by K. Gorman
Bang!
This time, with the shot and energy so close to her, she both heard and saw it—a resounding thunderclap that rumbled over the sound of the gun’s retort, accompanied by a crackling arc of lightning that smashed into the shadows at the end of the alley, much stronger than it had been the last time.
Scrambling, she almost missed the chain, but luckily, some lights were wrapped around the top rung. She jumped to pull herself up.
As she did, a new voice entered the alley.
“You bitch. Can’t you leave me in peace?”
That was definitely not Kitty speaking. It was a man’s voice, first of all, and it sounded strange. Off. Like something who’d learned speech by mimicking words out of context, putting the wrong stresses and accents on them. It also had an eerie, slithery quality underlying it that made her scramble harder at the ladder.
It sounded like it was right behind her.
Bang!
Another thunderclap boomed through the scene, and the flash left little dots in Mieshka’s vision. There was a shriek, and something scraped hard against the wall below her. She jumped, grabbing the highest rung of the ladder she could, and pulled her legs up to push against the wall. Hissing with her breath, she pulled herself up a few steps, then ran out of ladder as she reached the closest rafter.
Then, Kitty was there and hauling her up, fingers tight and painful on her arms, but wholly welcome.
A few seconds later, she was straddling the support, breathing hard, her legs curled up and out of reach from whatever Kitty had been shooting at.
Forcing herself to take a calm, steadying breath, Mieshka braced herself and looked down.
On the floor below them, sitting with its tail curled around it and baby blue eyes looking up at them, was a cat.
Hell, not even a cat—a kitten.
What the fuck? Did I just run from a kitten? Her eyebrows twitched as more implications came in. Is Kitty seriously shooting at a cat?
Maybe that’s why there’d been a mental health warning in her description.
“Quick, get the ladder up.” Kitty kept aiming the gun at the kitten.
It looked up at them, its blue eyes piercing even in the alley’s dim, decorative lighting. It had a blotched grey coat, kind of like a thick-striped version of a tabby—or a feline version of one of those inkblot tests. Its short-haired fur had a soft, supple sheen to it.
“What the fuck, man?” Mieshka said, widening her eyes at the gun Kitty was aiming down at it. “Do you kill cats? Is that how you got your fucking name? I—”
She was about to light into her—and was considering her options with the Mieshka and her position on the rafters, because there was no way in hell she was going to let Kitty murder an innocent kitten—when the kitten moved.
In hindsight, she wasn’t sure why the movement drew her attention when she really should have been focused on the gun, but she looked down.
Still sitting, it had directed its attention to the ladder and had started reaching for it.
It shouldn’t have been able to reach it—not with the lowest rung a full three feet from the ground—but its right foreleg had stretched for the act, growing in a thin, long-clawed manner that was as grotesque to watch as it was unbelievable.
That is no kitten.
A tremor of sick fear flipped through her chest. As if catching her thoughts, the cat’s head snapped in her direction, animal lips baring its teeth as it sneered, meeting her gaze with its predatory eyes.
“What’s wrong? Thought I was a cute little kitty?”
It snarled the last word, and those front canines grew much closer to her than she was comfortable with.
But not close enough to reach the beams.
Mieshka hooked the ladder with her foot and pulled it out of its reach. As Kitty grabbed the rest of it and draped it over the wood, the not-kitten-thing slid back into a smaller, more-normalized form—an adult version of the kitten she’d seen before, but with a more elongated ratio than she was used to seeing in cats. Its canine teeth were still quite prominent, the tips peeking out over its black lips, and its eyes, which never wavered from her, cut through the space as if they had a light of their own. Its long tail thrashed madly, thicker than a normal cat’s.
She didn’t take her eyes off of it.
“What the hell?”
“It’s complicated,” Kitty said.
She squatted down next to her, the end of her gun still following the cat, and Mieshka could see the fatigue that ate away at her features. Like in the picture, her black hair was pulled back from her face in a loose ponytail. A number of hairs had strayed from it, catching at the light that rose from below them.
