Catspell

by Colleen Shannon

  The cogent question was not merely–who was he? And yes, Shelly had seen the sizable testicles on the creature. The even more important question that pertained more closely to Arielle’s safety was–why had he come?

  Arielle wrapped her companion’s hand in clean gauze, smiling at Shelly’s tale of how one night, to stave off the bitter Himalayan cold, she drank her Sherpa under the hide table. Meanwhile, totally focused on different trains of thought at the same time, Shelly concluded two things from the current facts as she knew them.

  When she entered this room, the tabby had been toying with Arielle, but had exhibited no sense of menace. The menace only came when Shelly had destroyed the amulet. But even more importantly, since the creature could perform a virtually instantaneous feat of astral projection, no bars, no walls, no might of God nor man, could keep it out if it wanted to come in.

  And this was, apparently, the first time it had appeared to Arielle outside its dream form. It chose to appear first in a non threatening, winsome form, as a harmless house cat. And Arielle loved cats.

  The deduction came, as Shelly’s almost always did, a prioiri–the creature came not to frighten or kill Arielle.

  It came to seduce her.

  And this certainty frightened Shelly more than outright menace, for it would be far harder to protect Arielle from seduction than death.

  To the point, as the preceding discussion had proved, Arielle was at the transition in her life, as came to all young women, where the touch of a man was the last great mystery that would initiate her into womanhood. More problematical than that, however, Shelly was becoming increasingly convinced that the ancient female rites of copulation were, though she did not understand it yet, also a link to Isis and the bridge that would complete Arielle’s transformation. Shelly and Ethan had deciphered enough of the crypt’s hieroglyphs for Shelly to suspect that Isis’s madness grew full blown when she took a cat-man for a lover.

  Even as she made Arielle laugh with the funny tale, Shelly despaired. How could she protect a girl who didn’t want to be protected? A girl who seemed to want to embrace her mother’s fate rather than escape it?

  A long nosed face popped into Shelly’s head like her own personal doppelganger.

  Ethan. She detested having to ask for help at any time, especially from a man who made not just her tiny hairs stand on end, but her entire world felt off balance when she looked into those penetrating green eyes. But he was also the smartest man she knew, as familiar with the arcane world as she was, and most importantly, he had personally known Isis.

  It was time, as the Indians used to say, to palaver. For Arielle’s sake, she would swallow her pride and ask for help.

  And if, in the pit of her stomach, there was a tiny flutter of excitement at the thought of seeing him again, well, Shelly told herself she was hungry. Fighting the spirit world always whetted her appetites.

  The next night, human again, Seth waited until the lights dimmed in the window. Now Arielle was in the room, he could see through her eyes because of their link: the bed was turned back invitingly. He saw the woman kiss his beloved Arielle’s cheek and leave the room. He had watched the footmen clumsily try to block the broken window with wooden panels, but they would be easy to shove aside. Seth fingered the golden amulet in his pocket.

  The same amulet he’d had made as an exact copy of the one the spirit world had warned him would burn. It had been finished this morning.

  Despite his distaste at the task, Seth had broken into Isis’s crypt and stolen her golden jewelry. He had no choice if he were to win Arielle for his mate over his brother’s powerful allure. Only the heartfire of Isis’s blood and bone, that had taken her on the sacred journey to the afterlife, had the power to overcome the distance between spirit and real world, to allow Isis to communicate with her daughter. When she wore the amulet, Arielle was receptive to the spirit world.

  Yes, to both brothers, but to Isis above all…

  Luke had broken the sacred vows they’d both made upon the transformation rites. Ra had granted each of them the powers of his lion warrior god Mihos for one year. One year for the brothers to battle and prove who was strongest. Only the one with the ka of purity, whose soul would be weighed by Anubis in the afterlife and must counterbalance a feather, only the brother of maat, or truth, would survive. Forever. With Arielle, lioness of God, by his side, Mihos would gain the gift every Egyptian pharaoh had squandered lifetimes and fortunes seeking: immortality.

  Like their ancestors, Luke was obsessed with the thought of living forever, and the more he killed, the more merciless he became in the quest.

