Claws That Catch

by Lee Hayton

  Everything was perfect. Everything was okay. So, why did I feel like everything was about to spin out of control?

  I wiped the average man out of my mind like he was an old message on a whiteboard. Now that I was reunited with my tribe, Asha could step into the breach and find out information about my son, if he was still around to find.

  Her process with computers was a thousand times quicker and more robust than the average man could ever hope to be. All I needed to do was catch her in a good mood and actually bother to ask.

  That was a request that I was happy to put off until tomorrow.

  In celebration of the first day of being reunited, I set about clearing up the apartment so that it was a place fit for habitation. That didn’t involve clearing up, washing, and scrubbing, so much as it required me to gather together all the werecats and deliver them a lecture.

  “Now, I know that many of you are new to this form, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.” I’d assembled as many into one room as would fit, with more peering around the doorway from the corridor outside. There were so many, I’d have to take it in stages.

  “For today, I want each of you to source a litter box and a supply of kitty litter. Place a maximum of three in a room and ensure that you only ever use your one. It’ll be your responsibility to keep it clean and, believe me, you don’t want to be clearing up after someone else.”

  The cats nodded for the most part, although I feared that one or two were napping instead. I took human form and stamped the floor as hard as I could, trying to keep the stragglers awake.

  “Don’t all hit up the same shops and don’t all hit up the same neighborhoods,” I warned. “There’s a big city out there, and I want you all to ensure you’re as far away as possible before you start hitting up the stores.”

  “What if they run out?” one tabby near the front asked.

  “Then move on to the next one. Between you, there should be enough shops, markets, and bodegas that you don’t have to hit the same place twice.”

  As I looked around the room, I could sense that for the most part, they wouldn’t bother to obey me.

  “If I hear that you’ve visited the same store, you’re out on the street, do you hear me? No training, no help, no information. You’ll just be a stray cat without friends.”

  “Sounds good to me,” one troublemaker near the front said to a chorus of agreeable yowls.

  “Good. Get out right now, then,” I said, pointing to the exit. “If you survive a day before someone sets animal control on your skinny ass, then we’ll hold a big parade.”

  “If they try to lock me up in a cage, I’ll just change,” the wit shot back, unmoved.

  “Do that inside a cage, and you’ll kill yourself. Your best shot is to look cute if someone comes by who’s interested in adoption. If they don’t pick you, in a week you’ll be dead.”

  My voice broke a little on the last sentence. A sign of weakness, but the crowd seemed to understand that it came from another place. Experience.

  “You are no longer slaves to the empire, but that’ll change easily enough if you don’t all become more careful. I’m surprised that nobody around this neighborhood has already called us in, but that blessing won’t last forever. If we don’t become more organized and more careful, then your freedom will be a very short-lived thing.”

  “Why are you only telling us this now?” a disgruntled calico kitten shouted out. “I’ve been here for over a month, and this is the first time that anybody bothered to explain anything.”

  “They’ve been busy freeing other vampires,” I shouted back. “Everybody here has been hoping that you’d all work stuff out for yourselves. Since it’s obvious from the shitshow this building has become that’s not happening, I’m here to make sure you understand.”

  “Forget about the bloody litter trays,” another called out. “I haven’t had anything to eat for days. I’m about to starve to death if nobody’s got any food.”

  “Get your own food,” I shouted back, my anger rising. This crowd had been saved from a life of shackles, and instead of being grateful, they were acting like babies. “Hunt through a dumpster for leftovers, nose along the gutters for scraps. If you can’t find a meal to fill your tiny belly, nobody else is going to do it for you.”

  “I’m not eating garbage,” the same cat shot back. “If that’s what you have in store for us, then I’ll go back to being a vampire.”

  “You’d rather be a slave and drink blood every day?” I asked, fury rising up until my vision pulsed with red. “Go see Percival. I’m sure he’d be happy to oblige.”

  The cat stood and strode out of the room, banging into the edge of the door frame with his ass.

  “Nobody has to stay here,” I called out. “It’ll be far easier for us to survive unnoticed, in fact, if more of you go. Anyone who doesn’t want to abide by the rules of this house, feel free to leave.”

  I waited, my anger beginning to drain away. What had I said? If they all took me up on that offer, we’d be up shit creek without a paddle. It’d only take one capture, one wagging tongue, and this entire populace would be swooped up by the empire and shoved into a cage.

  Nobody else left.

  I relaxed enough to inhale another breath, then another. My vision settled down into its usual color scheme, and my heart pounded a steady beat.

  “Every day, we’re going to have instruction in this room,” I said. “We can’t fit you all in—”

  “There’s an empty gym down the road,” one cat called out in interruption. “We can get into it through the sewer pipes, I checked.”

  “Okay, good thinking.” I nodded to the black cat, and he swelled with pride. “What’s your name?”

  “Nick Watson,” he called back. “But you can call me Pounce.”

  The room broke into appreciative laughter and meows of encouragement.

  “Good one, Pounce. Show me later, and we’ll organize something a bit better than this old room.”

