Reserved for the Cat

Oh, come now! Thomas reproved. All these other things you have turned yourself into were quite large. It is one thing to make yourself into something human-sized or larger. But to make yourself into a mouse? I believe you are telling me a tale.

She sensed something from him that she could not read. She concentrated. What was he getting at? And—how could anyone turn into a mouse?

Don’t question it, she scolded herself, feeling the air of danger behind the words. Just listen, and be prepared to act!

“You doubt my abilities?”

Oh, I am sure you can make yourself into the form of a mouse, but it would have to be a mouse the size of a tiger. It takes real skill in magic to be able to shrink yourself that way, and I have never actually seen anyone that could do that—outside of a spirit, since they don’t have any material body to begin with and can look like whatever they like.

“You think I don’t have the skill?” The words were shouted, and angry. Thomas was getting her angry, maybe to keep her from thinking. A mouse, a mouse—had she somehow forgotten that he was a cat? “I will show you, skill, cat! I will show you skill such as you have never seen!”

If the magic before had made an air-quake, this made a kind of reality-quake. Ninette closed her eyes, tried to make herself one with the wall behind her, as the world took itself apart and put itself back together again, all in a moment. And then did it all over again. And again.

She was finding it hard to breathe, Whatever was going on in there, it was like nothing she had ever experienced before.

Terror closed in all around her. She went, hot, then cold, and she wanted nothing more to do than to flee in a panic. Death was all around her, and she could feel it breathing down her neck. She had never, in all her life, been so certain that in the next moment, she might very well die.

She fought the terror, and slowly, with infinite care, pulled the gun from her pocket and cocked the trigger. Thomas was counting on her. She could not let him down.

Finally, with a whuff of displaced air, it stopped. The air cleared a trifle. Ninette sucked in the first full breath in several minutes.

I told you, a new mental voice said, smugly.

And at that moment, Ninette knew what Thomas had been trying for. Yes, he had wanted the woman to become a mouse, if she could. He had thought he could trick her, then kill her.

But she, even in her anger, had called him “cat.”

She had not forgotten what he was!

Ninette stifled the warning shriek in her throat and whipped around the corner of the door, shoving it open with her shoulder, revolver at the ready as she had been taught.

She saw Thomas in mid-leap on what seemed to be a helpless mouse.

Except the mouse wasn’t so helpless. And whatever it really was had been expecting him to do just that.

There was another silent explosion of energies, and Thomas was caught by the neck by something strange, dough-like, smelling of rotting loam.

And Ninette did not even think. As she had been taught, she squeezed off the trigger in quick succession, aiming for the center of—whatever it was.

Six explosions shattered the air in the room. Six bullets, just as she and Ailse had loaded them. Blessed Lead. Cold Iron. Silver.

The gun bucked in her hand, but she brought it back to the target each time, each bullet impacting the thing in front of her, a mere eight feet from her, with a force that drove it back a little. Six bullets. Blessed Lead. Cold Iron. Silver.

It dropped Thomas, who wheezed as he scrambled out of the way, and then scuttled behind her. And—whatever it was—began to scream and dissolve. She couldn’t tell which of her bullets had that effect, but when the gun was empty, she backed up as far as she could, and fumbled more bullets out of her pocket, inserting them into the mechanism without taking her eyes off the thing. The reek of gunpowder filled the room, and a waft of smoke made her eyes water.

It was trying to change shape, only it couldn’t settle on one—horribly, the mass was producing an arm, three legs, half a woman’s face in one spot, a man’s eyes in another. And several mouths, all of them open, all of them screaming—