Chapter 37
I paused to give Séraphine one final pet before lifting her into the cardboard box.
Her paws windmilled but she gave only a token cry of protest before settling into the scarf-blanket.
I once again wondered if cats couldn’t sense when their fortunes had changed for the better, even if they resented the accompanying disruption.
Poor Séraphine, a remarkably quiet Siamese, had lost her guardian the previous week and been left in our care by the old woman’s daughter, who could not keep her.
“There you are,” I said, handing her off to her new caretaker, a soft-spoken conductor with greying hair and a grim look. “I would recommend indulging her at first, even if she misbehaves. She’s suffered a loss, which cats do not forget as easily as people think.”
“I know a bit about that,” the man said, then fell silent. I pressed his hand briefly, and finished up the paperwork for him. We had already completed our interview and I was confident that Séraphine would be happy in her new home.
After the man left with the box tucked under his large arm, looking less nervous than when he’d come in, I flipped the sign and locked the door.
The shop was warmly lit by both fire and lamps, and the faintest scent of baking still hung in the air—the enchantment seemed to have sunk deep into the stones of the oven, and still reliably turned back time each midnight.
Only two pairs of eyes gazed at me: those of Simone, a small grey tabby, and Mme.
Annette, a matronly calico, both only a few days in our care.
We had restocked both shelters twice in the fortnight since Valérie’s attack, and had even accumulated a waiting list. Our donations had also shown no sign of decreasing, and we were making plans with Dr. Para and half a dozen other vets to have as many feral cats trapped and neutered as possible over the next several months.
I was optimistic that we could halve the city’s stray cat population within the next two years, and if things continued as they were, that would be only the beginning.
“I’ll head out, then,” Mina said, emerging from the back room, where she’d been writing up a supply order. “Unless you need anything?”
“We’ll be fine. Enjoy your evening,” I told her. “Studying?”
“Studying,” she agreed with a sigh, though she returned my smile.
We’d been able to increase Mina’s wages and she was no longer behind on her tuition payments.
She’d also moved to a new apartment, one closer to school and the shelter, and far more comfortable than her previous cramped accommodations.
She pulled on her coat and headed out. I paused to pet Thoreau, who was napping by the fire.
Banshee, I assumed, was downstairs with Havelock.
This had become her habit whenever Havelock was in his workshop, which hadn’t been often these past two weeks; he had been occupied with tracking down Valérie’s remaining followers.
Whether it was to destroy their Artefacts and discourage future attacks upon himself or simply to seek revenge, I wasn’t clear—given the charity’s newfound popularity, I’d had little time for the intrigues of magicians.
Ambulance, meanwhile, had found a home—with Laurent.
He’d come to apologize the day after Valérie’s attack, and though élise had been disinclined to let him through the door, I had been pleased to have the opportunity to officially forgive him, and had accepted his apology warmly, ignoring élise’s ferocious glare from across the room.
She would say later that Laurent had taken advantage of my generosity, as others had done before, but as I was often reminding her, I would rather be taken advantage of now and again than go through life seeing monsters everywhere.
Laurent had seemed relieved by my reaction, and I could tell that his conscience had not been easy since our last encounter. It was only when he had asked if he could do anything else to make amends that I had felt my gaze slide to little Ambulance.
Did it give me some fleeting satisfaction to contemplate the broken cups and vases, not to mention hours of lost sleep, that Laurent would have to contend with in the coming weeks?
I will not deny it. However, I would not have given Ambulance over to Laurent if I did not think the match a good one.
Laurent’s guilty conscience, I suspected, would be a strong motivator for him to make a proper house cat out of Ambulance, who had seemed intimidated by Laurent’s cool confidence in handling him. The cat needed boundaries.
We’d spent the past few days in peace, more or less; the newspapers had at last stopped reporting on our doings and printing endless speculation about Havelock’s whereabouts, and had moved on to the next story.
It helped that Havelock had made himself scarce, as I’d asked, admitting not even magician visitors to his workshop.
Our foot traffic had yet to lessen, and I was beginning to make plans to open another shelter on the north side of the city.
élise joked that we would soon run out of cats to house, which was not a fantasy I would allow myself to entertain yet, though as the days passed with cats being adopted almost as soon as they arrived and donations pouring in, it seemed less and less improbable.
As for Havelock, on the few occasions I’d seen him, I’d had the sense that he was on the verge of saying something to me—something meaningful, not another wry remark—but each time I’d given him the chance, usually with a warm, encouraging look, he’d made some excuse and disappeared, once literally.
I was beginning to think I’d imagined that there was anything connecting us beyond the banality of landlord and tenant.
I went to the back room and lifted the trapdoor.
“Havelock?” I called. I wasn’t certain what exactly I wanted him for, only I preferred to know where he was, out of some desire to fix him to the tangible world, I think.
He still ate and slept but rarely, and vanished mysteriously with such frequency that he often seemed to exist merely as a lurking presence, or perhaps a sentient shadow, and I wished to change that.
I went down to the first floor, where I found his worktable cluttered and abandoned.
I wondered if he’d gone to speak to Yannick, who was over at the other shelter, filling in for one of our volunteers.
Yannick had taken a shine to our charges and had even worked out how to embed a wellness spell in a cat’s claws, which was longer-lasting than spells attached to the cats themselves.
We didn’t enchant the cats often these days—just one or two, here and there, to ensure the rumours kept circulating.
“Havelock?” I called again. My voice seemed to dissolve against the cabinets full of Artefacts, gleaming in the spiderlight—for of course Havelock had recast the enchantment on the poor spiders.
The first floor of the basement was still filled with cabinets of beautiful antiquities, but it was a desert from a magical perspective; not one Artefact had retained its enchantment after Havelock had unleashed the magic in Vortigern’s lantern.
As much as Havelock had moaned about it, he still had plenty of Artefacts to continue his experiments, as the other floors had been unaffected.
There came a low rumbling sound I knew well, and I followed it around the side of Havelock’s worktable to find Banshee curled up on his chair, blinking sleepily at me.
“Well!” I said, giving her nose a teasing tap. “And what would the Witch King think of this? Don’t tell me—he scowled, and insulted you in some witty fashion, then pretended that he didn’t need the chair after all?”
Banshee gave a contented stretch. She looked about, then gave a huff and hopped to the floor.
“He’s downstairs, is he?” I said, and could not help smiling as Banshee continued to stalk forward as if determined to give Havelock a dreadful lecture for sneaking off without her knowledge.
But then Banshee had often seemed to view Robin and me as if we were troublemaking wards she must watch over, rather than the reverse, which she seemed now to have extended to Havelock.
Banshee’s reaction to His Majesty’s departure had been difficult to gauge—I had assumed she would appreciate it; His Majesty might have excepted Banshee from his bullying, but he had rarely been kind to her.
Yet at times I had the sense that she was looking over her shoulder for someone, and she seemed small and forlorn resting on the armchair she had been wont to share with the larger cat.
She had taken to Cataclysm instantly—that was what we had named the black kitten, whom I hadn’t put up for adoption, given Banshee’s affection for her.
I wondered if the other cat, having been plucked from her own time by enchantment, bore some lingering scent of magic enticing to Banshee’s danger-loving nose.
They now spent much of their time curled up together by the oven.
There had been one clear beneficiary of His Majesty’s departure: Thoreau.
With the old cat now safe from His Majesty’s vicious brand of bullying, I had officially adopted him.
Not that he didn’t have other suitors; given the newfound popularity of Les Amis des Chats, even our older or more difficult cases were often spoken for within days, but I’d found that, once the prospect was actually before me, it was too difficult to contemplate parting with him.