  Seth, however, wanted Arielle in the now. Somehow he had to introduce her to the world of the cat and preserve her grip upon the world of man. Together then, in full control, they could defeat Luke.

  A new royal dynasty would begin in the loins of the descendant of Cleopatra. A dynasty that would eventually return to the land of where the scarab beetle birthed life anew in its dung each day, the land that belonged to the ancient ways. Isis was his ally in this quest.

  And the amulet would be her voice.

  He whispered the sacred words from the Book of the Dead, “O ye Sons of Keb, overthrow ye the enemies of the Osiris Ani, whose word is truth, and the fiends of destruction who would destroy the Boat of Ra. Horus hath cut off your heads in heaven… The Osiris Ani, whose word is truth, saith: Thou risest up for thyself, O Still-heart! Thou shinest for thyself, O Still-heart! Place thou thyself on thy base, I come, I bring unto thee a Tet of gold, thou shalt rejoice therein.”

  Closing his eyes and concentrating, Seth began the transformation, the rite of his ancestors empowering him.

  Then, in the form of a civet, small but powerful enough to push the wooden panels aside, the amulet about his neck, Seth climbed a tree next to her window and leaped the short distance to the ledge. Pushing the panel aside with his nose, he dropped down into her room, the amulet swinging with bright promise.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At that exact moment, Shelly and Ethan entered the family crypt, lanterns held high in their hands. Even during the day, the crypt had a moribund, neglected air. Now, at night, it felt deserted, not a bridge between two worlds, but a void. It was as if even the ghosts of the past had forsaken their ancient task of protecting their living descendants.

  As if the good fight had already been lost, and they not only accepted, but embraced the fact that the last of Cleopatra’s line would no longer walk the earth as human. At a much younger age, she would suffer the fate of her mother and forsake the world of the living for the world of the half life.. Neither human nor spirit, with no rest on earth or in heaven.

  But Shelly Holmes shook off the foolish whim. She would not give up on Arielle. She had been hired to protect the girl and so she would. As usually happened, however, no matter how she tried to lecture herself not to get emotionally involved with her clients, for a time, they became the only children she would ever have. Thus her vocation had become a calling. No matter the cost, she would protect Arielle–even from herself if need be.

  She stalked into the crypt, the lantern in her hand shaming the shadows to dance away.

  “Why are we doing this again?” Ethan demanded irritably. He’d just returned with the earl from a late night of cards to find the house in an uproar. While the earl questioned the footmen as to what they’d seen and assured himself of Arielle’s safety, Shelly drew Ethan aside and explained what she wanted.

  Ethan had shrugged, but cast off his top hat and expensive cape to follow her to the crypt.

  Now, as they paused to look warily around, as if he, too, sensed something not quite right, he demanded, “If there had been any evidence of why Isis was so distraught to be found in the crypt, do you not think either the earl or myself would have found it by now?”

  “His lordship has made a systematic, mostly successful attempt to erase every evidence of his wife’s existence. But in doing so, he’s intensifying Arielle’s obsession w
ith her mother’s fate, not demystifying it. When we can prove to Arielle that her mother’s obsession with cats, and her obsession with all things Egyptian were partially to blame for her…malady, then perhaps Arielle will begin to accept reason again. And even the earl is not ruthless enough to pry open her casket to see if there’s something there that would help us determine…”

  Mid sentence, Shelly stopped before Isis’s catafalque, appalled. They both saw it at the same time. The lid, hastily shoved back in place, gapped slightly at one end where the seal had broken.

  Someone had desecrated Isis’s tomb.

  Shelly and Ethan rushed to the soapstone and hefted the lid aside. Shelly held her breath, expecting that smelly musk of decaying flesh and bones, but an odd, spicy scent was the only warning of the eerie sight that met her astounded gaze.

  Shelly stepped back, gasping, almost dropping the lid on Ethan’s fingers.

  He pulled back in time, dropping his half of the lid, too. “What ails you, woman?” But the heavy stone lid, half on, half off the catafalque, lost the battle with gravity and slowly teetered over the side to the floor of the crypt with a loud crash.

