Chapter 14 Cattitude #2
Mal had shadowed her to the kitchen, as he did whenever there was a chance that anyone might be willing to feed him.
“And the cream. That’s for me too. Maggie said to tell you that part specifically.”
It couldn’t be. The kitchen was almost pitch-black. Mal looked up at her with wide green eyes that glinted and gave an endearing flick of his tail.
Sage barely dared to breathe. “Mal…?”
The cat simply yawned in response, exposed all of his tiny teeth, then sat on his back legs and curled his tail neatly around his front white paws.
Slowly, Sage lowered herself to his level, crouching as low as she could. She peered at the cat, giving it a moment to see if she really had…if he really had…
Nothing. Mal looked back with only a slow, steady blink.
Sage gave a disbelieving laugh at her own stupidity and removed her glasses again.
This week was proving challenging in many, many ways.
With a sigh of acknowledgement that it really was time to call it a night, she scritched Mal on the head again and got back to her feet.
But in the glint of the final candle’s light as she returned to the stairway, her attention was stolen by the chain around her wrist. The string of Lilara’s charms had changed when she left the museum earlier that day.
What had previously been a moon with the tiniest silhouette of a cat sat on its crescent—her favourite of the charms—had become a pair of looped hearts, one larger and one much smaller, interlocked.
She and Casimir had been speculating on the walk home as to the possible meanings.
He had been convinced that it meant some form of ghastly ex-boyfriend was going to turn up, while she had fretted that it would be something in relation to the fate of her two siblings.
But now that she contemplated the charm in a new light, it seemed to suggest an unbreakable bond between one larger and one smaller…She glanced back at Mal and swallowed hard.
“Mal?”
“Yes?”
“Oh no…” Sage flung out an arm, clinging to the banister for support as her legs buckled underneath her.
“Charming,” the cat replied. He gave a long-suffering sigh, and Sage could have sworn that he dilated his pupils right on cue, specifically to look as adorable as possible. “A life of servitude and adoration, and that’s the sort of welcome I get.”
Sage shook her head, spluttering. “Oh, I…Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound…”
Mal sighed again, his tiny body slumping down into a loaf shape, crossing one white paw over the other to rest his head upon them.
“No, no. It’s fine. Years of loyalty and companionship, an incomparable familiar affinity, sacred and universe-given in this life and all others to come.
But the moment I open my mouth, it’s ‘Get lost, Mal’; ‘Scram, Mal’; ‘I have more important things to think about, Mal.’ ” The ginger cat sighed the most emphatic sigh of all, followed by a pitiful little mew.
“I’ll just wither away in the quiet of night. Unappreciated. Unloved. Famished.”
Sage frowned. Cats.
“Mal, can I get you a snack?”
He peeped open one eye. “Oh. Well. Only if you’re making something. Don’t go to any trouble on my account.” He trotted back to the kitchen, tail perked upright immediately, and Sage found she had no choice but to follow after her talking cat.
Having bribed him with half a kipper, followed by a teaspoon of leftover cream, Sage cautiously invited Mal to join her in their usual setup on the sofa.
She wondered if this changed anything but soon realized that nothing was remotely different.
A brief display of him cleaning the cream from his whiskers began, followed by her simply gawping in fascination while Mal insisted that a frog had actually run directly under his paws that morning, and it really was no fault of his own, there was nothing he could have done about it.
Then Mal cleared his throat importantly.
“Anyway, I certainly have some questions,” he purred.
“I could say the same to you. You aren’t normally quite so…
vocal.” Actually, that wasn’t quite true.
Mal was an extremely chatty cat. Especially now that he was a little older and into his more gentlemanly years.
He tended to chirp, chat and meow fairly consistently as he wandered around the house.
His vocals verged on shouting when it came to circling her ankles at breakfast, second breakfast, lunch or dinner time.
“Maybe you’ve just never been listening well enough,” he said. “I tell you things all the time, just as you tell me.”
That was true. Sage did often pick up on meanings and messages from her familiar that others were not privy to.
She could sense when he was content, full of love, playful, satisfied.
She could also sense, a fraction of a second earlier than anyone else, when he was the exact opposite of all of those things and about to treat someone’s hand like prey.
“Your point is well made,” she replied.
Mal spun around a few times before deciding that the centre of the cushion was the right spot to resume the loaf position. Sage took the other end of the sofa and sat cross-legged, facing her familiar.
“From what I could gather last night while you were whittering away to yourself in the wee hours, and as we can safely assume from this newest development, a spell has gone awry,” Mal said.
Sage nodded. “That’s putting it lightly.”
“And far be it from me to speak out of turn, but from peering over your shoulder and reading your notes, it seems as though all of the resulting mishaps so far have actually been kind of the cat’s pyjamas, have they not?”
“Certainly not unpleasant,” Sage conceded with a nod. “Laurel…you know, my sister?”
“Of course I know Laurel. She’s the one who gives particularly good back scratches.”
“That’s her. She has a theory that magic is attempting to teach me some sort of lesson, to show me that it can be…something good.”
“As opposed to what? Wicked?”
Sage shifted uncomfortably. “Something like that.”