Cat's Claw

by Amber Benson

  feeling slightly chagrined about having to go out of my way for a complete stranger, I hightailed my ass to Bleecker Street, thanking God that the Magnolia Bakery was open late. Of course, if I were really smart, I would’ve totally remembered that they delivered!

  After a lengthy wait behind two pierced Goths—the female one was wearing a leather dog collar and leash attached to the male one’s nose ring—I was able to procure two carrot cake cupcakes (and a devil’s food one for myself). I walked for a couple of blocks, then, deciding to splurge, hopped into a taxi, luxuriating in the backseat all the way down to Battery Park City.

  I really do try to walk as much as possible because I do live in the greatest place in the whole world: New York City. I know I should just get over it already and stop acting like a tourist, but every time I walk outside my door, I just can’t help being silently thrilled with the beauty of my environs.

  Ever since I was a little kid, I had wanted to live in the City That Never Sleeps. I’d spent my childhood being ferried between Sea Verge (my family’s giant mansion overlooking the Rhode Island Sound) in Newport, Rhode Island, and a small East Coast boarding school called the New Newbridge Academy—but even then my heart belonged to New York.

  I don’t know what it is about the city that makes it so enticing to me, but seriously, being a denizen of lower Manhattan is kinda like being high on catnip all the time—not that I was a cat . . . or had any kind of weird catnip addiction that I was hiding.

  The only thing I did that might’ve bordered on the edge of addiction was my voracious obsession with acquiring new clothing, sunglasses, and shoes . . . the trendier the better. Too bad that all I could afford on the shopping scene these days was the cute little Al Gore tote bag I’d picked up at the Marc Jacobs store for five bucks the day before.

  I had really, really, really wanted the amazing blue baby doll dress with tiny pearl buttons going down the front in a neat little row I’d glimpsed in the window, but had had to settle for just the tote when my credit card had been summarily declined at the register. It was just my luck that, although New York boasted some of the best shopping in the world, it also was home to some of the world’s highest-priced real estate, meaning that my rent ate up three-fourths of what I took home from House and Yard each week.

  Ugh.

  Anyway, as the taxi glided to a stop in front of my building, I pulled a wad of one-dollar bills from my bag and shoved it at the driver. He seemed resigned to counting all my sweaty bills, but once he realized I’d given him a three-buck tip, he gave me a wide-lipped smile and tipped his baseball cap to me in the rearview mirror.

  I paused, one foot on the pavement, the other still stuck in the cab, and stared, my heart riveted by the pair of ice blue eyes that I saw reflected back at me in the rearview mirror.

  I knew those eyes!

  I opened my mouth to speak, to say something that would make reality slide back into place, but before I could make a sound, the driver turned his head and gave me a curious look. His dark face was pockmarked and shiny. The two hazel eyes that peered out of his eye sockets bore not even a passing resemblance to the eyes I’d just seen.

  “You okay, ma’am?” he said, the dulcet tones of his Caribbean accent ripping me out of the surrealness I’d just experienced and plopping me right back into the humid New York City night that surrounded me like a security blanket.

  I nodded, realizing that I didn’t trust my voice not to come out like a squeak if I used it.

  All I wanted to do was rewind, to go back a few minutes into the past and see those eyes one more time. There was so much that I wanted to say to the man who possessed them. It just stank that there was no way in Hell—and I meant that literally—that I was ever going to see the guy again, no matter how badly I wanted to.

  It was definitely something I’d dreamed about: meeting Daniel somewhere out in the real world, away from all the supernatural weirdness we’d shared together, but unhappily, there was no random run-in on the subway or a surprise bumping into each other at a mutual friend’s birthday party in our future. Not because we’d had some crazy falling-out and he’d moved to Timbuktu or Kazakhstan to escape my evil, female clutches. No, the reason I wasn’t going to see Daniel hoofing it down Park Avenue anytime in the near future was because . . . Daniel was dead.

