Black Cat Crossing

by Fitz Molly

  When I’d been human, I wasn’t the strongest of swimmers, and now as a cat, I felt like I was somehow even worse. You’d think with four legs and not as much mass to keep up, it would’ve been easier. But as I cat-paddled through the bay, I was constantly fighting cross currents and occasional waves that took me under.

  The shore looked even further away now than when I first spotted it, and what would’ve been an extremely challenging swim for a human under ideal circumstances felt impossible now for a cat.

  But I knew Val was still alive. I knew she was counting on me, and through the familiar connection, I could feel her encouraging me onward. Fish passed me by, no doubt wondering what a cat was doing in their neighborhood. At one point, another random boat almost ran me over. Obviously they weren’t on the lookout for a black cat night swimming in the middle of the ocean.

  My past failures came up in my head. How I’d been duped by a partner I couldn’t count on, how I’d failed to stop him, how even with the evidence I’d sent in, I’d failed to take down Scavo’s men in my department.

  Those were Officer David Jackson’s failures. And he was gone. Right now, Blackjack was working his soaked, fuzzy tail off to save his partner. Blackjack had taken down a Rottweiler.

  And most of all, Blackjack was tired. So very tired. I struggled to keep my head above water and more than once found myself rudely awakened by a mouthful of seawater. There was only so much energy left in my legs. Or at least what I could feel of them. I’d been so pumped full of adrenaline when I splashed down that I hadn’t realized just how cold the water was. Now I was numb nearly everywhere, and the only way I could tell I was still moving was by the slight resistance I still felt to the water as I struggled to keep swimming.

  I couldn’t give up. Val needed me. I had to keep swimming, but the more I fought it, the more exhaustion overwhelmed me. I’d failed. The shore was still miles away, and my legs just weren’t working anymore. Waves washed over me more and more, and it took longer each time to reach the surface again.

  The inky water enveloped me, and I silently apologized to Val through the familiar bond. I’d failed. Sorry, kid.

  Chapter Twelve

  With a jolt, I scrambled to my feet and coughed up what felt like a gallon of seawater. The sun had risen, and the wet sand was warm under my paws. I circled myself, looking for missing pieces or at least some clue as to why I wasn’t dead again. I coughed more, eventually dislodging a fur ball. Gross. That was not a fun side effect of the cat body.

  My breath came in ragged gulps after the hairball as I tried to focus on the familiar bond. But where Mason normally was, there was only a fuzziness that felt like the static between radio stations. I didn’t know much about magic, but that didn’t feel right. She wasn’t dead. At least, I didn’t think so. There were still bits and pieces of her I could feel through our connection.

  But I couldn’t quite put my paw on the direction she was. When we got out of this, she was going to have to explain more about the whole magic thing. That was a conversation for later—right now, I needed to find this pet resort park that Vega was running on Caraway, and I needed to find it fast. If Val and I were right and that was his headquarters, that might be where she’d been taken.

  I pulled up short as I began darting along the shoreline. Wait a second. He operated from the docks. There was the chance that they’d only taken her there, and if I showed up at the pet resort, I’d blow my element of surprise, which was really the only weapon I had at the moment.

  Plus, I was closer to the docks than the pet park. At least, I thought I probably was. But that just confirmed that I needed to check the docks first. I had no idea the layout of the island. But docks, by their very nature, had to be close to the water.

  For a brief moment, I almost doubted whether I’d washed ashore on Caraway Island, but the fuzziness of my connection with Val felt strong enough that if this wasn’t Caraway, then she wasn’t there.

  I padded along the split between grass and sand, heading toward the smell of diesel and metal. Yeah, that had to be the docks. I saw a few people as I trekked around the shoreline, but for the most part they paid me no mind. A random cat obviously wasn’t an unusual sight for them. It was the perfect place for shifters to hide in plain sight.

  The docks on this side of the bay weren’t impressive by any stretch of the imagination. A few warehouses of middling size, a big dock for the ferry so cars could drive on and off. And a simple truck bay.