  “You can use the sewer system to get a whole lot of places,” he said with a purr. “There’s access to most of the city, underground.”

  When the group broke up, I went to Asha. “We need blueprints of the sewer system,” I explained to her. “That way, we can keep the new cats off the street and out of the public eye.”

  She agreed to source them so quickly that I was tempted to add another request. To find my son.

  The words died away unsaid though. I wasn’t sure if it was because I would owe Asha a favor I couldn’t repay or if it was fear of finding my son—and finding out that he didn’t want me.

  Chapter Ten

  The gymnasium was a perfect meeting place for our group. Half the ceiling had fallen in at one point, letting in the fresh air on the top level, but down on the ground floor, everything seemed ship-shape.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the group, but I knew enough to get them started. If I could fix them onto a standard exercise that they all hated, then they’d bond. Once that was done, I’d be dealing with a team, rather than a mass of individuals.

  My undercover work might have veered toward the solo in the past few years, but I’d dealt with a lot of teams before I got that far. I could handle them, all I needed was the glue to hold them together.

  There were climbing ropes hanging down from the ceiling. Easy enough for a cat, except they were built for adult humans, so they hung far off the ground. With no perches nearby to launch themselves off, they’d make an excellent first step in breaking the group down. I’d already told each and every one of them where to find the front door.

  “When I say go, I expect you to be up at the ceiling in under a minute.” Nothing like a time constraint to really get the blood and the frustration pumping. “Work in pairs. This won’t be a task you can handle alone. Rules are no changing, and you aren’t finished until both of you have touched paws to the roof. Go!”

  I blew a whistle that I’d found lying on top of a locker. Its s
hrill cry pierced the air. With the group’s newly developed hearing skills, that was a fingernail on blackboard moment for sure. I could barely stand the sound, and I was the one making it.

  The exercise was a shambles, as I knew it would be. Industrious cats who didn’t mind close contact did the best. One would climb atop the other, then try to find their balance on the slippery fur while they stretched up toward the base of the rope.

  A pity that the poor sap on the bottom soon found out that a cat’s balance was all in the paws—and the claws. To have ten puncture wounds while you tried to do a mate a favor wasn’t a lesson any cat would soon forget.

  I blew the whistle again at time up, and the cats who had managed to grab hold of the ropes dropped down to the ground.

  “Switch places and try again,” I ordered. Everyone needed a taste of this medicine. The complete failure this time wasn’t a surprise, but I saw more than one cat using the opportunity to deal out more than they’d been dealt.

  “Next up, we’ll try something easier, since it seems I overestimated your abilities.” I looked around the room and saw some cats who weren’t quite up to the job of staring back at me. Hung heads and slumped shoulders were a good start, but these creatures needed to be built up again in the right way before they’d be of any use.

  “Hang on the boards at the back,” I ordered them. “Find a spot for yourself that isn’t touching another, and we’ll give this a shot.”

  For a man, this task was easy to perform, even if the strain of holding up the full weight of their body would soon overcome their pride and have them drop down to the floor. For a cat, the flexible fingers were a thing of the past. If they wanted to keep themselves aloft, they would need to dig in. Literally.

  The piercing cry of the whistle saw the entire crowd jump up into position. I caught a few looks of confusion as the task immediately disintegrated into chaos. To get used to the change in my body after being turned was the primary challenge I’d faced down and had to win against. If I could move these cats on quicker, then it would be to their benefit, even if it now seemed like a curse.

  Only two cats remained hanging when I blew the whistle to cut time. One of them turned out to be doing so—in excruciating pain—because he couldn’t extricate his claws. I soon fixed him up and dropped him to the floor, but the other one I marked down on my internal checklist. A black and white striped feline with a gray mustache, he’d be easy enough to remember. I wondered what the cat would look like when he changed, then stopped that thought in its tracks.

  Just because I’d found my people, didn’t mean I could turn back time and become a young kitten ready to explore. I’d taken my turn at having a family, and it had exploded in my face. Even if the clock hadn’t turned so far that all hope was lost, I didn’t want to head down that biological track again.

  Having the cats jump over the straddle horses was a great success. Even the worst physically-minded kitty could handle that event. As they congratulated each other on a good performance afterward, I could see them starting to bond. A good deal, too, since the next task of handling the monkey bars wasn’t just hard, it caused the collapse of the old equipment.

  “How about we stick to running lengths?” I said as we cleared away the last of the spontaneously dismantled beams. “Quick as you can. Go!”

  Once again, the whistle cut through the air. This time, though, none of the competitors flinched. They had bought into the exercises, even though there was no hope of them ever proving useful.

  As we wended our way through the sewer system to reach home, I commanded a team.

  “If you don’t like what I prepare for dinner,” Asha said with a scowl, “you’re more than welcome to take over cooking duties. Just because I have the body of a goddess doesn’t mean I’m domesticated.”

  “You could say that again,” Norman grumbled. I watched the two of them with a smile. Both of them were stuck in some endless form of teen sulking, despite their collective ages. If I hadn’t been so amused by the performance, I might’ve started to snap them out of the rut.

