by Lee Hayton
But Dory flapped her hand at her to shut up. “Anyway, for a witch to answer a wish is easy. Once you have a clear visualization of what you want in your head, I just get in there”—she tapped my forehead—“and sort out where to put it. Voila! A wish comes true.”
“You get inside his head.” Asha looked the most pissed-off I’d ever seen her. I had to duck my head down to hide my smile—it seemed like Dory was raining on her one-woman parade. Miss Tiddles reached out and took my hand, squeezing it in a comforting gesture of friendship.
“Something like that,” Dory said. “I don’t really know, it’s all just words, isn’t it? The point is, you do your thing, and I’ll do my thing, and we’ll end up with you human.”
Dory took a step back, looking around the room as though she’d dropped something important somewhere. Then she clapped her hands together. “Unless you end up wishing for something else entirely, in which case, who knows?”
Asha sat at the end of the couch, my feet propped up in her lap. Miss Tiddles knelt beside the sofa with her hands flat against my belly. Dory sat at the end opposite Asha and cradled my head, her thumbs pressed lightly to either temple.
“Okay. Why don’t we give this a shot?”
It didn’t take long. I’d been dreaming of this moment for so many years that the wish was already fully formed by the time Dory could draw in a deep breath. I visualized the hell out of it—being human, growing up in the sunlight, maturing—and then I felt a crawling sensation spread out of my head.
I jerked. Immediately afterward chastising myself for nearly ruining the moment. Even though my back and legs and arms seemed to be moving with an army of fire ants running over my skin and eating into my muscles, I held still. Ignore the physical world, it doesn’t matter. Focus on what you want to become, not what is.
“And, we’re done.”
“What?” My disappointment welled up so fast that the word burst out of me before I even knew I’d opened my mouth. “Didn’t it work?”
Dory stared at me, her head tilted to one side. “Take a look for yourself,” she said, reaching for my hand and pulling it into the glow of the overhead light.
I looked down at my arm, unsure of what I was meant to be seeing.
“In fact,” Dory said, getting on her knees on the sofa so she could reach over the back, “this might work to convince you a little bit better.”
She grabbed the curtain in her hand and slid it along the rail, sending a blast of midday sun pouring into the room. I flinched, but it was too late. I’d never make it to the door before I burst into flames. With my eyes closed, I waited for destruction. Jimmy’s ghastly end rising high in my thoughts.
Then a minute passed with nothing happening. I cracked open one eye. Asha was staring at me quizzically, her mouth open. Dory looked as proud as a baby momma feeding her child at her breast.
“How does it feel?” I started at Percival’s voice, but he was calling out from the safety of another room.
“It feels…” I trailed off, unable to capture the essence of the wonder flowing through my body. The fire ants had subsided. In their place was the warm rush of blood. It feels wonderful! It feels miraculous! It feels like the way I was meant to be!
I peered down at my shaking hands as the red blood of life filled them. My skin blossomed from gray to white to pink.
The legend was true. I was human again.
I could feel the moment when the cancer settled into my bones.
The cancer didn’t venture forth into my body like a fighter returning from a long journey. The cancer had been there all along, lurking in the shadows, just waiting for the chance to take center stage once more.
The ache crept along the edges of my bones as though they were frozen. I thought that I was used to pain, the burning chains, even the cutting of my throat to pull out that damned tracking device.
I wasn’t. In the years that passed between my sickness then and now, I’d forgotten what real pain was. Physical pain. I thought that my mental anguish was on a par with it, close enough to put aside drawing straws and just quit.
Emotions only hurt when the urgent needs of a body weren’t drawing all the attention. Who remembered the mental pain inflicted by teasing in the moments after whacking their thumb with a hammer? Nobody.
The chill carved a swathe of pain through my body. It twisted my muscles into useless fibers and sapped my energy until I couldn’t even lift my head.
While the others argued, Miss Tiddles came over and stroked the fringe back from my forehead. I don’t know what she saw in my eyes, but she gathered me into her arms and took me outside, dropping me down to the ground only long enough to force her way through the twisted metal gate.
Asha hadn’t left a lot of it there as a barrier.
The sun was high overhead, and my eyes winced shut against its brightness. Another thing I’d forgotten on the list of all the things.
When Miss Tiddles reached the middle of the meadow, she lay me down and held me on her lap. The sun shone on my skin, warming it into more color than just the blood flowing through it could manage. I closed my eyes and saw the dance of colors from its ragged heat.
I fell asleep after a few minutes, the exhaustion of just breathing as Miss Tiddles carried me, forcing me into unconsciousness to recover. When I next looked up, I was sprawled alone on the ground while the cat played further away.
Nothing was off-limits. Miss Tiddles chased a field mouse through the long as eagerly as she jumped into the sky to try to catch a golden moth. Every inch of her lithe body returned to kittenhood as she played in the midday sun.
She noticed that I’d woken after a few minutes and returned to curl up next to my side. With her head tucked down on her paws, she sat beside me. Not asking for anything, not demanding an answer. At that moment, she was all the people I’d ever loved, giving me the space to do my own thing.
To make my own decision.