  I slinked through the area, making sure to steer clear of any workers or security. There was no telling who on this side of the bay were shifters or on Vega’s payroll. C’mon, Mason, how about leaving me a breadcrumb?

  The docks weren’t busy. Just a few guys stacking crates in one of the truck bays and some milling around as the ferry left the dock. There were no animals over here, despite the numerous animals coming off from the other side. Rocky had either given me bad info, or he hadn’t made it to the inner circle.

  With a simple bound over the fence, I started following the main road into town. I was beginning to feel pretty frustrated when a familiar smell caught my nose. There was something in the grass. I dropped low and sniffed around until I found a small, yellowish stick of chalk. The same chalk I’d used in the cargo hold. I could even see my teeth marks in it.

  Good girl. Now at least I knew I was on the right track. Rather than continue along the main road, I ducked into a suburban neighborhood filled with Tudor-style and Dutch Colonial houses mixed in with the more prevalent Cape Cod. At least in a housing area, I’d look like a wayward pet rather than a suspicious cat walking along the main road.

  I hadn’t noticed the old woman in a tattered housecoat and fuzzy slippers until I almost walked into her. Her face seemed to be wrinkled extra from a perpetual scowl. She held a composition notebook tightly in her hands and scribbled as she inspected one of the Tudor houses. When she saw me, her frown deepened, the wrinkles turning her entire face into a craggy mass of disapproval.

  “Hmph,” she grunted, scribbling more in her notebook. “Ugly stray cat.”

  Oh, how I wanted to insult her back. Calling me ugly? Did she even own a mirror? Rather than announcing my mystical nature to her, I simply sneered at her while I thought loudly about what a miserable old hag she was.

  The cat part of me wanted to sneak into her house and throw up in her ratty slippers, but I had bigger fish to fry. And a nicer witch to save. I trotted on, keeping my ear tilted just high enough for me to hear the unmistakable sounds of dogs cavorting and humans bustling.

  I was on the right track, and as I got closer, the static between Val and I started to diminish, like I was tuning into the right station finally.

  Hang on, kid. Blackjack is coming.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I don’t know what I’d expected the pet resort park to look like, but it was surprisingly innocuous. Maybe it was just the knowledge that Vega had Mason here somewhere that made me think it was going to be a sinister prison-like compound rather than a… Well, a pet park, full of brightly colored toys and structures for pets to play on. Happy people milled around and chitchatted while their dogs sniffed butts and played tug.

  There were way too many dogs for my tastes. I mean, I had been a dog person in my former life, but when I lost the person, I lost the dog part, too. They were just too… everything for me as a cat. Luckily, a fence separated me from the majority of the four-legged drool monsters.

  My first inclination was to check the outbuildings, like the maintenance shack or where they parked the lawn mowers. But there was no reason. They didn’t need to hide their operation in the back—they were hiding in plain sight here. You didn’t expect criminal shifters to be running a dog park any more than you expected the mafia to run a pageant for toddlers.

  With a nonchalance I didn’t feel, I sauntered over to the admin building in the center of the park and immediately felt the familiar connection come flooding back. Relief washed through me, and from Va
l’s side of the connection, she felt the same.

  I still didn’t know how to push my thoughts through the connection the way Mason did, but I tried to signal her that I had her piece of chalk and was ready to scrawl some magic to help her get out of there. Instead of a coherent response, all I got back was confusion. Dang it, Mason. We needed to work on our teamwork a bit more when this was all over.

  My tail flicked of its own accord as I circled the building. The last thing I really wanted was to have to go in the front door and try to find Val that way. Luckily, a basement window had been broken and not fully repaired. Cardboard was much less of a barrier than regular glass, and I pushed through it easily.

  With a small hop, I landed gracefully on the hard concrete floor. That was one big benefit of the cat body. I never would’ve been able to do half of that had I been a regular human still. But somewhere along the way, I’d dropped the chalk. I guess that was the tradeoff. No pockets. I made a mental note to see what I could do about that for the future.

