by Lee Hayton
No, thanks. I’m sure whatever else Dory wanted, a large scar confirming that her body was second-hand wasn’t it.
Working together, we pulled out and had a look at the variety of corpses on offer. When I pulled out one tray and unzipped the bag, a sticky mess started to leak out the side. The stench from that decomposition reminded me of the vampire pits, but it was a thousand times worse.
“What about her?” Norman called from the far end just as I was beginning to give up my lofty aspirations.
I walked down and had a look at the body inside. There were no signs of advanced decomposition. No wounds from an examination cracking her chest open to snip out and weigh her heart.
“Looks good. Does she have a name?”
Norman cast me an odd glance. “I don’t think we should get that intimately acquainted with her, do you?”
On second thought, probably not. If our trick tonight worked then, we’d just be calling her Dory, come the morning. If it didn’t, this poor corpse would end up being parceled out around the city a la Earnest.
“Wait a minute,” Norman said as I reached out to help lift the body out of its container.
“What?”
“How the hell are we going to get this thing through the sewers?”
I stood and stared at him, feeling a knot of unease tightening in my belly. He was right, of course. We’d set out here on a mission, and none of us had thought through what we were actually trying to accomplish.
While he waited for an answer, I stared down at the woman’s corpse as though she might offer up a suggestion. I flicked a glance back toward the drain cover, but that look just confirmed what I already knew—a cat might fit through that gap, but this dead lady sure as hell wouldn’t.
I closed my eyes and put a hand up to cover my face. “We need to get the car around the back, so we can drive her back to the gym.”
Norman nodded and walked off to find a phone to make the call back home. Of course, that defeated the whole purpose of sending the werecats to do the job. We were meant to get in and out of the morgue via stealth—a car pulling up to the back door and two full-size humans loading it up with a dead body? That might raise a few eyebrows, even on this side of town.
“Hey,” I called out in a voice louder than I meant to. Norman wandered back through with his eyebrows raised. “Ask them what we need to do to get Dory in here. If we can perform whatever magic trick she needs, then she’ll be able to walk out of here herself.”
“Good idea.” Norman wandered back through, and soon I heard the low hum of his voice. After a while, he walked back through. “Pounce is on his way with a copy of her file to upload and instructions.”
I sat and put my head in my hands. This day had been too long already, just another crappy series of events in a long line that stretched back for years. If our next plot didn’t work out, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t bother to try again. At anything. Ever.
“I wonder if she’ll remember us?” Norman said, wheeling another chair over to sit beside me. From the way he crowded close, I guessed that the dead bodies were still weighing on his nerves.
“Dory?” When he nodded, I tilted my head to the side, trying to think. “Probably not. Since she didn’t know where her upload files were kept, she can hardly have patched through an update. I guess it might take her back years. Before we met her in the cottage even.”
“Asha should be here,” Norman said. “Since she’s the only person Dory knew from before. She’s going to freak out.”
At that statement, I laughed. “Of course, she’s going to freak out. We’re bringing her back to life, naked, in the center of a morgue and then asking her to follow us into a car to take her to a derelict house on the bad side of the city. I’d freak out, and I know you!”
Pounce arrived soon enough, pulling the car up the driveway and parking it around the back, before finding an entrance into the sewer and following our own trail in.
I spread out the instructions, such as they were, on the table while Pounce prepared the files for transfer. Once he nodded that he was ready, we moved the body out of its tray to the floor and clipped a USB port onto its finger.
“Fuck, I hope that nobody decides to pay the morgue a visit right now,” Pounce said with a grin, and I nodded. The thought of being caught trying to do freaky things to a dead body in the middle of the night would be a problematic anecdote to live down.
“Is this incantation for real, do you think?” I asked Pounce, showing him the instructions.
He shrugged. “Either that or somebody was playing a joke. Asha swore that’s what the file said, and I don’t think she’d be playing around this late in the game.”
When the USB showed a green light, I began to read out the strange sounds from the sheet of paper. Although I felt like an idiot, it was hardly the first time, and I became more confident as I saw the corpse’s fingertips begin to glow.
“There we go,” Pounce said, taking a step back. The corpse jolted, seemed to suffer through an extended seizure, then rapidly blinked its eyes. Within seconds, the sunken in pupils puffed out, and the body frowned while staring straight at me.
“Hi, I’m Miss Tiddles,” I said, raising my hand in a wave. “You probably don’t remember me, but I’m friends with Asha. We’ve come to take you out of this facility and to a place where she’s staying.”
The enlivened corpse continued to stare at me with a slight frown. It could be that she didn’t understand a word I said, didn’t believe me, or her brain hadn’t quite gotten itself together enough to respond.
“I’m Norman.”
“I’m Pounce.”
The woman turned to look at them, showing some sense of intelligence or understanding behind her movements.
After another minute of silence, I stepped forward again. “We need to get you to the car and get you home. It’s not safe to stay here much longer.”
The woman turned to glare at me. “Where the fuck are my clothes and why the hell do you all smell like you’ve crawled out of the sewer?”