“Your name’s Kitty, right?”
“Yep.”
Mieshka gestured to the thing below them. “Is that why—”
“No, he is not the reason I’m called Kitty.” Kitty’s eyes narrowed, following the thing as it stalked the floor below them. “My name’s Kate. Kitty’s the pet name of that.”
“Ah.”
Kitty jabbed her gun a few inches in the cat’s direction. “He used to live in my head. No one really knew about him ‘til a week ago. Thought he was just some fucked up mental result of childhood trauma, y’know?”
Ah. That was the reason for the mental health note.
She decided to prise that apart later. When she had time to explore the Internet for what she assumed would be an entire branch of psychiatric health documentation.
“A week ago? Is that when you killed that guy?”
“That wasn’t me.”
She raised an eyebrow.
Kitty made another gesture downward. “That was him. And ‘that guy’ was my boyfriend.”
Oh, Jesus.
Mieshka looked down for a long moment. Now that she knew the thing had killed, it felt prudent to keep her eyes on it. And, as she did, she began to notice even more odd things about it. The shadows had grown around it and appeared to be moving to its call, shivering in ways that made the hairs creep up on the back of her neck and shoulders. The black blotches of his coat also started to bleed, like watching a wet ink-wash painting, and lingered in the air as an afterimage where he’d walked. His face twisted in her gaze, a condensed poison and fury bristling him in ways that a normal cat wouldn’t do—and, when he looked at her, she could feel the venom in his gaze.
Yeah, okay. I believe her.
“So,” Kitty said. “You know who I am. Who are you?”
“I’m Mieshka. Most people call me Meese?”
“Meese?” Kitty’s attention snapped to her, momentarily forgetting the cat that stalked below them. “No shit? I thought you’d be taller?”
“Her tales certainly are,” said a wavering, gentleman’s hiss from below.
“Hush, you,” Kitty said to him, as if they were old friends.
His eyes were back to staring at Mieshka again. She held them, part of her not daring to look away, another part of her defiant.
For a second, she thought she detected a change in his expression, though the venom remained.
Then, energy shifted in the space. The cat had stopped, staring at her. It felt like the alleyway narrowed on just them.
All around, the lights flickered.
“He’s trying to turn them off,” Kitty said.
They flickered again, and Mieshka broke her stare with the cat and glanced up to Kitty.
“Let’s go,” Kitty said, rising to her feet.
Left unsaid between them was just how much neither of them wanted to be in the dark with the thing below.
*
The ceiling rumbled above them, shaking bits of dirt and dust down onto their hair and arms. In the midst of taking off her jacket, Mieshka gave it a worried look.
“Subway tunnel,” Kitty explained. “I recognize the sound. Guess we’re high enough to start connecting into Uptown’s lowest bits.”
There were a few Uptown buildings that connected to the Underground—and, yes, she
did know of an entrance through one of the subway maintenance tunnels. That find had been convenient for her a month ago when she’d still been making regular visits to the Underground.
She’d lost count of the amount of floors they’d gone up, scrambling in equal parts through building staircases and up rafters. Her arms and abdomen ached from all the climbing, and she was getting a recurring pain in her right heel from when she’d slipped and banged it against one of the walls. Her skin was damp from sweat that now cooled in the air.
But they’d managed to lose the cat. His name was Kitten, Kitty had informed her, and he had been a presence inside her head for as long as she remembered. According to one of the many psychiatrists she had visited, the name ‘Kitten’ had likely come from her wanting to diminutize him, since her mind had identified him as an opponent and, well, she’d been probably around three years old when he’d started making his presence known.
Of course, clearly, Kitten had not been a symptom of a mental illness but of something else—something to do with magic. And the shifting ways his black spots bled into the atmosphere were clear hallmarks of the Dark Element.
Kitty actually knew a Dark Element Mage, so she could definitely recognize the magic.