  Mason was in here somewhere. I could feel her nearby. With all the stealth I had in my fuzzy body, I slipped between boxes and supplies and found her tied to a chair in the corner of some shelves.

  “Geez, Mason. You don’t make it easy, do you?” I griped quietly as I began to gnaw at the plastic ties around her wrists. A blast of yellow energy bit back at me, knocking me into some cans of dog food.

  A symbol flashed in my head. Warded. Of course. Why would they just tie a witch up? Somewhere in this mess of a basement, there was a ward symbol that needed… Well, I wasn’t sure what it needed.

  I dodged, ducked, dove, and dipped through the winding maze of shelving units and boxes, trying to find some space in the mess that could’ve housed the warding symbol that was keeping Mason in her ties. Something in my kitty mind forced me higher, and I found myself bounding up to the top of the highest shelf in the basement.

  There, as I looked down, was the reason I couldn’t find the ward. The shelving system was the ward. Each unit painstakingly arranged to perfectly form the symbol. And it wouldn’t be obvious at ground level. I silently hoped it was true about cats with nine lives as I leapt from the top of my shelf toward a smaller unit on the floor.

  The air whipped around me as I soared majestically like a… Was there something like a cross between a cat and an eagle? I was still trying to figure out what cool animal I must’ve resembled when I crashed headlong through the shelf and barely managed to get my paws around a support to keep me from careening into a wall.

  The shelf gave way, and the entire unit toppled over with me along for the ride. That shelf smashed into another shelf and another as the ward collapsed like a house of cards.

  I picked myself up off the ground and shook out for added measure. With a lick of the paw, I brushed my ears to clear off any cobwebs or dust from the calamity I’d just caused.

  “Well, well, well,” came a familiar voice through the dark and rubble. “Aren’t you quite the bad kitty?”

  The voice was snide and arrogant. I’d dealt with his type before. For the life of me, I couldn’t see the speaker, though.

  “Yeah?” I called out. “Why don’t you come over here and I’ll give you a bad kitty!”

  “Now that is something,” the voice said in a low growl. “Fifty years later and I still recognize that horrible Boston accent.”

  No. It couldn’t be. Whoever it was must’ve had me confused with—

  “My, my, Officer Jackson,” the voice continued. “Time has not been kind to you.”

  My blood went cold and the fur on my back twitched reflexively. I knew that voice. I’d heard it a handful of times before, but each time meant more trouble was about to enter my life.

  “Scavo,” I hissed. “Oh, I’m going to enjoy taking you down, buddy. You ain’t got Flaherty or Davis to watch your back this time.”

  “Oh, I don’t need them,” Scavo scoffed as a short-haired cat leapt into view. “I’ve got other associates,” the cat said in Scavo’s voice.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Scavo, the tough, burly, mob boss of Boston was a little short-haired house cat. Sure, I was a cat as well, but I’d gotten used to that. Scavo, the mysterious Mr. Vega of Caraway Island, was a little kitty cat.

  My laughing didn’t sit well with the ill-tempered tabby, who, with a hiss, launched himself at me in a blur of fur and fangs. I closed my eyes and braced for the hit, but instead there was a loud clanging sound followed by a dull thump. I peeked out to see Val standing over me, holding the metal chair she’d been bound to just minutes ago. Scavo, the tiny tabby, was slumped against the wall, out cold but still breathing.

  “Wow, Mason,” I purred. “Maybe we oughta call you Sox. You’re a regular Dom DiMaggio.”

  “Funny, Jack,” she said, still catching her breath. “Let’s stuff this cat in a sack and get out of here.”

  “What about the rest of the operation?” I asked, pawing through the debris to find a suitable container for the fuzzy felon.

  “Without ‘Mr. Vega’ here,” she said, grabbing a small box and dumping out the contents, “the shifters will do what shifters will do. Most of them will wander off, a few might fight over his scraps, but without a strong leader holding them together in a pack, it’s over.”