That certainly sounded like Dory, even if her voice box had changed. I smiled.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I still don’t understand what’s going on or why you think I should trust you,” Dory said with a snarl more fitting to one of the werecats. “If I wanted to be stuck in this disgusting hovel, I never would have sold my secrets in the first place.”
“What secrets?” Asha asked, tossing a grim look in her friend’s direction. The Dory that we’d met in the cottage, contained for long years on her own, had been a nicely seasoned version. This one appeared to be ornery on a good day.
“You know.” Dory waved her hands in a vague gesture. “My spells and things.”
“Who the hell did you sell them to?” Asha demanded.
I tapped her on the shoulder. “I hardly think that’s important right now,” I whispered. “Can you just get her to work out the spell we need?”
“Why don’t you try it?” Asha suggested, crossing her arms furiously over her chest. “I have no idea who this woman is.”
Dory snorted. “Yeah, that’s a nice stance. Like we didn’t break out the double agents from the Kremlin back in the day.”
Asha glared at her. “How about we keep state secrets quiet for the time being and try to concentrate on the matter at hand?”
“Look, I don’t know you from a bar of soap, honey,” Dory said when I cleared my throat. “So it’s no use pleading with me to help out your cause. You want me to cast a spell, then you pay me upfront. It takes cash to play.”
“We don’t have any money,” Percival said from behind her. When Dory turned to stare at him, she quickly took a couple of steps away. In the moonlight, his pale skin seemed to glow silver, and his eyes stood out like caution lights careening out of the dark.
“Well, you’re stuck, then. Take me back home, and if you’re lucky, I won’t tell anybody that you stole me to begin with.”
“Your home
is a hard drive in the middle of a slave pit,” Norman said. “Are you sure you want us to take you back there?” Dory snarled in his direction, but Norman just held up his hand. “I mean, we’re perfectly happy to do it if you really want. I just thought that you might be a bit bored.”
“I’m bored of this conversation,” Dory said, walking over and perching against the stairs. “Why the fuck is this place so cold? If you’re from the future, why don’t you have central heating or some shit like that?”
Saying they were from the future had been my idea, but it hadn’t gone down as well as I’d intended. For a start, when it appeared as though you were living in the dark ages, saying you were from a technologically advanced future carried a lot less weight.
“How about we make a deal,” Percival growled. “I won’t turn you into a vampire, and this lot—” he gestured to Norman and me “—won’t turn you into werecats, so long as you do exactly what we ask. If you don’t, then we’ll fight it out over who gets the first nibble, what do you say?”
“I don’t know any flying spells, old man,” Dory said with a sniff. “And if I did, I don’t deal with terrorists. I’m protected by the state, so if you harm a single hair on my head, they’ll bring a shitstorm down on top of you.”
“Cut the shit.” Asha moved to stand in front of Dory, poking her in the shoulder to make sure the witch was paying attention. “We need you to cast one spell, then you can go back into your box, and never be brought out again for all I care.”
Dory’s face changed with that threat. Perhaps it was the anger that backed it up or the force of truth contained within the words. “You can’t do that,” she insisted. “It’s against your moral code.”
But that phrase just made Asha laugh. “It’s been a fucking long time since my moral code was intact. That’s what being the property of the state does to you, in the long term. Now, either you voluntarily give up the spell, or we’ll start to cut little bits of you off until you do.”
I held out one claw, sharp and still stained with the blood of the last person I’d skewered on it. Dory stared at it, and her face turned as pale as old Percival.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I’ll do it. Just don’t expect me to protect you when the government finds out.”
“Believe me, dear,” Percival said. “We don’t expect a lot out of you at all.”
He sounded so tired that I was filled with concern. We could lose any one of the cats, including Norman or me, and still be on track with the plan. If we lost Percival, it would leave us with no alternative. Even if we found the average man hiding down in some dank cellar, I doubted he would fall into line with our demands.
“It only works when you’re naked.”
“I know, dear. We’ve shared a flight using this spell before.”
Dory gave him a strange look, and I could sympathize with her position. It must be awful to meet a group of people who all knew you, knew things that you’d done, yet you had no recollection of the situations or them. Still, just because I could empathize with her position didn’t mean that I would go easy on her if I needed to push.
“Why do you want to fly anyway?”
“Considering that you’ve just told us all you’ll report us the first chance you get, I think we’ll keep the reasons to ourselves for the time being.” When her lower lip pouted out, I added, “Maybe later, if you prove you’re loyal, we can share the whats and whys.”
“Don’t worry,” Dory snapped back at me. “I was just asking to be polite.”
Norman burst into laughter, earning a scowl.
“I’ve agreed, okay? Can we just get this nonsense over with?”
“Sure, we can,” Asha agreed. “You just need to come with us on a little journey, then once you cast the spell, you can be on your way.”
I flew in as a werecat. My modesty was probably a stupid asset to cling to, under the circumstances, but I held tight to it nonetheless. The other cats followed my lead, and if we needed another excuse for the choice, it would be that our small stature made it less likely that our invasion would be noticed.