  He’d sacrificed his own life for my mine during a hardscrabble battle between the evil demon serpent Vritra and myself almost two months earlier, and no matter how many times I replayed the memory of that horrible night over and over again in my mind, I couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that I didn’t get to tell him thank you.

  Or good-bye.

  i took the stairs two at a time, my dark bangs matting to my forehead as sweat poured down my face. There was no air-conditioning in my building, which meant that whenever I opted for the stairs—which was anytime I wanted to leave or return to my apartment since it was a sixth-floor walk-up—I was assured of desperately needing a shower after the fact.

  Cradling the box of cupcakes in one hand, I stuck my other hand into the depths of my messenger bag, fumbling for my keys. Like everything that found its way into my bag, my keys were nearly impossible to find. I pulled out my PDA, a toothbrush, and the eponymous tampon from the bag’s innards before finally getting a good grip on my keychain and fishing my keys out of the darkness.

  I slid the largest key on the chain into the giant, eye-level dead bolt—I always felt like I was in a staring match with the damn thing—and turned the key home. My door swung open and a burst of hot air hit me full in the face, making me wheeze.

  “Ugh,” I moaned to myself as I flipped the light switch to the “on” position, bathing the apartment in a warm yellow glow. I used my foot to pull the door closed behind me before setting the cupcake box on the arm of my sofa and quickly locking the dead bolt with a heavy, thunklike click. I grabbed the cupcake box off the sofa’s arm before it could slide off and fall lid first onto the floor, settling it under my arm as I made my way to my tiny eat-in kitchenette. I opened the door to my dorm-sized refrigerator and put the cupcakes (still in their box just to be hygienic) on the bottom shelf, where they would be safe.

  When I had first looked at the apartment, I had just been so happy to find something in my price range that I had somehow managed to miss the apartment’s big, inherent defect: a kitchen so tiny that an adult human couldn’t stand up in it without banging against a cabinet or bumping their head on the ceiling. I comforted myself with the fact that I didn’t really do all that much cooking so the lack of kitchen wasn’t too much of a hardship. Although the minifridge did tend to fill up once I’d loaded in a six-pack of Fiji water and two bottles of raspberry Kombucha juice—and the bottle of Baileys Irish Cream I’d gotten as a Christmas present the year before didn’t really help, either. It desperately needed to be tossed in the garbage if I was ever gonna get anything edible inside the Hobbit fridge.

  Luckily, I had polished off the last bottle of water the night before, so tonight the cupcakes got the water’s old spot.

  I closed the refrigerator door and turned around, my feet unconsciously heading for the large, flower-patterned couch that took up half the living room. I was just within couch-flopping distance when I suddenly started sneezing: three vicious sneezes that rattled my brain around inside my head like a Ping-Pong ball and made me see stars.

  Feeling the hairs prickle on the back of my neck, I wiped my nose with a tissue I plucked from a box on the coffee table, my eye catching my reflection in the large mirror that hung on the beige wall above the couch.

  “What the—” I started to say as I saw a tiny old woman with curly red hair piled high on top of her head reflected back at me in the mirror. She was standing in the middle of my kitchen, filling my ratty old teakettle with water right out of the (germ-laden!) kitchen tap.

  “Hey!” I yelped, almost tripping over the edge of the beige and brown area rug that covered most of the living room floor as I scurried across the r
oom. “That’s my kettle you’re contaminating with tap water!”

  My teeth clenched unhappily as I moved to confront the intruder, grabbing a tattered old copy of Kevyn Aucoin’s coffee table-sized book Making Faces from my bookshelf and wielding it like a baseball bat behind my back. I didn’t like anyone invading my territory without my prior approval—no matter how small and old and female she appeared to be. I had learned from experience that even the most benign-looking creatures could prove to be malevolent monsters in disguise.

  And I meant that literally.

  “Who are you?” I stammered, holding the spine of the book tightly in my sweaty hands.

  The old woman didn’t bat an eyelash. She just stood there waiting for the kettle to whistle, ignoring me.

