Chapter 5
Mori
Moonscale London
I dreamt that Baby Andy had grown up and Sharon Claudis had kidnapped him away into some magical dimension.
Preston and Wess were locked in a freezer, and my parents were on vacation to the moon.
I was the only one left to save him, but Amorti was hunting her too.
Did I risk his life to save Andy? Yes! I had to!
Andy was my baby – no matter how old he got.
Some things were more important than me or Amorti.
I mean, he knew the risk of hunting down his dead mother, right?
Surely, he’d heard about her, even if he hadn’t made the connection.
The cat yelled for my attention. It was a full body meow that shook the world to its core and made me want to crawl into a hole so that I could sleep forever.
The yowling went on and on, stretching into eternity and boring tiny holes into my tired brain.
Then it slapped me with its toe-beaned paw on the eyelid.
The only problem was I didn’t have a cat.
I had a dog who had way bigger paws than that cat who slapped me.
Snowy grumbled on the bed next to me. What time was it?
Morning? The middle of the night? Nope. It was afternoon and I laid down to take a little nap because the wolf next door finally stopped howling.
How had a cat gotten into the house? Was there some secret passageway between the walls of the duplex?
“Shit. It’s a ghost cat,” my own wolf grumbled into my thoughts before I even opened my eyes.
“What?” I snapped and the slapping stopped long enough for me to open my eyes.
A big orange tabby, plump and fluffy, sat next to my head staring a hole into my soul. He was ethereal in the way all dead cats were ethereal, but cats always seemed more solid than other spirits as if they practiced their whole lives wandering in and out of the spirit realm.
“I need your help. Some squirrel told me someone on the street could see ghosts. I’ve been banging faces all day. Didn’t think it was you. Didn’t think dog people could see ghosts, but it is you! Get up!” the cat demanded.
Not all animals instantly learn to speak in ways humanoids could understand when they died, but a lot of pets or other animals who had a lot of shifter contact did.
They’d spent their whole lives listening to us after all and in death there were no restraints on their physiology to stop them from making our mouth sounds.
“What’s going on?” I glanced around the room.
Snowy’s tail thumped against the bed as he licked my arm for support.
“Didn’t you hear my guy?” the cat asked, rolling his eyes as if I asked him what color the sky was.
“The howler?” I asked, still not sitting up.
“Yes, who else would howl like that but someone who lost their most beloved companion? It’s obvious who I am speaking of. Why are you acting so dense? Is it because you’re a dog person?”
“What do you want me to do about it?” I grunted, contemplating pulling the blankets over my head and leaving the cat to resume the singing of his ancestral song.
“I’m like you,” he said.
“Like me how?” I countered, wishing I’d put on a pot of coffee or the tea kettle before I laid down.
“I’m not a cat,” my wolf yawned.
“I can see the future. Well, I can see his future. I always have. That’s why I followed him home. Before you ask, I don’t bother with other cats. So, no, I don’t know if that’s why they pick their particular humans, but it’s what happened to me.”
“Okay,” I nodded, glancing at the bedroom door, wondering if I could ask him to come back after I had some caffeine.
“Also, you should feed me while we talk, okay? I haven’t had wet food in like a week. I saw some tuna in your kitchen. It’ll do in a pinch. You know how to make it spirit food, right? The squirrel said you would.”
“Yes,” I groaned. “Look, I’ll feed you and help you find your door, but that’s it. I’m not going to show up at the neighbor’s front door unannounced and tell him that his dead cat sent me. Even in this day and age, that gets a lot of strange looks. I moved here for a quiet hermitage.”
“Ha, ha. We both know I could annoy you into doing it. You really don’t like having your eyelids patted.
So, we can do it the easy way or the hard way.
The hard way would be more fun for me, but I am really worried that my passing has altered his future and I don’t want him to be lonely forever,” the cat said and leapt off the bed.
He stood in front of the bedroom door waiting for me to follow him.
Snowy side eyed him and then glanced at me.
We both knew I was about to dive into someone else’s business because while I counted myself as an animal person, living with a cat would be impossible.
They were so insistent and I was enough of a diva for one household.
Snowy was the first to leave the cozy warmth of our bed.
I stretched, grunting as my bones snapped and crackled.
I needed to get out more or at least move around more.
Hermiting away was making me stiff in not so great ways.
I swung my feet off the bed and stretched again.
Then followed Snowy and the cat into the kitchen.
“I’m Alcaster. Caster for short. Call me Al and I’ll use my claws like an awl in your hide,” the cat said, jumping up onto the kitchen table.
Snowy whined, looking up at him. He was not allowed on the kitchen table and didn’t like the intruder trespassing where even he wasn’t allowed to put his paws.
I scooped up Caster and put him back on the floor, but when I turned around to grab the tuna, he leapt right back up onto the table. Snowy barked and Caster hissed.