Yeah, a likely scenario. Anyone looking out their window at the wrong time would still be able to see a hundred cats flying in for a landing. If we’d been mice, maybe they’d miss us, but a cat was still a big thing to be hurtling through the air when it shouldn’t be there at all.
The landing didn’t go too well for me, though others managed it with a lot more grace. First off, we were all headed for the same small area—the garden inside the gates of the Pennyworth mansion. Second, I was too worried about checking out the property for possible points of entry to remember that the ground would soon be a lot closer.
Hey, whatever. It was my first time flying, after all. Give me a second opportunity, and I’d do my best to perform better.
“Is that you, Miss Tiddles?” a voice called out from farther down the garden, on my left. I peered into the inky darkness, letting my eyes adjust until I could make out Norman.
“Yeah, it’s me. Did Percival come in for a landing yet?”
I wasn’t looking forward to that one. Asha could disguise the bulk of her nakedness by turning her skin metallic, but the old vampire would be wrinkles and flesh, old skin over old bones.
A thump followed by an expletive told me that he’d only just landed. It sounded like he’d come down even more heavily than me.
“Where’s Asha?” I asked him as I hurried to his side and looked him over. We could afford to lose a cat or twenty in the raid, and still be able to function just fine. To lose Percival would be disastrous, as it would to lose Asha.
She landed a few yards away, coming in for a gentle landing as though she’d been born a butterfly. Once she brushed off a few strands of fresh spider silk, spun throughout the garden, her attention turned to us.
“Did you see a way in?” she asked me, and I nodded.
“There’s a window on the top floor partially ajar. I think if half a dozen of us go up, we can try to get another point open to let you all in.”
She nodded, and I hustled over to the nearest werecats, ordering them to follow me and leading off up the nearest drainpipe. I had a mild setback when my mind flicked back to a group of hippies camped out in an old apartment, but I shook them off and continued onward. They hadn’t helped me then, and they wouldn’t help me now.
The window that I’d spotted while drifting in for the landing was fixed in its position of two inches open by a staunch metal bar. Once the six of us had slipped in through the opening, Pounce changed back for long enough to realize that if he adjusted it, an alarm would sound.
In fact, the entire house was wired up against potential intruders. A necessary device in some parts of town but it seemed like overkill, given the sentries on duty at the gate and the enormous electric wall that bound the wealthy community in on every side.
On the other hand, here we were breaking in, so perhaps the paranoia was warranted.
The doors downstairs were a no-go, so I wandered up higher. I passed by a room with gentle snoring and relaxed a smidgeon. We had one shot at this task, and if the Pennyworths had decided to spend the night in another location, we were fucked.
Without putting eyes on the inhabitant of that bedroom, I couldn’t be sure that it was the Mr. or Mrs. who we sought, but it gave me hope that it was possible. Enough to spur me into further action, moving to a staircase to the upper floor.
I placed my ear against the bedroom door of the topmost room of the house and kept it there for a good fifteen minutes while the other werecats grew impatient. Let them build their frustration—I needed to increase my reassurance no one was on the other side before I dared to take the chance to open the door.
Once inside, I breathed a sigh of relief to find that my senses hadn’t misled me. The bedroom was decorated in a myriad shade of pink—belonging to the couple’s daughter, no doubt. She must be staying with a friend or locked up tight in a boarding school. Either way, I didn’t care, just feeling happ
y that she wasn’t there.
As part of her pretty princess bedroom, including a double bed with a canopy, there was a set of French doors leading out onto a balcony. I checked and double checked but couldn’t see the same warning sign of a blinking red light that had scared me away from the downstairs doors.
“Can you see any alarm triggers?” I asked Pounce, who came and examined the doors with the same attention. After a minute, he shook his head. I stared at him wide-eyed for a second, then reached out and turned the handles.
Despite my paranoia, all that happened was the doors opened, leaving me free to walk outside.
I leaned over the edge of the balcony, judging the distance down to the garden. Too far to jump and too high up for Percival to climb. He would need to fly up here to be sure to arrive safely. The next level down from the one I was on, seemed to lead into another bedroom, I judged the same room from which I’d heard the soft snore.
It took another few minutes for the crew on the ground to see me, then work out what needed to be done, and last of all to convince Dory to play her part once more. Even in the darkness, I could see her smile. The streetlights reflected off her white teeth as she gently shook her head.
A few more minutes, and whatever threats they were using on her worked again. Percival rose in the air, and I tried my best not to look too hard at what he was packing.
Asha arose as well, once again landing smoothly and surely and turning to give Percival a helping hand down.
“Are they home?” she whispered to me, just as I heard a creak from the stairwell. Although the other werecats quickly jumped under the bed and out of sight, it was too late for the three of us standing outside.
Graham, the butler, stood in the doorway to the Pennyworths’ daughter’s room, the whites of his eyes catching and reflecting the moonlight.
Chapter Twenty-Five