  “Who are you?” I said again, not so nicely this time. Like I said, I didn’t like uninvited guests—and I especially didn’t like uninvited guests that ignored me to boot! Suddenly, the teakettle began to whistle, and the shrill sound of boiling water screaming through a tiny metal spout was like nails on a chalkboard, making me even more annoyed with the old lady.

  “I said, who the hell are—” But the sentence was interrupted by another round of rapid-fire sneezing that made my eyes water and my throat itch.

  Raising an eyebrow in my direction, the old woman took the kettle off the eye of the stove, resting it on a lopsided, purple-glazed clay trivet that had my name emblazoned on it in my younger sister’s sloping cursive.

  Clio had made the trivet for me at one of those “paint your own” pottery stores when she was twelve. It was supercute and it always made me kinda miss my family whenever I looked at it sitting on my kitchen counter—which really wasn’t that often, sadly, since I was more of a take-out sandwich gal than a cook.

  “You are in need of training much more desperately than your father and mother have led me to believe,” the woman said finally, and I instantly recognized her voice as the very same one that had hijacked my cell phone earlier in the evening with a request for carrot cake cupcakes.

  “You talked to my parents?” I said, latching onto that snippet of information and allowing a deep feeling of resentment to build inside me.

  “They have no right to talk about me behind my back like that! That—that—that . . . sucks!”

  The older woman snickered at my words, her red curls bouncing like they were in on the joke. I lowered the Kevyn Aucoin book, but didn’t return it to its place in the bookshelf. Instead, I kept it at my side just in case.

  “They said you were feisty—”

  “Yeah?” I stammered, “Well, whatever!”

  This only made the old woman laugh mirthfully.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” I howled, starting to feel embarrassed by the situation. This was my apartment, after all, and no strange old woman had any business making me feel like a fool in my own living room/kitchen.

  The old woman’s laughter died instantly as she began to appraise me.

  “So like your mother,” the woman said, staring at me like I was a specimen floating around on a slide under an electron microscope. Not a great feeling, especially coming from someone who’d probably been around since the Cretaceous period and had “the art of staring” down pat.

  “Whatever,” I shot back again, annoyed at being compared to my mother. My mother and I were nothing alike as far as I was concerned . . . at least, God, I hoped we were nothing alike.

  “Silence,” the old woman said, her voice firm yet not unfriendly. She didn’t seem to be put off by my feistiness, but there was still time. I mean, we had just met, so I was pretty sure I could figure out a way to piss her off before the night was over.

  I opened my mouth to say something smart in response (I have a hard time with the whole “think before you speak” thing), but was stopped cold when the curly red hair on top of the old woman’s head suddenly came to life, baring two twin eyes that seemed to magically appear at the crown of her head.

  Fascinated and repulsed at the same time by the newborn eyes—one was dark brown; the other was such a startling shade of lavender that it looked fake—I almost didn’t notice the cherry red mouth resting just above the place where the woman’s hairline met the flesh of her forehead. That is, until said mouth opened itself right up and began to speak:

  “I hope you pay more attention to our words than your mother did,” the mouth intoned in a deep, modulated baritone. “Maybe then your obstinacy won’t almost cost you your life.”

  two

  There was a loud, apartment-filling yowl as the red-haired beast on top of the old woman’s head suddenly took flight, crossing the space between us in one giant leap and landing on my shoulder.

  I shrieked, fear tearing at my stomach lining, making me want to run and pass out at the same time. I tried to shake the giant, unruly hairball off my shoulder, but it was no good. The thing had grown claws, claws that were now sticking into the flesh of my collarbone—probably drawing blood, if I knew my luck.

  “Get it off me!” I shrieked, taking a step backward and nearly tripping over the coffee table that sat benignly in front of the couch. Righting myself just in the nick of time, I made a face as I felt the creature’s warm, yeasty-smelling breath rasping against my cheek.

  Ugh!