  The lanterns they had set on the ledge above cast a flickering light down on the casket’s contents, giving them a flattering, luminescent glow. Astounded now that he saw what Shelly saw, Ethan also took a step back.

  Her remains had been mummified.

  “Dear heaven,” he exclaimed, “Do you know how many members of the Royal Society have been experimenting–to no avail, I might add–with mummification procedures? No one has even come close to preserving bodies as well as the ancients did. Who could have done this? Who has perfected such a sought after art and yet not come forward to claim it?”

  For once, the science was of little interest to Shelly, for at this point her sole concern was modus operandi. The how, and why, and who would benefit from disturbing the poor creature’s final rest. A rest she had paid for so dearly, a rest that seemed to be demanding a like sacrifice of her only child.

  A couple of gold strands remained in the shrunken ear lobes and in the disarrayed lank of black hair still attached to the skull. The skeletal hands that bore only a pitiable covering of flesh, peacefully crossed on the dried up bosom, were bare of rings. From the shimmer of gold embroidered all over the Egyptian-looking caftan garment, and the ancient parure Isis wore in the picture in Arielle’s room, her family jewels must have been magnificent. A fitting tribute to a direct descendant of Cleopatra, or so Isis had always claimed.

  “Are you quite certain she was buried with the golden jewels she wears in the picture?”

  “One of her last requests was to be buried with the golden diadem, rings and earrings of her mother, and her mother’s mother, leaving the amulet for Arielle” Ethan rasped, his shock turning to rage. “Who would have desecrated her like this and taken her most sacred birthright? If anyone should have them off her cold, dead body, it should be Arielle.”

  They exchanged a look. Shelly had always found that when the motive was understood, the perpetrator was far easier to find. Whoever took this gold wanted it for Arielle. The shape of a lion who was not a lion formed in the shadowy corners of Shelly’s worried mind. When she found the human form of that being, she would find the man creature who raided this casket to further nefarious ends she did not yet understand. If anyone had answers, and knew more of Isis, it would be the shape shifter who was trying to seduce her daughter into the same madness.

  Without a word, she turned for the exit. Moving as one, they left the crypt as it was, the lid off Isis’s casket, the lanterns on a ledge casting flickering, mournful light on the woman who had once been so lovely.

  They hurried back into the house.

  After they left, the lanterns flared higher in a sudden draft of wind, despite the closed door. Shadows danced on the wall, shadows that made the place of the dead seem alive with that most powerful of human ideals: love. For the briefest instant, the withered hands might have clasped in a prayer, the ghastly lips whispered, too, from the Book of the Dead.

  But there was no one to see.

  And only one with ears to hear.

  Inside her chamber, Arielle had just removed her night robe to climb into bed. Her eyes were still moist as she stared at the cold hearth empty of ashes, empty of the barest flecks of gold. Shelly had ordered the hearth cleaned, hoping to spare her pain.

  But she was not empty of pain…

  Even memories of her mother had been stolen from her by her father’s obdurate determination to see his daughter didn’t suffer her mother’s obsession. Only now, with the beckoning bed her ship to that netherworld of dreams, was Arielle beginning to recognize the lure and power of the spirit world that Victorian society by turns scorned and embraced. Arielle knew of some society girls who attended seances or card readings, and yet when her own nighttime visions followed her into the day world, she was the one called crazy.

  What had her father’s world of privilege and high morals gained her? A crippled leg, no memories of a mother polite society considered both amoral and deranged, rejection by the social climbers of the ton, a father who was more like her gaoler than her protector…Worst of all, a cold loneliness and aching between her thighs she could relieve only in dreams.

  Torn between fury and despair, Arielle yanked the covers back to seek that forgetfulness when she froze, a chill running down her spine. “Mother,” she whispered.

  “My child, beware…” the words came to her as clearly as if they were spoken in her ear, but when she spun in place, she saw nothing but shadows. Closing her eyes to use only her instincts instead of her mind, which had begun playing tricks on her, Arielle, for an instant, saw her mother clearly.