When Asha found us later and tried to call us back inside, I refused. Not out of stubbornness but out of longing to have one last full day living the life that I’d always wanted. No pretense in the world would allow me to believe that I had a hope of keeping this day as mine forever. Still, I wanted it while it was here, and nothing could dissuade me.
She strode away, the lines of her jaw and the way she shoved her hands deep into her pockets telling me how upset she was. Asha didn’t understand how to communicate emotions any better than I did. It was only through the longevity of our company that we understood each other at all.
A friendship that would soon come to an end. There was no way I’d let Percival sink his teeth into my neck and turn me.
I lay on my back again, eyes closed, feeling a cricket resting on my hand rub its back legs into a song to attract a mate. A lifetime ago, I would have scribbled that detail down into a notebook in the hope that one day I’d reread it and experience the sensation again. This time around, there was no need.
One day. Two days. Probably not that long, and certainly not longer. The priest had been called to say last rites, no family did that before it was time.
“Stay out here with me,” Miss Tiddles said when I tried to roll over onto my stomach. “Let’s just spend this last part of the day together. The moon’s going to be full enough to light our way when it’s time to go back inside.”
Groggy in the heat, I thought it over, then nodded my head in agreement. Yes. When the sun sank on the horizon and my hated companion the moon rose in the sky, I’d say goodbye to it as well.
I waited in the field with the changing of the guard between night and day, watching the rich gold turn into the cheapest silver. And when I faced Miss Tiddles to tell her it was time to go inside, she swiped her hand through the air and clawed out my throat.
Chapter Twenty-One
The blood choked me. If the stupid spell had still been in effect, the lack of air to my lungs would have rendered me invisible.
That magic was long gone, though. I saw the bl
ood spurt into the air, like an oil strike spraying into the sky.
My body fought against the attack, I clutched my hands to my throat in a desperate attempt to live, even though a moment before I’d accepted my impending death as inevitable. Even with my hands pressed as tightly as I could manage against the gaping wound, blood continued to escape.
Then Miss Tiddles put her arms around my chest and began to squeeze me. I experienced a sudden kinship with lemons. My breath hitched in my throat, my lungs no longer trying to draw in oxygen. Colors began to dance in my brain as the air grew scarce.
Miss Tiddles then dropped me on the group, standing one foot on my chest and tilting her head back to howl at the sky.
The moonlight shone into my eyes. I no longer had the energy to blink them. Its flat gray light filled them, and I couldn’t look away.
“What have you done?” Asha screamed from the far side of a lengthening tunnel. “You’ve killed him! Why have you killed him?”
Miss Tiddles turned, raising her hands in a defensive stance, shifting her weight low to stabilize, readying a spring forward to attack.
But Asha didn’t even look at her. She dropped to her knees by my head and cradled my face in her hands.
“Hold on,” she whispered. “We’ll get help. Hold on.”
That blind optimism even when reality was shoved in her face made me giggle. At that slight movement, I found that I now had the strength to draw in a breath.
I made it a deep one. One to really count. Then found the energy to draw another.
A craving ignited in my stomach, a pull like someone or something was tugging at me through a rope or umbilical cord.
“Stand back,” Miss Tiddles warned, taking her foot off my chest. She hauled Asha off me and pulled her back just as my entire body writhed.
“What have you done to him?”
Asha’s cries were lost beneath the tumult of sound screaming through my eardrums. My heart was magnified a thousand-fold, and every cell in my body beat along with its drum.
“I passed…”
“… could you…”
“… only way to…”
“Monster! You know that was against…”
My back arched, the muscles pulling me until my head was almost touching my feet. Instead of pain, there was a craving that took over the world. Worse than hunger. Thicker than fear. I wanted to stuff the world inside myself and even then, I wouldn’t be full.
Then the world changed around me. The grass grew longer, the moon drifted farther away. Sounds grew louder, both inside and outside. Each noise taking on a dozen more frequencies than I was used to hearing. I looked down at my body and saw it was now covered in ginger fur.
Miss Tiddles had created a beast in her own image. In one day, I’d changed from vampire to man to werecat.
While the battling shrieks of Asha and Miss Tiddles grew louder and more violent, I died from my cancer under the glow of the moon.
I awoke to Asha sitting, face down on her folded arms, at the table while Percival hovered in the background. At times, he’d reach his hand out and let it hover an inch above her shoulder. Through slit lids I watched him extend and retract, a repetitive dance that never ended in contact.
When I sat up, everything in the room appeared a strange color. I looked down at my arms, back to human now although covered with peach fuzz. The movement roused Asha from her reverie, and she sat up, reaching into her pocket for a tissue to blow her nose.
“Welcome back. I thought we’d lost you.” Her eyes looked puffy, but that must have been my imagination. I’d known Asha for a long time—she wasn’t one to cry.
“Where’s Miss Tiddles?”
Asha shrugged and looked away, refusing to look back and meet my eyes even when I cleared my throat. “She’s decided to move on. The cat knows where we live if she wants to come back for a visit.”
“She saved my life.” I turned my hands over to trace the lines along the backs of my fingers, the bluish veins carrying blood back to my heart. The ache in my bones had vanished, gone as quickly as if a witch had clicked her fingers. Not Dory, obviously, but someone good at her job.