“You smell like one,” Kitty said.
“Err… what?”
Over the past thirty minutes, she’d begun to see a pattern in Kitty’s speech. At first, she seemed to switch topics at seemingly random, with questions like this one coming in way out of left field, but they actually did have links. This, for example, was linked into the sound of the subway. She’d simply changed senses and memories.
“You smell like a Fire Elemental.”
“You can smell that?”
“Yep. Everyone says you’re one, but you don’t use it. How come?”
Uhh. If she knew that much about Mieshka, then she ought to know about what had happened to the Phoenix.
“Well, I became a Fire Elemental after I absorbed a Phoenix from one of the Mage’s crystals. Then it died, so…”
“I thought Phoenixes couldn’t die,” Kitty said.
“Actually, dying is kind of their thing.” She’d spent months of researching it. “Usually, though, they come back. This one didn’t.”
“Are you sure?” Kitty cocked her head, leaning forward. With the way her arms crossed over her chest and her ponytail pulled the hair back from her face, her silhouette looked a bit bird-like, as if she were considering her.
“Pretty sure.” Mieshka let out a nervous laugh as Kitty leaned toward her, ducking her gaze as she tied the sleeves of her jacket around her waist. “I think I’d have noticed if I’d started setting things on fire.”
“Uh huh.” Kitty leaned back again, this time stepping behind until her shoulders hit the wall, which made the dim light from the left cross over her face through the bars of shadow the rafters created.
When she didn’t continue, Mieshka narrowed her eyes, studying her.
Maybe now was the time to get some answers.
“What’s it like being an Elemental?” she asked. “I mean, what does it feel like?”
Kitty lifted an eyebrow. “You ought to know.”
“Yeah, that was only temporary. Not even a day—”
She winced, a memory of a sky full of fire coming to her. It had been more than a day. A large part of her suspected that she’d been up in the sky with the Phoenix the entire time it had been shielding the city, but the memories were suppressed and fragmented at best. Abstract. She could only get vague notions of fire and being part of its raw, unfettered power.
“Please, tell me,” she said.
Kitty had a habit of holding a stare. This time, Mieshka was determined to keep eye contact.
“It didn’t use to be this easy to use,” she said. “Like anything, it takes practice, but once you start using it, it gets better—and you feel better. It’s… kind of like watching a television, you know? Normally, you’re focused on the sound and picture, but you can still hear that high-pitched whine above it all. Being an Elemental is like being able to focus on the whine instead, and being able to do something about it, depending on what you hear. For me, I can feel electricity around all the time. Once you start feeling it, and doing something with that feeling, you understand how to use it more. Do you understand?”
“Sort of,” she said, hesitating. “It… wasn’t like that for me.”
“Yeah? What was it like?”
“Well, overpowering. I wasn’t supposed to absorb the Phoenix—it was an emergency—so I’d had no training and no help. It just moved inside and took over. And it was already so powerful…” She gave Kitty a guilty smile. “More of a screaming alarm on the inside of my head instead of a whine.”
“Ah. Well. That… makes sense. Crystal spirits are powerful.” Kitty wrinkled her nose. “I’ve had a few interactions with the one Derrick uses in Terremain. It doesn’t like me much.”
She frowned. “Isn’t it also Electric?”
“Yep. I think that’s part of the problem—it may be getting jealous.” Kitty shook her head, and her eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “He has a fucking strange relationship with that thing. I have learned to stop thinking too hard about it.”
“I… uhh…” Mieshka’s eyes widened as the implication set in and she, also, decided that she did not want to know about it. “Right.”
“I don’t get it,” Kitty said.
By the tone of her voice, this was another topic change. This time, Mieshka couldn’t follow it.
“Get what?”
Kitty gave her an up and down look, refolding her arms over her chest.
“How did you get such a hard-ass rep down here?”
“Oh.” Mieshka knew exactly what she meant. She wasn’t precisely the badass that everyone reported her to be. “It’s not my fault.”
