory. As the ringing sounded in his ear, he swiveled toward the cash register. He started punching in the prices for a cat bed, a litter box, and some Science Diet cat food. He was becoming his own best customer.
“Heart’s too soft, Grant,” he muttered to himself as the vet’s tech put him on hold. But he’d always known that was his problem.
He also knew that he really wasn’t interested in a solution.
***
Her name was not Erika O’Connell, but that was the name she had been using for the past twenty years. Her time with that name was almost up. When you were in the public eye as long as she had been, people tended to notice when you didn’t age. She figured she had another ten years before she had to fake a spectacular death or disappear on a trip to a remote outpost.
Unfortunately, there weren’t that many remote outposts left, not like it had been when she was a child—four thousand years ago—when everything, it seemed, was remote.
Erika O’Connell—whose real name, Eris, was not something she had shared with anyone—sat behind the desk in her Los Angeles office. She had her shoes off. They lay on the tasteful white carpet, the heel of one inside the other.
Hard-copy files rested on all the leather furniture—only a custom-built wooden desk chair had escaped the clutter. Even her plants were messy, because she preferred them that way—overgrown, trailing down the sides of tables and onto the floor.
She was talking on her cell phone, listening to a meeting on speakerphone, watching CNN, KAHS, FOX News, and CNBC on the double split-screen television that sat on one corner of her desk. In the center of her desk, her state-of-the-art IBM with more bells, whistles, and other unnecessary items, remained on AOL, pinging whenever she received e-mail. In one corner of that screen, stock quotes ran in real time, and in the other corner, ESPN shared the tiny television monitor with C-SPAN.
And on the far corner of her desk, her handy-dandy laptop was synchronizing that day’s schedule with her Palm.
Who needed magic in the twenty-first century? Technology did everything for her.
The intercom on her desk buzzed, and she tapped it lightly. “In a meeting,” she said to the secretary, whose name she had never bothered to learn.
Eris rarely used the Los Angeles office—she preferred the New York headquarters because no one could predict what was going to happen on any day in the Big Apple—and she viewed being here as a great inconvenience. But she had had to meet some stockholders the night before, and once in a while she had to come to them.
Besides, her A-team was here, covering yet another entertainment scandal, and she was looking for a way to pry them loose. Her network, KAHS, had risen to the top tier of the cable news shows in two short years, but she still had a long way to go to become number one.
She didn’t want to do it by imitating this week’s rival. Instead, she had to establish her own voice. And doing that required more than covering the latest Hollywood divorce. She wanted to cover stories that would change the world—not all at once, but one little layer at a time.
She had just hung up from the conference call when her son—who was, dangerously, calling himself Stri these days—appeared before her. At three-thousand-eight-hundred and something, he wasn’t even close to young, but he liked to pretend at it. This time, he had a shaved head, a jacket that was more chain than fabric, and more tattoos than she had ever seen on a human being.
“Busy,” she said as she was about to dial another conference call.
“Yeah,” Stri said, “but I got news you can’t cover in any part of your multimedia empire.”
She flicked the cell phone shut without saying good-bye and pulled a red-tipped fingernail away from the speakerphone. “What?”
He grinned. He had blacked out or discarded half of his teeth. It didn’t look menacing. In fact, it made him look like a peasant during the Russian Revolution—even with the ridiculous clothes. Or maybe she only thought that because she could remember the Russian Revolution.
“Well?” she asked, when he didn’t answer.
Her door opened and the nameless secretary—a mouse of a mortal, brown skin, brown hair, brown clothes (weren’t people in Los Angeles supposed to be prettier than average? What went wrong here?)—crept into the room to throw more paper on one of the chairs.
“I’m having a meeting,” Eris snapped, furious that her son hadn’t come in by normal channels.
“Just more numbers from overseas, ma’am,” the secretary said. “I thought you might want to see them immediately.”
“Fine,” Eris said. “Next time, e-mail them to me. I’ll see them quicker.”
“Yes, ma’am.” And the secretary backed out.
