I batted aside the bed’s pink pleated skirting-of course it had pink pleated skirting, of a different shade than either the archway curtains or the rest of the bed-to peer under the bed and was gratified to see nothing but an unbroken field of white fur, free of the smallest speck of dust or cobweb. No ghost cat here.
Never leave unexplored territory between you and the known way out. I turned toward the closest archway to the bedroom door: the shoe closet, reeking with expensive leather and the very best dyes. Taking a deep breath while I was still far enough from those smells to keep myself from a fit of sneezing or choking, I prepared myself to come nose to nose with spooks.
Jethana Walkingcorpse probably kept her shoes in neat pairs on shelves-the ones she never used, that is. The others would be in untidy heaps on the floor, strewn all over the-
They were. I padded forward cautiously, springing over a few pairs into a little bare area of fur rug before the real heap began.
Where I stopped, nose prickling. Someone was happening behind me.
Just behind me.
I spun, silently. The Ghost Cat was fading into view and solidity right in front of me, between me and the archway out of this dead end. It-no, he-was smiling. A smile I knew all too well.
Hello, Little Meat.
I had to touch Steve, or any human, to mindspeak. We all have to, unless we use a spell.
Or we’re talking to immediate kin.
Only one of which had ever called me “Little Meat.”
The Ghost Cat opened his jaws wide, very wide-long yellow fangs, sharp and deadly as ever-and then smiled at me. Oh, yes, I knew him.
Suddenly I was struggling to breathe, fear like ice around my heart.
It’s been a long time, he observed pleasantly, looming up suddenly in the narrow closet as he gained full solidity and his true size.
Montuhotep. He Who Makes War and Is Pleased. Maralwshbekhtah, to use his later name.
He had another, more mundane title, too: my father.
I hadn’t seen him for centuries, but he hadn’t forgotten me or what he’d been trying to do to me at our last meeting, and that smile told me he was picking up right where he left off.
Trying to kill me.
Swiftly, messily, and gloatingly. That could have been his motto, had Father ever bothered with such things. He probably would have put it in other words, however. “Maim, Torment or Rape, then Slay,” perhaps.
Last daughter, he purred in my mind, come to me.
He had killed all my brothers and sisters, and probably my mother before that, by maiming them into immobility and then casting a spell on them that stole all of their nine lives and transferred them into him.
He had tried to kill me, too, but I had leaped in desperation, landed someplace I shouldn’t have, and paid the price in a nasty backlash as the spell waiting in that place had shattered Father’s life-stealing magic.
I had fled, and he had sought me, chasing me tirelessly for decades. Until there came a time when I saw him no more, padding smilingly along on my trail.
Centuries passed. I’d concluded something fatal had finally happened to him.
No such luck, evidently. He was still very much alive.
My nose told me I was facing no ghost, but a living cat. My eyes told me my father was using magic to become incorporeal and pass through things and then solidify again until turning back into a wraith seemed more useful. Until the spell wore out, or he tried to pass through cold iron and got stunned by the shattering of his spell for his pains, he could probably turn back and forth at will, as often as he wanted.
All royalty had heard of that spell, but it had been far beyond Father’s mastery when I’d fled from him. He had been busy then with his nine-lives-stealing; his own invention, that had left him bursting with pride, bereft of almost all his kin, and with more lives than any cat had any right to.
He’d probably used most of them by now, though-which was why he was here smiling at me. The stealing spell only worked on royalty who shared his bloodline, a breed of which I was now presumably the last.
Oh, I was terrified. And he knew it.
Tombs and bones, anyone who got a glimpse of me would know it! All over me, my hair was standing on end, thrusting out at the world in all directions like so many rigid little lances.
Father hadn’t been the only one learning magic. I knew a few spells, none of them very impressive and only one of them useful in my present situation.
On the other hand, I hadn’t known any useful magic-oh, I could conjure a feeble glow, or bring down darkness around myself, but all kittens could do as much, if they were royalty-while he’d been chasing me or earlier. If he still thought me helpless and gloated just a moment longer…
Surrender, he told me. Abase yourself, and receive me.
Once a tomcat, always a tomcat, first and foremost. His gloating and prancing had given me the time I needed.
“Take me. If you can,” I whispered-and vanished.
He launched himself forward, claws flung wide, raking the space where I’d been. He suspected I’d merely mastered invisibility and now, unseen but still in the closet, was seeking to dodge around him.
My spell was something a little more powerful. A translocation, “jumping” my body from the closet to a spot on that broad expanse of furs that I’d examined carefully earlier. Right beside Steve’s leg, as it happened, as he tried to ask Walkingcorpse questions as he kept moving, to keep her from rubbing herself quite all over him.
He stared at me-my sudden appearance, and my hair on end in terror-in astonishment, jaw dropping open, and her surprise was hardly less.
I didn’t wait for further reactions but raced past him like a storm wind, sprang to the sliding miniature and clawed it aside, landed thumpingly hard beneath it, and sprang right back up again to push a particular trio of the buttons I’d seen her push.
In response, the door clicked open-just as Father burst out of the closet and streaked across the room toward me.
“There! The Ghost Cat!” Throneshuld cried, almost triumphantly, pointing. “That’s it!”
Then I was out through the tiny gap between door and frame and running for my life, with Father bounding after me, eyes ablaze with anger and excitement.
“Sam?” Steve shouted, real alarm in his voice. “
Sam!”
I heard his shoes pounding across the floor after me, in the instant before the door shut itself again, muffling a shout from him that was loud and angry. And no wonder; he’d never seen me frightened before, in all our time together, and I’d just left him helpless.
I was the ghostsniffer and expert, and without me he was just a man in a hat and coat who knew how to bluster.
He was probably as frightened now as I was. Perhaps more, because humans get so frightened of the unknown. Whereas I knew exactly what I was afraid of.
Thinking of which… I risked a glance back. Father was gaining on me.
Bast take him! I’d thought in a flat-out race I-being younger, sleeker, and a lot lighter-would be faster. I always had been faster!
Wherever he’d been, he’d evidently been doing a lot of running, or getting stronger, or learning some sort of magic that lent him greater speed.
Oh, jackal dung, as some of the priests had been wont to say.
I sprang, batted the elevator button in passing, and kept right on going. I hadn’t the time to wait for its ponderous door to roll open, even if it was waiting on this floor-and it was far more likely sitting at street level, two floors down.
Nor did I really have time to use the stairs-not when Father could “fade” through flights of them, to appear below and wait for me. Or could he? Surely its frame would be iron, underneath the carpeting and the sound-deadening sandwiches of foam and wood I’d smelled beneath it. I-window!
That window had not been open when we’d come up, but it was open now. I sprang, trusting in my claws on the wooden sill to slow me enough to keep from hurtling helplessly out and down. The sharp stink of fresh cigarette ash told me why the window had been opened. The caretaker with the vacuum who’d been fussing in the lobby when Steve and I arrived had been smoking, and had dumped-or more likely flicked-the evidence out this window. I followed, quickly.