SkinThief

by Sonnet O'Dell

  Sienna carried me through the line, drawing the eyes of many of the women—women like a man who is kind to animals. He rubbed my ears, and I had to close my eyes because it was a very enjoyable sensation. No wonder Nancy had never wanted me to pet her—it would have just felt wrong to her, I was sure. Sienna checked the pendant around my neck, staring at it with mild fascination.

  “You’re a very lucky cat, such decoration; whoever lost you must be missing you terribly.” I found myself batting my head against his hand to get him to rub my ears more. He obliged me, and I got lost in my own purring. He carried me right inside the club; the security men didn’t even bat an eyelid. The girl at the coat-check desk bounced over to Sienna and rubbed her fingers under my chin. I stretched my neck to give her better access without thinking about what I was doing. Focus, Cassandra, I told myself—you are not a cat. You’re in the club; now all you’ve got to do is find Nancy.

  I wriggled in Sienna’s arms; he tried to hold on but had to let me go for fear of hurting me. I made a run for the space under the stairs to the balcony floor before anyone could grab me. The bodies inside were sparse—it was early, and only those feeders were inside at the moment. I could see them sitting with vampires curled around them, suckling on wounds in their flesh. Nancy was here; I could feel it. It was like my own body called to me. I let my eyes wander over the vampires in the main room. Aram wasn’t in sight, which meant he was probably back in his room. He only went there for three reasons: to feed, to sleep, or to see me. Aram had to have been awake for a couple of hours now; he’d had time to feed already. A human a day keeps death away. I gave a catty chuckle. I should write slogans for a living—or in this case, for the dead.

  The door on the other side of the main dance floor that led into the back areas of the club, the private areas, was shut tight. I wasn’t going to get back there that way. The stairs I was currently under were too steep for me to climb up very easily. They would also leave me exposed, and I could be grabbed and turfed out. There was another set of stairs across the dance floor in the far right corner; they were stone and much narrower. I knew that at the top, they connected to the mezzanine floor, where the bathrooms and a drape hid another of the secret corridors that young vampires used to appear and disappear to thrill the fans. It was my best bet. I peered around the steps; the coat-check girl was bent over at the waist, sucking air through her teeth in an attempt to call me out of hiding. I ignored her and scurried away as quickly as I could toward the back stairs. If she saw me, I was too quick for her.

  Once I was up the stairs, there was no one else around. The bathrooms were empty because the club still hadn’t filled up, so it was no trouble to sneak under the drapery. The corridor behind was lit by torches that burned with gentle fire, illuminating small circles of the wall. I kept close to the wall, following it as it bent around a corner, and went down some steps. I stopped when I could hear voices coming from a hole in the wall—my voice and Aram’s. It was very quiet, and I crossed the corridor, trying to hear better. There was a hole in the bottom of the wall; it looked like there had once been a vent cover over it, but it had been removed or damaged. I darted into it, following it along till I came to the covered-over vent at the other end. It was above the bathroom door of Aram’s room, and I was looking down at myself sitting astride his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed. Nancy had my arms wrapped around his neck, our bodies pressed close together, and she was whispering things into his ear. Aram shook his head, grabbed my arms and detangled them from around his neck.

  “As much as I have longed to hear these things from you, pet, something just isn’t right. This brazenness is not like you. What is the matter?”

  “Can’t I just want you?” Nancy said, putting an affectionate purr into my voice that I didn’t appreciate.

  “I have always known that you want me, Cassandra, but such a revelation to yourself should have taken months yet. I know you too well to imagine that there is not something else behind this, and I refuse to take advantage of you.”

  “But I want you to take advantage of me,” she said, leaning in and kissing him. I growled and threw my weight at the vent; it crackled with age and bent inward. Aram forced my body back from him with great reluctance, it seemed.

  “I said no, not until you are yourself!”