  She was lovely, and smiling, looking exactly as she did in the picture, but she was wistful, too. Her arms, laden with gold bracelets engraved with the Egyptian cat goddess Bast, exactly like the missing amulet, reached toward her daughter with a love so powerful the feeling brought tears to Aielle’s eyes. Arielle reached back, but as their fingertips almost grazed, there was a scratching and then a thump! at the window.

  Her mother disappeared, but her last word lingered in the still, quiet air: “Beware….”

  Arielle blinked back to awareness of her surroundings as the wooden panels blocking the window scraped aside. She sensed more than heard the creature bound down into the room. She started to turn up the lantern next to the bed when she realized, strangely, that she didn’t need it.

  She could see despite the almost total blackness of the room.

  The animal was small, and lithe, and a cat such as she’d only seen in pictures. What was it called? Ah yes, a civet. It was indigenous to Africa, as she recalled, and this one couldn’t weigh more than forty pounds. It had a black mask and black spots, and a rough, short mane, a frill of fur extending from its neck to its tail. When it was excited, as she recalled, the mane stood erect.

  It stood erect now.

  Beware, her mother had warned, but of what, or whom? Surely not of such a winsome creature. Arielle had always loved cats, and she was more drawn to them than ever, now, in her loneliness.

  Totally unafraid, she bent on one knee to pet it. It purred and rubbed against her, and it was only then she noticed the heavy gold link necklace like a collar, looped several times about its delicate neck. She lifted the pendant to squint down at it. It was a bit beyond her newfound night vision to make out the strange markings clearly, but she thought she saw a cat…

  “My mother’s amulet!” The cat bent its head, as if expecting it, for her to unloop the necklace. “But…I don’t understand. I thought it burned.” Were there two amulets? Where did this one come from, and why was it sent about the neck of an exotic cat she’d only seen in pictures? Who, or what, was controlling these feline appearances?

  Voices below disturbed the rest of her train of thought. With a gentle lick of a rough tongue on the exposed vee of skin at her bodice, the cat rubbed its head against her bosom
a last time. Lithely, as if it had the strength and agility of a feline twice its size, it bounded out onto the window ledge and from there into a tree. The amulet a comforting weight at her neck, Arielle leaned out to watch it shimmy down the tree without a misstep. It paused on the edge of the grounds, visible only by its glowing golden eyes, looking up at her. For an instant, Arielle felt a strange hunger that made her nipples harden and her breath quicken. Then, pausing to mark a tree with its scent, it was gone.

  By the time the three sets of footsteps, two rapid and purposeful, walking lightly, the third the heavier tread of her father, arrived at the door, Arielle had hidden the amulet under her pillow and had her covers demurely pulled up to her chin. When the knock came, she affected sleepiness. “What? Wh-who is it?”

  With a scraping of the key in the lock, her door was flung wide. The earl entered, turning up a gas lamp on the wall, suspiciously surveying the room. Shelly inched past him and ran to the wooden panel, slouched against the wall. She looked out and down, then turned to survey her charge with suspicious gray eyes that had their own eerie glow in the gloom.

  For an instant, glowing eyes met glowing eyes. The earl didn’t notice the strange battle of wills, for he was too busy looking for signs of a break in, but Ethan saw. When the earl turned, Ethan hastily flicked the gas lanterns up. Light chased the luminescence away as both gray eyes and blue eyes blinked.

  “Who was in here, my dear?” Shelly asked sweetly.

  “No one. I had just fallen asleep.” Arielle punctuated her lie with a convincing yawn. “So the panel fell of its own accord. Odd. I saw the footman brace it firmly,” Shelly said.

  “Perhaps that’s what woke me,” Arielle said languidly. “How unsafe. Since you’re so efficient, would you be a dear and fix it? I’m certain not one can fix things quite as well as you.”

  Shelly’s eyes narrowed at the condescension. Ethan’s lips quivered but when he went to move the panel back in place, Shelly brushed him aside and did it herself. She not only braced it with a chair as the footman had, she picked up a marble bust and weighted the chair. “There you go, right and tight. Sleep well.” She stalked out.