  “How about we set up a roster?” I suggested. From the looks that were cast in my direction, I guessed that wouldn’t be the way things went.

  Dory sloped into the room, looked at the variety of snack boxes on the counter—what Asha referred to as a meal—then chose a box of raisins and headed back out.

  “Lovely to see you,” Asha called in a sweet voice, earning herself a middle finger reply.

  “I don’t know how she has the stamina to keep Earnest occupied day and night.” Asha tossed an empty candy wrapper into the trash and started on the next. “It wears me out just thinking about it.”

  “I’m just worried that she’ll run out of wine and turn back into a hag,” Norman commented. “When she stepped out of the shower last month, I thought that she’d crawled straight up from hell.”

  “She just looks old when she doesn’t drink,” Asha said with a frown. “It’s not that bloody hideous.”

  “Not to you, maybe. I’m a teenage boy with standards.”

  “You’re a hundred-year-old man who never bothered to grow up,” Asha grumbled.

  The same could be said about her, but I had better manners.

  “The cats seem a lot happier tonight,” Asha said, turning to me. “What have you been doing to them?”

  “Just getting them in shape in the gym and taking them through basic hygiene.”

  To her credit, Asha did manage a blush of shame at the recrimination in my voice.

  “It’s a pity that we can’t all fit down into the sewers,” she continued. “That’s a great way to get around the city without being seen.”

  “Pounce came up with the idea.” I looked out into the hallway, but it was clear. “It might be worth my picking a few members of the group out for higher duties. At the moment, they’re pretty much doing whatever because no one’s told them any different. If we want to organize everyone and mobilize as a team, we’ll need some seconds-in-commend to spread around.”

  “Do we want that?” Norman asked, giving me a sidelong glance. “Nobody said anything to me about mobilizing as a group.”

  “Well, what else are we meant to do?” I stared at him, genuinely puzzled. Judging from his expression, Norman was equally confused.

  “I’m just getting out as many vamps as I can,” he said. “I don’t know about grouping them together into a unit. I just thought once they got used to their new forms, they’d go their own ways.”

  “What would we be mobilizing them for?” Asha asked. “It’s not as though we have any grand plans to seize control of the city.”

  “Perhaps it’s time we did.” I stared at the two of them, frustration crawling up the back of my throat until it seized, trapping inside everything I wanted to say. Instead of talking, I had to sit quietly. Even with a massage of my neck, my chest was so tight that I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  “We had a grand plan once,” Asha said. “It didn’t turn out so well, remember?”

  “That wasn’t your plan,” Norman pointed out to her. “It belonged to the vampires, and you just got in the way.”

  “I got in the way because you were trying to target a whole lot of innocent people and drag them into your same circumstances. Besides, I was the one who was right, wasn’t I?”

  Norman glared at her, taking minutes to slowly relent. “You didn’t know that at the time,” he eventually grumbled. “When you went in to fuck everything up for us, for all you knew, we could’ve freed every vamp in the city.”

  Asha just chewed on her candy bar harder in response. To be fair to her, there wasn’t much else to say. I’d been taken in by the same action, joining up with her alliance and fighting hard against Norman. He’d forgiven me, of course, but that came complete with its own perils. Like how he didn’t feel it was necessary to listen to me now.

  “If we did want to do something big, we’ll need to work it out shortly. I don’t know if Jeffrey bothered to fill yo
u in on his last attack, but the guard appeared to be expecting it. Once you’ve lost the element of surprise, it’s not going to be so easy.”

  “So what? When they start to fight back, we’ll stop.” Norman heaved himself up from the sofa and wandered through to the kitchen to pour a glass of rusty brown water from the tap. “I’m just one person. I can’t save the world.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying—”

  “What the hell’s that?” Asha leaned forward, cutting me off and turning up the volume on the TV. On the screen, people were running down a street, a ball of flame licking at their heels.

  TERRORISTS STRIKE AT EMPIRE BLOOD BANK, ran the scrolling headline across the bottom of the screen. My blood ran cold as I recognized the target. This was from the group I’d been following just a day ago. If they hadn’t kicked me out, full of suspicions, I might have stopped this attack.

  “What the fuck do they think they’re going to gain from that?” Norman spluttered. He cast an indignant look at the television as he took a seat back beside me. “Those banks pay the poor and feed the slaves. If they blow them up, who the hell do they think they’re helping?”

  “They’re not trying to help,” I said in a voice full of suppressed rage. It was directed at myself, but there was so much it spilled out the edges. “They’re trying to disrupt the system. That’s how you spur change.”

  “It won’t spur anything.” Norman threw a heated glare at the screaming faces on the screen. “The empire can’t close down the blood banks. It’s the only way they can source the vampire’s food.”

  “I don’t think anybody bothered to tell them that,” Asha said, pointing at a new notice on the television. “Blood banks closed for the day until investigations are complete.”

  “But they can’t do that,” Norman cried out. “Who bloody knows how long these investigations will take. A month? The vampires will be starving while they’re dragging their heels looking into everything.”