  “And what do we do with Scavo?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t know anything about the magical justice system. Do we have DAs or somethin’?”

  “Well, first things first, Jack,” Val said, sealing the box after punching a few air holes in it. “We need to go to his house. We’ve got to figure out why he’s a cat.”

  I laughed a bit. “Yeah. That’s gonna take some gettin' used to. I mean, oh, what’s a good cat pun I can use in mixed company?”

  “Blackjack!” Mason admonished. “That’s inappropriate.”

  “Sorry, Mason,” I said, following her out of the basement. “It’s just funny, you know?”

  “What I know,” Val explained as we walked through the empty admin building, “is that Scavo should be dead right now and instead he’s a cat.”

  “Like me,” I added.

  “No, not like you,” Mason retorted. “You’re a Spirit of Justice and were brought back with the familiar ritual.”

  “Okay, so could Scavo have had a similar ritual but like bad? I mean is he a familiar or is he a cat?”

  Val stopped dead. “Do you think he’s got a witch helping him or one that’s summoned him?”

  I did my best to shrug. “Look, kid, I don’t know anything about magic and whatnot. Scavo seems to be a lot like me. Maybe it’s just an old cop’s gut feeling, but maybe someone wasn’t looking for a Spirit of Justice.”

  “That’s… unsettling,” Val admitted, tossing the box into the back seat of the Impala. “Well, let’s head out. There was mention of a house over on Avalon Avenue.”

  I hopped into the car and watched through the windows as we rode in silence. There wasn’t a lot I knew about magic, but it seemed like the idea of someone summoning an old mob boss as a familiar wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. But the implication seemed to have really shaken Mason. I could feel it through the familiar bond.

  “We’re here,” she said quietly.

  It wasn’t much of an evil lair with its picket fence and trimmed lawn, but if there was one thing you learned on the streets, it was that you couldn’t judge the people in the house by the paint on the outside.

  I followed Val as she walked in, all badge and business. A few shifters took off through the ground floor windows, but she let them go. Small fish. Or probably more accurately, little dogs. But if Scavo had been summoned, we were here for the big dog. A witch who’d wanted a scumbag familiar.

  The top floor of the house was a mess of occult symbols and papers. Graffiti littered the walls in languages I could only guess at. Skulls of animals hung at odd angles, and wooden frames held crystals and chalices of red liquid that I sincerely hoped was wine.

  Th
e door to the master bedroom was gone, replaced with a beaded curtain. It was here that Val hesitated. I could feel magic swirling around her, possibly through the familiar bond, or maybe just that she’d gathered so much around her that the hairs on my body stood on end like I was in the middle of an electrical storm.

  With a pop, Val passed through the flimsy ward on the room. I watched in awe as the symbol briefly flashed to light and then dissolved into ash from her determined gait.

  Anger flashed through the familiar bond, and I rushed into the room, ready to back up my witch. But the only thing in the room was a photo of Val tied to the chair in the basement of the pet park. And scrawled in dark red on the opposite wall was a message.

  “Better luck next time.”

  “Val,” I said searching for some words that could make this better. “Look, I’ve had my fair share of slippery fish. But they always mess up, and when they do—”

  “We nail them to the wall,” she said, electricity tinging the words.

  The sound of glass shattering broke the stillness of the room and both Mason and I swore at the same time. We rushed down to the car where all four windows had been broken out from the inside and the cardboard box Scavo had been in lay shredded in the back seat.

  This day was going from bad to worse.

  “Okay, so on the bright side,” I said, stepping lightly over the broken glass. “This means you get to take another swing at Scavo, right?”

  Mason didn’t react, so I did my best impression of the sound Scavo had made when she’d hit a grand slam with her chair earlier. Sure enough, that caused a smile to cross her face.

  “The glass is all on the outside of the car, so that’s no big,” I said as we both climbed in. “We just gotta replace a few windows and move into our new HQ.”