“You two! We don’t have to get along for long, but we have to get along while we’re all together,” I said.
Snowy shot me a look that said he was going to knock the cat to the moon as soon as he got him alone. Caster mewed for the tuna unbothered by the dog’s annoyed scent.
While I opened the tin and blessed it so that Caster could eat it, Snowy hopped up onto his chair and stared the cat down. Not much pissed off Snowy and he’d been around cats and other animals before, but what could I say? My baby was a stickler for the rules.
“Stupid Other World Rozer,” Caster mumbled under his breath.
“What did you call him?” I asked.
“What he is,” Caster said, looking up at me with big eyes and licking his lips.
“What is that?” I asked.
“He’s your dog and you don’t even know what he is,” Caster rolled his eyes. “Sheesh. Maybe the squirrel was wrong and you’re not very smart.”
“I can dump this tuna straight into my mouth,” I said, threatening to tip the tin.
“You wouldn’t!” he said and let out another full body meow. “That is mine!”
“Tell me what you said,” I held the tin up higher as Caster rose to his back legs and tried to lean into my arm to get at the open tin.
“Other World Rozer. It’s what sort of dog he is. I guess they just call them Rozers over there. They don’t come over here often, but when they do it’s usually because they wandered away from their mothers. Usually, they try to live with wolves or coyotes, though.”
That gave me a lot to think about and something to ask around for too.
Snowy had always been just Snowy despite being carried to me by a wolf in a snowstorm.
Sure, he had some quirks and seemed to know more than the average dog, but most shifters vastly underestimated the intelligence of domestic animals.
“NOW FEED ME!” Caster meowed.
“One second. Let me get a plate. I don’t want you to cut yourself on the---”
“I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he screeched.
Relenting, I gave him the tin and grabbed Snowy’s bag of treats from the top cabinet above the stove. I put the pot on while the cat ate dainty bites of his food. I sank into my chair and gave Snowy a treat while Caster took his time eating the blessed tuna.
“Are you going to tell me what you want me to do about your human or not?” I asked, wondering if I should make something caffeinated this late in the day.
“Can’t right now. I’m eating,” Caster said and I sighed.
Yep. It was time to put on some coffee. I put the pot on while the cat ate dainty bites of his food. By the time the pot was done, and I sat down he had eaten about half the tin and was licking his paw in post-meal bliss.
“His name is Era. He was my human for twenty-five years. I know you can’t tell it by how I look but I’m old. Well, was old anyway. Era is sad.”
“Twenty-five years is a long time,” I nodded, waiting for the feline to continue.
After a few minutes of silence passed, I asked him what he would like me to do for Era.
“His mate isn’t here,” Caster said.
“Obviously,” I nodded.
“Fix that.”
“And how would you propose I do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You’re the one with bloody thumbs not me.”
“What do you know about his mate?” I asked, leaning back in the chair and taking a long drink of my coffee. Its sweet acidic flavors on my tongue were the only thing that kept me levelheaded. It was the sort of coffee that always touched your soul on that first drink.
“He doesn’t live here, but we were supposed to go across the ocean on a boat this week. It’s been on his calendar for months. We were going to take the boat because last time we flew, I got sick all over my carrier. It was horrible. It wouldn’t stop coming out and—”
“I get it, but take the boat to where?” I asked.
“To the other side of the world. There is a new art school opening up in this artsy fartsy town. They’re famous for dragon queens or something like that.
He was going to teach technical nature drawings because that’s what he does.
He looks at plants and then makes pretend plants on paper.
They’re fake, though. They don’t have a scent. ”
“Glitter Bomb? Drag queens?” I tried.
“I don’t think you should shorten dragon like that.
I don’t think the queens would like it,” Caster, scrunched up his nose, curling his upper lip until his tiny little front teeth showed.
“Era doesn’t like it when I annoy the dragons.
They’re really easy to annoy, though, but I try not to because I like it when he’s happy. ”
I sprinted back to the bedroom to grab my phone.
“COME BACK! THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO HAVE THE ZOOMIES, YOU DUMB DOG!” Caster growled.
I plopped on my bed and searched the upcoming event pages on the Guardians of Glitter Bomb Territory website.
Yep. There was an art school opening up there.
It was funded by Blake Knight and chaired by one of his great grandsons.
It was attracting a lot of attention because of its connections to Jonah Darnell and the Grim Howlers.
“That’s why Bobby and Liam didn’t let them build it in Heartville,” my wolf chuckled into my thoughts.
“It’s grand opening was delayed by a semester because of the murders,” I whispered back to him. “Era could still make it.”
“How do we tell a grieving wolf to go to the GGB because his dead cat said so?” my wolf sighed.
“Very carefully.”