AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her fur is soft against my arm, and I reach out a hand toward her. She lets me stroke down her back. I’m lying. I don’t know what she is. I think I know who she was, but I’m not sure what she is anymore.
“I don’t know how to turn you back,” I say. “I figured out that it was me who changed you. I figured out that part. But I don’t know how I do it.”
She stiffens, and I turn to bury my face in her fur. I feel the rough pads of her paws. Her tiny claws are sharp against my skin.
“I don’t have a dream amulet,” I say. “I don’t have anything to stop you from working me. You can make me dream, can’t you? Like the rainstorm and the roof. Like before you were a cat.”
Her purr is a rumble, like distant thunder.
I close my eyes.
* * *
I wake up still hurting. I am lying in a pool of blood, slipping as I try to rise. Leaning over me are Philip, Barron, Anton, and Lila.
“He doesn’t remember anything,” Lila the girl says. When she smiles, her canine teeth come to sharp points. She looks older than fourteen. She looks beautiful and terrible. I cower back from her.
She laughs.
“Who got hurt?” I ask.
“Me,” she says. “Don’t you remember? I died.”
I push myself up onto my knees and find myself on the stage of the theater at Wallingford. Alone. The heavy blue curtain is closed in front of me, and I think that I can hear the sounds of a crowd beyond it. When I look down, the blood is no longer there, but a trapdoor is open. I scramble to my feet, slip, and nearly fall into the pit.
“You need makeup,” someone says. I turn my head. It’s Daneca, in shining plate mail, approaching me with a powder puff. She hits my face with it. There’s a cloud of dust.
“I’m dreaming,” I say out loud, which doesn’t help nearly as much as it should. I open my eyes and find myself no longer on the Wallingford stage but in the aisle of a majestic theater. The wood-paneled walls are grooved with dust above a scarlet rug. Lights drip crystals, and the plaster ceilings are painted in frescoes of gold. In the rows of seats on the terraces in front of the stage, cats in clothes fan one another, wave programs, and mew. I turn around and around, and a few of them glance in my direction, their eyes shining with reflected light.
I stumble into one of the empty rows and take a seat as a dark red curtain opens.
Lila walks onto the stage, wearing a long white Victorian dress with pearl buttons. She’s followed by Anton, then Philip and Barron. Each of the guys is in a costume from a different period. Anton’s got on a purple zoot suit with an enormous feathered hat, Philip is dressed like an Elizabethan lord with a doublet and ruff, and Barron’s wearing a long black robe. I can’t decide if he’s supposed to be a priest or a judge.
“Lo,” Lila says, pressing the back of her wrist against her forehead. “I am a young girl and very much given to amusement.”
Barron bows deeply. “It just so happens that I can be amusing.”
“It just so happens,” says Anton, “that Philip and I have a little side thing going where I get rid of people for money. I can’t have her father know. I’m going to take over the business someday.”
“Alas, alack,” says Lila. “Woe.”
Barron smiles and rubs his hands together. “It just so happens that I like money.”
Philip looks right at me, as though I was the one he was speaking to. “Anton’s going to be our ticket out of being small time. And I think my girlfriend is pregnant. You understand, right? I’m doing this for all of us.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand.
On the stage Lila gives a small scream and starts shrinking, changing shape until she’s the size of a mouse. Then the white cat springs down from one of the balconies, her dress tearing on the jagged splinters of the floorboards and pulling free from her furry body. Pouncing, she catches the Lila-mouse in her teeth and bites off the tiny head. Blood spatters across the stage.
“Lila,” I say. “Stop it. Stop with all the games.”
The cat gulps down the remains and looks out at me. And then the stage lights are turning toward me, the brightness making me blink in confusion. I stand up. The white cat stalks toward me. Her eyes—those blue and green eyes—are so clearly Lila’s that I stumble back and into the aisle.
“You have to cut off my head,” she says.
“No,” I tell her.
“Do you love me?” she asks.
