Reserved for the Cat

She intended to go through with her threat to torment my wife and child. I expect she had some idea of capturing me as well, but I got over the shock of finding myself permanently a cat a great deal faster than she had thought I would. I crept into the hotel where she had rented a room that same night, Thomas told him, reining in the anger and hatred that still lashed him whenever he thought of that cruel, cruel woman. How he despised her still! Had she been a man, her evil nature would have been uncovered and dealt with long before it had come to this pass by her fellow Elemental Masters, but since she was a woman . . . they had laughed at what they called her “folly,” and had never taken her seriously. Perhaps that was why she had obsessed over Thomas; he had taken her seriously. He had known she was, or at least one day would be, a menace. He had realized that she was dangerous to him, when he had begun finding her creatures spying on him. And she had money, a very great deal of it, being the only child of a shipping magnate who had left her his entire fortune, while he was as poor as a church-mouse. She had assumed she could buy him, as she had bought everything else she wanted, including the best of tutors in her magic. It must have come as a tremendous shock to her when she discovered he had fled. I waited for her at the top of the stairs, he continued, reliving that night. And when she stepped out of her room, and was not looking, I ran between her ankles and tripped her. It was a new hotel, in the latest fashion they called Art Nouveau. There were terrible stairs in that place; very steep, beautiful marble with sinuously curving iron railings, and treacherous. She broke her damned neck exactly as I intended she should. I was glad I did it and I would do it again.

Another long pause. “But . . . you lost the chance to have the transformation reversed—”

Which she swore that she would never do, Thomas said bitterly. In fact, her last words to me as she sealed the spell were “I hope you enjoy mice, for you will be living on them from now on.” At a stroke she doomed my poor Marie and Ninette to starvation or worse, and me to a miserable existence either running from her, or as her captive. My only regret is that she did not suffer as poor Marie and Ninette suffered. I did what I could for them, but I was limited by . . . well, real life. I stole purses and left them where Marie would find them, but I had to be careful, and I had to make sure it was nothing too generous nor too often. Marie herself would have started to question where they came from, and if she started looking too prosperous, the gendarmes would start to ask questions to which she would have no answers. How well he remembered his horror when Marie decided that Ninette would have to become a courtesan! And to see his lovely wife trading her favors among the artists for the sake of a few sausages . . .

It made him angry, ashamed, and vengeful, all at the same time. It still did.

“I—see,” Jonathon said, slowly. “I mean, I do see. I’d have felt the same in your place . . .”