  Just knowing the hairball thing’s mouth was that close to my face totally freaked me out even more than I was already freaking out. What if it decided that I smelled like dinner and decided to take a bite? I was damned if I’d lose an earlobe to the creepy little bugger. I mean, my ears were one of the few things that I actually dug about myself. They were small and shaped like tiny, perfect shells. They looked especially exquisite when paired with diamonds and pearls (the fake kind obviously).

  “Get off before I throw you off!” I hissed from between clenched teeth, hoping that the hairball creature would take the not-so-subtle hint. The creature must’ve sensed that it’d only been an idle threat because it continued to sit there, an immobile, orange, talking tumor attached to my shoulder.

  I didn’t really want to touch the thing with my bare hands, but I also didn’t want to end up with the hairball as my new favorite permanent accessory—kind of like a miniature Chihuahua, but without the pedigree. Since the hairball was clinging to my skin like a painful tick, I bit the bullet and dealt with the situation, sucking together all my courage and reaching up and grasping the beast around the torso.

  “Calmly,” the smooth baritone voice whispered into my ear as my hands wrapped around its middle. “Calmly, now.”

  “Get off of me!” I shrieked again, fear starting to give way to anger as I tried to yank the hairball off me and realized that it wasn’t budging.

  There was just something about having a hairy, claw-wielding creature of indeterminate species attached to one’s shoulder blade that did not make one a happy camper, I decided.

  To top the whole thing off, Mr. Badass Hairball Creature weighed a ton, too. It felt like I had a small watermelon perched on my shoulder instead of a fur ball. Besides the extra weight, the creature was way warmer than you’d expect—kind of like having an overweight miniheater strapped to your shoulder. I decided that the only way the phenomenon might’ve been relaxing was if you’d encountered it at a spa—but it was definitely not pleasant when it was forced on you against your will.

  Suddenly, there was a flash of reddish orange in front of my eyes and I felt something soft and fluffy rubbing against my nose. Instantly, I started sneezing again, the quantity and intensity of the sneezes making my head ache.

  Damn it, I hadn’t sneezed like this since I’d agreed to cat-sit for my neighbor Patience last Christmas and ended up in the emergency room with a respiratory attack—

  Wait a minute, I thought, my body racked by another round of staccato sneezes. The only thing I knew for sure that caused me to have respiratory attacks was . . . well, cat fur. So, it only made sense that I was dealing with my arch-nemesis: the domesticated feline!

  “Get this feline off
me!” I said angrily, another sneeze simmering just underneath my words. How much of an idiot was I? I should’ve realized immediately that the hairball monster was nothing but a big, fat, orange and red kitty cat!

  “Ask Muna nicely, then,” the old woman said as she pulled a mug down from one of my cabinets and poured the water from the teakettle into it. “She will only respond when she feels she is being genuinely respected.”

  I watched the steam pool around the edges of the old woman’s mug, willing myself to calm down. If that voice belonged to a female, I decided, then it must be one hell of a butch lady cat.

  “You better get off before I call the Humane Society on your ass,” I wheezed, the threat half-swallowed by another sneeze.

  I could feel claw digging into bone, which only made me feel crankier. Obviously, I wasn’t showing the proper amount of respect toward her. My shoulder was probably gonna be scarred for life the rate this whole thing was going. Well, I guessed it was just one more thing I could add to the tally of emotional and physical wounds I’d suffered since I’d allowed myself to become re-embroiled in the family business.

  Once upon a time I’d prided myself on being a normal girl with nothing strange lurking in the shadows of my present-tense life—okay, I did have a past that I couldn’t shake, but it was definitely within my prerogative to ignore it if I wanted to, so there! Now it was all I could do just to maintain a quasinormal life and clean up the mess that was inevitably left behind when some weird, supernatural entity broke through the “normalcy” barrier I’d carefully constructed around myself. Seriously, I mean, try explaining to your coworkers that the last “vacation” you took was a Devil-guided tour of the bowels of Hell and just see what kind of reaction that gets you at the watercooler.

  “Would you mind chilling on the couch, or something?” I asked the cat in as polite a tone as I could muster, seeing that there was now a band of cat-induced tightness restricting the flow of breath in and out of my chest.