  I threw my weight against the vent again and the covering shot away from the wall, crashing onto the floor below and startling both of them. I took a running leap, shooting out from the opening like a ball of gray fury, and prayed that the old adage about cats always landing on their feet was true. I landed on all four feet with a tiny bit of a wobble and stalked the floor toward the couple. Nancy dismounted from his lap as I hissed at her.

  “Damn it, not yet,” she said, backing as far away from me as she could. The closer I got, the more I could feel that my spirit wanted to return to my own body whether I had the amulet or not. I felt power surge around me, and from the way her eyes widened, I guessed she could feel it to. She cursed out a spell and vanished in a gust of smoke as I leapt for her. I personally hated teleportation magic. You had to focus on the place you wanted to be really hard and with a specific spot in mind or you could land anywhere, including inside a Dumpster. It also left you feeling really sick and dizzy for about a half hour afterwards. Witches and Wizards were taught it as a last straw—if there was nothing you could do to save yourself other than run, then you used a teleportation spell. Even some really powerful Wizards hated to use them because it basically ripped your body apart, carried it on the wind and slammed it all back together somewhere else. It wasn’t pleasant.

  Aram stood up as I mewled and scratched at the place she had vanished from. She had to have gone pretty far because I couldn’t feel her, feel my body like I had before. I was also very tired. Getting around as a cat was so much harder than I had imagined; I only had little legs and I couldn’t hail a cab.

  “Nancy? What is going on here?” Aram demanded. I sat on the floor and looked up at him disbelievingly. Did he really expect an answer? He couldn’t hear my thoughts and I couldn’t speak. I needed his help, though, that much I understood. I could not go on like this. How was I going to explain it when I had no voice? I sat there looking up at him as he looked down at me, and I swished my tail back and forth with my displeasure at the situation. I ignored his pleading look and went for his bookshelf, where I knew he had a copy of Aeschylus Agamemnon from the Oresteia. The Oresteia was a collection of three Greek tragedies about the end of the curse on the House of Atreus. Agamemnon—although it was not technically called that, as the individual plays had no name—was about the fall of Troy and Agamemnon returning home from the war to be murdered by his jealous wife and his cousin her lover. This book interested me because Agamemnon brought home from the war Cassandra, princess of Troy, as a slave and concubine. She later died with him, as did their sons, but the point was that this book would have my name in it, spelled out as clear as day.

  I leapt onto the chair and then the table under the books and searched for it. I looked back to see that Aram was indeed watching me as I strutted along the tabletop.

  Aram’s copy of the play was quite old when I found it, and although I hated to do such a thing to a book, I put both my front paws on top of it, angling my weight until it fell out of its place, hit the table and then with a thunk landed on the floor. Aram grumbled as he went quickly to retrieve it.

  “I do not understand. What are you doing?” He held the book up to put it back into the shelf. I batted my head against it hard and he stopped in place, looking focused on the book for the first time. I gave a gentle, encouraging meow and batted my head against his hand and the book it held again. He seemed to look at it more carefully.

  “A Greek tragedy. I didn’t know you cared for such things.”

  I batted the book more forcefully with my head. Why didn’t he get it? Aram wasn’t dumb. Make the connection, I beg
ged him, make the connection. He sat down on the chair, book still in hand, and I jumped into his lap.

  “It’s just a play about the Trojan war,” he said, turning it from cover to cover. I bobbed my head and still could give no more sound than another soft meow. He motioned again to put the book back, so I turned and angrily bit his finger. The book dropped into his lap, and he looked at me sharply. Nancy had never, ever bitten him. She would rub up against him or curl up on his lap and purr. But I was not Nancy, and he needed to get that. He brought his finger up to his mouth and sucked gently on the little wound. I had drawn just a little blood. While he tended to himself, frustrated by his lack of progress, I nudged the cover with my nose, pushing it open on his lap. I was in luck because it landed on the cast of characters page. I meowed loudly and whacked my paw over the name of Cassandra, enslaved princess of Troy. He stared at the page.