In her short time as city-savior, the Phoenix had made quite the impression on people.
*
They ran away from the dark across the less-stable rooftops of lower buildings, trying to ignore the shiver and shake of the shadows that followed them. Their direction had been an instinctual thing—a run away as opposed to a run toward something—but Mieshka had been growing increasingly aware of the fact that they were moving farther and farther away from the Core.
The thing chasing them—Kitten—was pushing them away from any chance of help, and chasing them into a part of the Underground that was more deserted and less lit, the spaces above the roofs becoming more cramped and tight-knit as they ran.
For a few minutes, they seemed to be getting away, racing and ducking, sprinting across the rooftops and through the buildings on a jumble of paths that buckled and segued into one another. Twice, in a sudden gap that had made Mieshka’s heart leap into her throat, they’d sprinted across thick support beams, the floor dropping suddenly on either side. In a wink, they’d ducked back through the next empty window frame and continued to sprint.
Then, at the end of one corridor, a roar of darkness raged up from behind her. She had just enough time to launch herself through another window at the far end of the hall before it swallowed the hallway whole.
When she looked back, the entire inside of the hall was opaque. And the darkness moved like a thick fog.
Her body shook from the exertion. As she watched the blackness move, a nail of pure fear drove into the center of her back. Kitty pulled her back, putting herself in front. A crackle of electricity lit up around her wrists, arcing in quick, flitting darts of white-blue as she aimed the gun at the window. Kitty’s shoulders dropped, loose and ready.
In the window, the darkness writhed. It pulsed—once, twice—then settled, its surface moving like a skim of oil on top of a slow river.
Then, it exploded.
Kitty yelled, loud and fierce. The gun went off, along with a thunderclap that shuddered the air and thrummed right through the marrow inside Mieshka’s bones. There was a loud growl, then a clang, then Kitty was in her face, grabbin
g her shirt, pushing her back.
Another thunderclap. As the dark reared up behind them and Mieshka’s feet stuttered on the rough, broken surface that had once been a rooftop deck, an electric glow warmed in the air around Kitty, charging it with a purple-blue tinge. As one, all of the tiny hairs on Mieshka’s arms, neck, and back stood upright, prickling at the energy.
Then, Kitty let out a snarl, shoved Mieshka forward, and twisted around, her hands rising above her, gun aimed up at the center of the darkness.
Light erupted. The roar of thunder boomed through the small space.
Under it, she heard a pained scream—and the tiny sound of Kitty’s gun clattering to the ground. Both pieces skittered across the floor in front of her, lit in black and blue-white by the electricity that still crackled. Something had sliced it in half from just ahead of the back sight to the top of the trigger. Blood darkened its silver handle, and a wisp of smoke rose from the top of the chamber.
She jerked around just in time to see Kitty backing off to the side, an expression of grim pain on her face, holding a bloodied fist to her chest. Toward the building they’d just come from, the darkness had risen in a wave, looking like a grim, nightmarish fog.
It stayed that way for a few seconds, seeming to shift and churn on the inside. Then, Kitten materialized from its base, stepping out first as a silhouette, then gaining the same bleeding-inkblot coloration that he’d used in the alleyway.
“Hello, Meese,” he hissed, more than a hint of canine teeth showing from his mouth—he’d given up the illusion that he actually used his mouth to talk, instead shifting his expression to follow his words and adding a subtle growl that underlaid his tone.
Mieshka stumbled back—but, after a few steps, her heels bumped against the lip at the edge of the roof.
A quick glance back at the sheer, four-story drop was enough to freeze her motions and send her heart leaping toward her throat again. She could either attempt a six-foot leap, or try to sprint for the next rafter crossing about twenty paces away.
Yeah, that’s not fucking happening. Neither of those are fucking happening.
Recovering, she balanced herself on the nearest crossbeam by her head, and turned. Her right hand reached for the small gun at her back and tugged it free of its leather holster.
