Then a voice told her what to do. It was a relief to be spared thought, a relief to obey. Under direction, Valerie washed her wounded arm with antiseptic and bandaged it cleanly, cutting up two of her favorite T-shirts to make the dressing. She also tended her foot, picked the glass off the bathroom floor, and cleaned up her vomit. Finally the voice told her to go to bed and sleep and, a grateful automaton, she did.
Hours later she woke screaming.
She fumbled for the light and, blessedly, it came on. Valerie looked around, the sound of her own breathing harsh in her ears. She saw her clothes in untidy heaps on the floor; she saw the dirty, cream-colored walls; she saw the magic circle she had painted on the floor. From the corner of her eye she saw the awkward lump of bandage binding her aching arm, and began to tremble again. It hadn’t been a nightmare, after all. What had happened to her was real.
It was true. Using spells learned from books, she had summoned up a spirit. Only it hadn’t gone as the books had promised. Something had gone wrong, despite all her care, despite the magic circle. The spirit—Valerie remembered suffocating, remembered drowning—the spirit had not obeyed her commands—the spirit had—
“Possessed you,” said a voice so close it might have come from a man in bed beside her.
A little wildly Valerie turned, but she was somehow unsurprised to find herself still apparently alone.
“You tried to kill me!” she cried to the air.
“No. You tried to kill yourself.”
Valerie remembered the curving glass dagger she had made, and how she had plunged it into her own flesh and dragged it down, watching the blood bloom, feeling no pain.
“I was trying to kill you,” she said.
“You cannot kill me,” said the voice. “And how ungrateful of you to try. Did you not summon me?”
“But you were supposed to obey me, not—”
“Do you imagine you are worthy of being obeyed?” said the voice with awful contempt. “But there is much I can do for you, many benefits to be gained by accepting my presence in your body.”
“No,” said Valerie dully. It was unthinkable. She had only the dimmest memories of what it had been like, but she could remember the sense of suffocation, the utter darkness, the helplessness, and that was enough, more than enough. “I’d rather die,” she said.
“Little fool. Yes, you made that clear. Don’t worry—I need not stay where I am unwanted; not when I have so many options.”
“Why do you want a body at all?” Valerie asked. “Why not just be—free, like you are now?”
The sound of laughter in the empty air made her skin crawl.
“I need a body for the same reason you do, little Valerie. In order to live. When I left you, I found myself another temporary shelter.”
There was a soft thump against the window screen. Valerie sat up and looked across the room. Twin yellow flames glowed out of the darkness beyond the window. She caught her breath, and then heard a cat’s soft, inquisitive cry, and relaxed.
“Let me in,” said the voice in the air.
Valerie looked at the ceiling. “You’re . . . the cat?”
“We are one.”
“Poor little thing.”
“Not at all. It is a mutually agreeable relationship. A fine, healthy cat which I shall keep fine and healthy for as long as I use its body.”
“It would be better off dead,” Valerie muttered.
“Let me in,” the voice said, more sharply. “I shall not ask again.”
Valerie got off the bed and crossed the room, not knowing if her body obeyed her own will or another’s. She decided it really didn’t matter. She unlatched the screen and the cat leaped in lightly past her, and onto the bed. There it sat and purred and regarded her with gleaming eyes.
“A witch and her cat,” said the voice. “How appropriate.”
She tried to shut out the voice and think. There had to be some way out, some way of escape if only she could figure it out. She was smart—everyone had always said so. Too smart for her own good. But this should not have happened. She had been so very careful to follow the rules as they were set out in the books she had studied, to say the right words, never to step outside the boundaries of the consecrated circle . . . All that care should have kept her safe, according to the books she had read.
“Maybe you read the wrong books,” said the voice, as silken-smooth as a cat’s fur.
Her stomach clenched, and she felt sick. It was reading her mind. That awful sense of invasion. Would she never be whole and alone again?
“Remember why you summoned me?” said the voice. “You can still have what you want. I can give you what you want.”
“I just want you to go away and leave me alone.”
“Oh, no, you don’t want that. I remember what you want, ah, yes. Money, and all the good things it can buy. A nice car, nice clothes, and lots of drugs. That’s what you want. That’s what was important to you, so important that you summoned me.”
Was that true? Valerie supposed that it was, but she could not remember what it had felt like, to want things, to think that money was important or even necessary. There was only one thing she wanted now, and it was a negative kind of want, the desire to be left alone.
“You can have that too, in time. I’ll leave you in peace—let you kill yourself, if you like. But first you must do something for me.”
It was reading her mind. It could read her thoughts, and there was no way out. Revulsion made her convulse, and she bent over, coughing and heaving, but there was nothing left to bring up. She staggered back to the bed and sat down, wiping tears from her eyes and shivering uncontrollably. Why couldn’t she just die? She had to escape.
The cat was purring, making the bed vibrate softly. Think, think, she had to think, but she didn’t dare, not when the demon could read every thought.
Valerie stretched out her hand. “Here, kitty,” she said absently, and the cat came and fitted its sleek head into the palm of her hand just like any ordinary cat. She stroked it, feeling the delicate, fragile skull beneath the fur. She looked across the room at the magic circle, where she should have been safe.
Numbly, she rose and began to dress herself, trying to keep her mind a blank, trying to think of nothing. A plan, the barest image of a means of escape, had presented itself to her, but to think of it was to risk warning her enemy, and to be lost forever.
She slung her heavy leather purse over one shoulder and wondered if he would let her leave the house. She felt rather than heard the cat bound lightly off the bed behind her, and, not thinking but simply doing, Valerie turned and bent as if to pet it. But instead of stroking, her fingers closed on the back of the cat’s neck and gathered up a wad of loose skin. The cat let out a hiss of surprise as it was hauled firmly into the air, and claws shot out and legs flailed wildly.
Valerie held the cat away from her, not looking at it, clutching the scruff so tightly that the animal would have had to shed its skin to escape, and she carried it into the dubious protection of the magic circle. It was the only hope she had.
The cat was howling now and struggling furiously, body whipping around with a strength and agility that seemed supernatural. Valerie was aware of the burning pain as claws once, twice connected with the flesh of her arms, but that did not matter. Her wounded arm was bleeding freely again, too, but nothing mattered so long as she could still move. The pain, because she could feel it, was almost a relief after her earlier numbness.
She rummaged one-handed and with difficulty inside her purse, fingers trembling until they closed upon the solid handle of the knife. Terror and triumph rose in her like a sickness, and she withdrew the knife and looked down at the cat. At that moment it went limp in her grasp. But although it was not struggling physically, fury blazed out of the golden eyes, and Valerie felt his power like a hand which grabbed her heart and squeezed. But she would not give in; she would die first. This time, her will would be done.