  “Are you trying to tell me something about Cassandra? Is she in trouble?”

  I bit his finger again. He recoiled so his hands were away from me, and I sat on the open book in his lap and stared up at him, trying to put all of it into my eyes. Please, I begged, for the love of all that’s holy, see me, please see me in here. After a minute of nothing but staring at each other, Aram finally spoke.

  “Cassandra?”

  I meowed in relief and rubbed my head against his chest so he understood that I was pleased with that answer. He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, holding me so that he could peer down into my face.

  “Cassandra? Is that really you, pet? I do not understand. If you are her, how did you get like this?” I turned my head to try to bite his finger again, but he let me go before I could. “Do not bite me because I cannot understand you. If you are a cat, then who was here before? Who was that?” Maybe Aram wasn’t as smart as I gave him credit for. I tilted my head and just stared at him, waiting till he got it. “Was that Nancy?” I meowed. Good vampire, I’d offer you a cookie, but you don’t eat food.

  I jumped off his lap and headed to the door. I scratched at the wood, waiting for him to follow. He stood up, leaving the book on the table.

  “I cannot understand you, pet, so we must find someone who does.” I meowed in agreement; at least we were starting to get somewhere.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I sat for the second time, strangely contented in Aram’s lap. I had to suppose that it was an almost natural feeling for a domestic cat, to be curled in a ball on Aram’s lap. His fingers played softly over the ears and the back of the neck of this cat form. He was far more affectionate in word and deed to me than he had been when it was Nancy in this body. I supposed that must mean he had a true and deep affection for me. It was reassuring in a way to know that. I had been surprised to say the least when I had found him refusing Nancy’s advances—my advances. He might be on a serious mission to seduce me, but it was not his whole, all-consuming goal. If it had been, I’m not sure what I would have walked in on.

  It didn’t bare thinking about; but it got thought about regardless. Even at some of my best moments I imagined, even fantasized about what it would be like not just to go to bed with Aram, but to go to bed with a vampire. You heard things about it; there’d been a whole article about a woman who only went to bed with vampires, claiming that after her first vamp, a regular old human guy just couldn’t do it for her anymore. I had to wonder if that was true or if it was just her. I had heard of other men and woman who’d become addicted to vampiric sex, but each and every one of them had an addictive personality. If it wasn’t a vampire, they’d have been addicted to something: drugs, alcohol, or regular old human sex.

  Aram and I sat in the back of a dark blue town car being driven by Lance. He was the vampire brothers’ go-to guy—really just a fancy gopher. After realizing I was trapped in cat form, Aram had to excuse himself and when he’d explained to Jareth why, he’d assigned Lance to drive him. I didn’t think either Aram or Jareth drove, and presently the law prohibited them from taking the test. Imagine just trying to fill out the form when your birthday was something like 1837. Guys like Lance were necessary, if only to help the vampires get from place to place in style.

  Lance was about thirty-eight years old. He had brown hair that had started to go gray prematurely; it gave him silvery sideburns that actually made him seem slightly more distinguished. His eyes were quite a warm blue, and it wasn’t often that I found blue to be a warm color. Jareth had blue eyes too, but they were like a solid wall of water, deep and sometimes very, very cold. Jareth had seen some real battles in his life, and it showed there in his eyes. His eyes were rarely warm or soft, which was a pity because when he laughed, it lit up his entire face, changed it from a bland but handsome mask to a radiance that was hard to describe.

  Lance was also a small man, but one who worked out to compensate for it. He had little to no body fat, wide muscled shoulders, and arms that sported some impressive tattoos. I’d seen them before, as Lance tended to do any manual labor at the club shirtless. The suit he was wearing had to be tailored to him, because it covered his intimidating body with smooth lines that wouldn’t have come from something store bought. He was a very well-treated gopher. Handmade Italian suits were not cheap.