“We all wanted what was best for you.”
The edge in Asha’s voice told me to leave well enough alone. Between that and the far-away look in her eye, I guessed she was missing the feline as much or more than me. The two of them had grown into a tight partnership while I was off hunting down Jimmy’s granddaughter. For that to explode apart, left me reeling with sadness and guilt.
“Anyway.” Asha clapped her hands together. “The trains aren’t up and running again yet, but we did score an old delivery van that should get us back to the city. Once I can sort out what to do about my actual job, we can all fit in and travel back in style.”
I thought of the phone call that the vampires’ guard had made. When I’d been caught out on the street instead of tucked up safely in a hotel. Asha told him that she had a bounty on a vampire. His call confirmed it.
I hadn’t given it too much thought beyond gratitude that we got off so lightly. Now, for the first time, I realized that Percival had done more than offer me a place to stay. He’d stuck his neck out, and Asha might have a contract to make sure that head got chopped off.
“Who is your job for?”
From the way Asha turned her back, I assumed I was right. Poor Percival was in a boatload of trouble, and I’d led the hunter straight to his door.
“You can’t turn him in,” I said softly.
“Of course, I can’t fucking turn him fucking in,” Asha said. “Thanks for the explanation. Unless you have an actual idea of what I’m meant to do, then how about you wander off somewhere and give me time to think?”
“We could change him back, as well.”
Asha turned back to me with a scowl on her face so severe that I backed up a step. “And then what? Watch him die of natural causes? Turn him into a werecat?”
“I think I’d prefer to stay as I am, given a choice.” Percival stood in the doorway, staring at each of us in turn. In his tattered robes and slippers, he looked like a harmless old man who’d stumbled into the middle of trouble for no good reason.
“What’s the price?” Percival asked Asha, taking a step toward her. “I don’t have much money, but what I do have, you’re welcome to take if it means that you leave me alone.”
“I don’t need your money,” Asha said. “I need a plan to get around it.”
“What’s the worst that the BHI can do to you if you return empty-handed?” I jumped up on the countertop to sit. “Surely, hunters must come back all the time without their targets. They wouldn’t offer so much money if the job were that easy.”
“That’s not the point.” Asha ran a hand through her hair, blowing out a breath in frustration. “If they’ve got me chasing after him, then he’ll be on the books for others. I don’t know how long Percival’s been on their radar, but I have to say, he wasn’t the hardest target to find.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Only because I told you where to look.”
“Like I wouldn’t have thought to check an ancient old building where nobody had taken the first steps to even place on the open market? The world’s not populated by complete thickos. A few minutes’ research in the council office and another hunter will be able to track him down.”
“They haven’t so far.”
“He’s a new listing,” Asha explained. “That’s how I managed to get the train ticket. All I was looking at was sightings close by so we had a legitimate excuse to come here”—she turned to Percival—“but someone’s got it in for you, mate.”
“I thought you said the village had rallied around?” I looked at my old mentor. “Why would they turn on you after all this time?”
“How would I know? People are damned strange creatures.” He sniffed. “I still don’t understand why you wanted to be one again.”
Dory staggered in through the door. Judging by her age, she’d found a new
stock of wine to entertain herself with. “I could change you over, get that on some sort of recording and Asha could hand it in. Once that was finished, we turn you back into a vampire. Voila! Done.”
Percival stared me in the face. “Know of a vampire to turn me back, do you?”
After a second of confusion, Dory’s face cleared. “You could turn him”—she pointed at me—“again and then I change you back to human, he changes you back to vampire, and I change Norman into a human again.”
I held my hands up. “Sorry, but I’m not volunteering to go through all that. Not unless you’re positive that such a thing would even work twice on the same person.”
“Got a better idea?” Dory asked, leaning over and breathing the scent of dank wine into my face.
“Anything that involves fewer steps relying on your powers would be good,” I said. “I seem to recall that most of what you do involves unknown drawbacks.”
“Nothing’s gone wrong with you, so far,” Dory said, flapping a hand at me.
I laughed. “Apart from cancer, you mean. Yeah. Everything’s been grand.”
“I already said I’m not changing back into a human,” Percival said. “This discussion, no matter how entertaining, is all moot. What other ideas do you young folks have? My brain’s a bit forgetful at the best of times.”
“What kind of recording equipment do we have access to, anyway?” I nodded over at the old laptop on the table. “Maybe we could put together a wee film with a few special effects that would do the trick.”
I yawned, suddenly feeling more tired than I had before. Even as the others continued to talk, my head nodded down toward my chest.
“Hey, sleepyhead.” Asha poked me in the ribs. “Why don’t you head off to bed? You’re now on a roster of eighteen hours asleep a day if Miss Tiddles is anything to go by. We’ll wake you up if anything exciting happens.”
With a nod, I stumbled out of the room, my eyes closing until I tripped over and jerked fully awake again. When it had just been my pet sleeping all the daytime and half the nighttime hours away, it had been cute. If I had to fight off this drag to stay awake, it suddenly seemed less fun.