Stri didn’t even turn around, nor did he wait for the door to close to start telling his news. He always created trouble. That was one of the things Eris loved about him—most of the time.
“The kids have taken the oath and are now exploring their new office,” he said.
Eris forgot her irritation with him. “When?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” he said. “Saw them get flown into Mount Olympus, and was their first customer when they got out. They have a lot to learn.”
Eris laughed. “Wonderful. And the Fates?”
He shrugged. “On their own, I guess.”
“Even better,” she said. “Put some kind of trace on them. Let me know if they get anywhere close to the mortal realm.”
Stri grinned. “Will do, Mommy Dearest. You gonna hunt them down? Or are you going for more finesse than that?”
She raised a single eyebrow at him, giving him the stare she had used when she was a twenty-two-year-old mother with no magical powers at all. He cringed. Of all the tricks in her bag, that one was the most effective—at least with Stri.
“Guess you’re going for finesse,” he said.
“Have I ever done anything else?” she asked, and he looked away.
“I’ll trace them,” he said. “But there are rumors they’re heading into Faery, and I’m not going in there again.”
Last time he did, he ate some of the food and lost a hundred years before Eris even noticed he was missing.
“Just trace the Fates,” she said.
“Why can’t you do it?”
“Because if I do,” she said, flipping open her cell phone again, “they’ll think I’m up to something. If you do it, they’ll think you’re just creating trouble.”
“I’m not someone who should be ignored.” He crossed his arms, and the tattoos bulged.
“No, darling, you’re not,” she said, glancing at the divided television screen. “You’re something to be tolerated, and you should be proud of that. Now go away and let Mommy take over the world.”
He peered at the television too. “I still think you should put me on the air.”
“Busy,” she said, just like she had when he came in.
“Jeez, Mom, I’m doing you a favor.”
“No, dear,” she said, picking up a pencil to dial with so that she wouldn’t break a nail. “You’re doing me a job. Now get out before I stop cleaning up after you, and you’ll be in trouble with the Powers That Be.”
“If the Fates are really gone, that won’t matter,” he said.
“We’ll see.” Eris dialed, but stopped before the last number. “’Bye.”
Stri frowned, his pout looking perfectly natural on his tattooed and pierced face. He waited just long enough for her to catch the full impact of the look and then he vanished, leaving a cloud of red smoke that smelled of cherry bombs.
With a wave of a hand, Eris made the smoke dis
appear. She wished she could make everything else that bothered her disappear as quickly, but that would be obvious, and she hated nothing more than the obvious.
She smiled. Everything was going well. She was even ahead of schedule. With the Fates gone, her life would get a whole lot easier.
She might even abandon some of her finesse and reveal a tiny corner of herself.
The last time she had done that, the world had taken notice.
It would take notice again.
THREE
VIVIAN WAS DREAMING of a world filled with homeless kittens, kittens that people kept dumping on her doorstep, expecting her to take care of them. They were little and they seemed to be multiplying asexually. Every time she touched one, there would suddenly be two, but she couldn’t stop herself from picking them up.
Then the kittens started pounding in unison, as if they all wanted to join the cast of Stomp, and she kept telling them to stop, but they wouldn’t. It took her a few minutes to realize that the pounding really existed.
She sat up and rubbed a hand over her face before glancing at the fancy CD alarm clock that Travers insisted she buy. 6:45 a.m. Light was coming in through the sides of the linen shade, but the bedroom was still dark.
Her heart was pounding and her eyes were made of glue. She hadn’t had much sleep. She’d stayed up, reading and rereading Kyle’s comic book, missing her family already.
It felt like if she was in a hotel. She’d only been living here for a week and everything was unfamiliar. Even though it was her nightstand against her bed, her blue sheets and pillow cases surrounding her, her specially built comic book shelves holding all the boxes of her collections, the arrangement was different than the one she’d had in L.A. And she wasn’t used to the sounds of the building yet.
Somehow she hadn’t thought the walls were this thin.
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