  I’d half expected him to have a little black chauffeur’s hat too, as he was very professional about his job. He’d opened the door for Aram and everything; but that might have been because Aram had his arms full with me. Lance had a very smooth voice, which was more evident in person, as previously I’d only really spoken to him on the phone. He’d been curious to know when Aram had gotten a pet, but Aram, knowing this whole situation was causing me considerable embarrassment, didn’t explain. Giving Lance credit, when he was told to shut up, he shut right up.

  But Lance, like a lot of people who got close to the vampires, was afraid of aging. He wanted to prove himself so that he would be turned. Jareth had told me that his kiss wasn’t going to turn anyone until they knew if the vampire rights bill would pass. I didn’t ask his reasons because he wasn’t someone who made foolish decisions. I guessed it had to do with humans knowing exactly what they’d give up by taking the change. It didn’t matter to me if the law passed or not. I opened my eyes but I couldn’t see the window, so I had no idea how close we were yet. Aram—quite intuitively—had decided that the best place to take me to deal with a magic problem was to my semi-mentor Virginia. At least she would be able to hear what I was thinking. I would have to monitor my mental motorway; sometimes I thought things that I really shouldn’t, and certainly that I didn’t want to share.

  I thought about walking to the window and using my back paws to support me so I could see how close we were, but I was reluctant to move out from the warm little hollow I had created in Aram’s lap and his gentle rubbing to the back of my neck. It wasn’t sexual for either of us, but it was disturbingly pleasant. It was akin to when I was a child and I would lay my head in my mother’s lap; she would stroke my hair, run her fingers through it, and it had made me feel loved. Aram loved me—he had confessed it—but it was almost as if I could feel it now in the soft touches of his fingers in my fur. There was a kind of contentment in it.

  The car stopped moving, engine still running, and Lance opened the back door.

  “We’re here, Mr. Aram. Do you want me to wait for you?”

  “Yes, Lance, but we might be here some time—sit with the engine off.” Lance nodded, shutting the door behind us. Aram had scooped me up from his lap into his arms, and I crawled up his chest to look over his shoulder. Lance climbed back in the front of the car, killed the engine and took a paper back from the glove compartment. It looked like the cover said “Alan Dean Foster.” It gave another little insight into the man Lance was.

  I settled down in Aram’s arms as we approached the porch and then the front door. Aram reached out and gently rang the bell. Virginia had to have heard the car come up the drive; when you got no through traffic, t
he approach of a vehicle was something you didn’t miss. The door opened very slowly, and Virginia stepped forward, feet planted firmly on the protected side of the house’s threshold. She looked at Aram with contempt. Virginia made no secret of her dislike and mistrust of vampire kind.

  In olden days witches had fought and killed vampires to protect the normal humans around them. I thought that had been dumb because it exposed the witches, and it was straight to gallows with them. Normal humans were so fickle—one minute they’re all “save me, save me,” and then they’re quoting the Bible at you: “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live!”

  “What do you want here, vampire?”

  Virginia crossed her arms over her chest, staring at him. Aram looked at me, expecting me to talk to her. I sat myself up farther in his arms.

  Give you three guesses.

  Virginia turned to look at me, noticing my furry self for the first time. It must have been a new experience to her to be listening to the thoughts of a cat. I always came to see her, she never came to see me, and she had never had to deal with Nancy post punishment, although she was aware she was a gray-haired Persian.

  “Nancy?”

  Wrong! Two guesses left.

  “Cassandra!?!” Virginia exclaimed, shocked. She knew me enough to recognize even my internal voice.

  Correct. Let me tell you what you’ve won...

  “Sarcasm is not going to help, young lady. What happened?”

  I scratched at the amulet around my neck with a paw.

  Amulet of Taish—switched us.

  “So Nancy is running around loose in your body?” Virginia said, instantly grasping the crux of the situation. “Not good!”

  Preaching to the choir. Can you help? I’m severely limited in finding her right now.

  Virginia gave a large sigh and stood aside.