“If we don’t stop him, we’ll be killed! Whoever kills him will be the next king!” she shrieked.
“Tika!” I roared, leaping into the center of the crowd.
After dragging two or three of them to the ground, the young cats let out a series of screams and fled into the darkness. Fur of all colors scattered. I picked out Tika’s back and chased after. Pouncing on her from behind, I pinned her to the ground.
Tika tried to escape, but I put my teeth on her throat. She froze, giving in.
The commotion transformed into silence. Tika shook like a leaf. My teeth still at her throat, I said, “I’m going to let you go. If you run again, I will rip you apart.”
“Okay.”
Slowly, I let her go.
I spat her fur from my mouth and circled Tika. The young cat, thoroughly cowed, didn’t move.
“Palul,” she said, recognizing me at last.
“I want to ask about the boy,” I said.
“I was just talking about him! Just—”
Maybe she meant that as an excuse. Her breathing grew ragged as fear flooded her.
I couldn’t tell if she was afraid of me or recalling how afraid she’d been of the devil child.
“You smelled him?” I asked.
“I did.”
“What did he smell like to you?”
“Nothing. He smelled just like a child.”
“Okay.”
Disappointed, I shook my head and walked away.
I was done here. But before I left, Cole called after me, sounding just as sleepy as before.
“Like I said, you’re overthinking it,” he muttered.
“Can’t be too cautious.”
“Really? After seeing them?” He flicked an ear at Tika.
He had a point, but I didn’t want to admit it.
“I said cautious, not panic-stricken.”
Apparently, Tika decided I’d moved far enough away. She stood up and began giving the same speech again, but her audience had cooled down considerably. The others kept their distance, cleaning their fur or sharpening their nails to alleviate the tension.
Honestly, I wanted to go home, but I’d stopped in to talk. If I went home now, I’d feel as if I’d done nothing to remove the prick from my paw.
“When the king’s away, it’s hard to rein in the chaos,” Cole muttered.
“It is,” I agreed. “With the help of those visitors, the blight is finally gone. Ulthar is free from danger, but our mission is gone, too. The king quells these sorts of disturbances.”
As I spoke, I realized the king’s absence explained the young cats’ skittish behavior tonight.
“Where is the king anyway?” I asked.
The king had left Ulthar a few days ago, but I still wasn’t sure why.
Cole yawned.
“Humans took her to the next town over.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. Maybe there’s a good vet. Something involving her urethra? She’ll be back next week.”
“What about Jasper and Barney? Didn’t she leave anyone in charge?”
“The humans suddenly threw her in a basket and put her in a car. Didn’t have time to make arrangements.”
“And she couldn’t get word out from the vet?”
I sighed.
“Palul, you’re a wise cat,” Cole said. “Clever, even by our standards. Much more so than I.”
“You think so?”
“But don’t go freaking out over a human child. Don’t go diving for prey that may not even be there, like a rat in a well.”
“You’re plenty clever yourself,” I said. And with that, I left the Cat Place behind.
It could have ended there.
I could have forgotten my fears and returned to my routine, relaxed but prepared in case something happened. If… If that child did bring the blight back, I would hardly be the first he killed. Humans like that don’t distinguish between cats. They always start with the ones closest to them.
Tika would be first then.
As dawn broke, I could taste her throat in my mouth again. Well, bits of her fur stuck in my teeth made me sneeze at least. For all her show of strength, Tika was still very weak. I remembered how she’d trembled.
Reluctantly, I left my usual patrol to look for the child.
Ulthar was the perfect-sized town, neither too large nor small. I found him quite easily.
Passing through the hedge behind Tika’s house, I jumped over the drainage ditch and into a field. A grasshopper crossed my path along the way, but I wasn’t distracted. After a scant twenty seconds, I stopped playing with it and made my way forward.
Mackowick was out for a jog, dragging his feet so badly I was able to pass him walking at a normal pace. The longer we walked in tandem, the longer I had to smell him. His breath was ripe with the alcohol stuff that humans drank, and Mackowick drank even more than most. I often caught him staggering home from the pub in the middle of the night. He made better progress then, jogging and mostly sober, than he did now.
Finally branching off from Mackowick’s path, I breathed deeply and settled myself. Nearly there. I ran up a crumbling wall around the old bakery.
There, I heard a voice.
“Argh.”
Well, more of a sigh. One that was intended to be heard.
It was the kid from Tika’s house. I jumped onto the bakery roof to listen and crept along until I had a good view above a bay window.
“I’m never going to get a break. Mum said I could go buy this week’s scone. One scone broken into six pieces to last me a week,” she said.
“That’s not much.”
“Mum’s rule, so how can I argue? I get dessert on Sunday, so that’s No Scone Day.”
The girl continued talking while I hid on the roof, watching the two children outside the bakery.
The girl and that boy.
Tika had said the girl went home crying. I guess either she got over it or her mother had scolded her for getting upset over nothing. Either way, she and the boy were together again.
I’d collected stories about the boy. He’d only just arrived in Ulthar the day before, which was why I hadn’t recognized him. He was a distant relative of Tika’s people, and he and his mother were staying with them.
They planned on renting one of the nearby houses. As the grown-ups were busy cleaning out the place, the girl had been ordered to show him around.
The boy was solidly confused by this scone situation.
“So just buy one,” he said to the girl.
At last she got to the root of the problem.
“But if I go without this week, I can upgrade to a chocolate scone next week.”
“Have you ever tried a chocolate scone?”
“No. But I’ve had dreams about them!”
The girl folded her arms and frowned, facing the toughest decision of her life, one that revolved around sweets and the coins in her pocket.
I could see how that was a difficult issue. No matter how much you wanted something, the amount you received might never increase. Much like how I wished for the world to be overrun with infinite mice.
But the boy just stared up at the sky, clearly not at all interested. Then he suddenly tensed.
“What?” The girl asked.
He looked around. “There’s a cat about,” he said.
I pulled my ears out of sight before he could look my way.
Surprising… I hadn’t expected him to notice me.
He was different than the local children. Ulthar humans wouldn’t mind if there was a cat about, there were cats everywhere. This boy was unusual. Wherever he’d come from, it was a place that clearly lacked cats.
When she saw how rattled the boy was, the girl laughed.
“So it’s not that you hate cats, it’s that you’re scared of them?” she said.
“I’m not scared! Cats can’t do anything to me. They’re useless!” he protested. Then he muttered, “Don’t need anything useless in the family. Nothing that can’t help and won’t understand.”
Then he pointed.
“See! There!”
He was pointing at the alley, not me.
A cat sat there, acting oblivious to the boy’s yell. The boy’s expression darkened.
“Black cats are bad luck,” he said.
“It isn’t black. It’s gray,” the girl said.
“But it’s creepy.”
Obviously, I knew the cat they were arguing about: Jasper, a seventh-life cat, and one of the Ulthar old guard. Not the oldest cat around but one of the most respected—aside from the king.
His dark gray fur was always shiny and immaculate. He was as nimble and hard to catch as a shadow. I need not even mention how clever he was.
I hadn’t expected to run into Jasper here, so this took me by surprise. Ignoring the boy’s cries, Jasper approached. I gulped. If that child really was a devil…
If so, he wouldn’t show his true colors that easily. Jasper moved lightly past the boy’s feet, perhaps playing on the superstition about bad luck.
As the child snarled, Jasper passed between the two kids and dove into the brush. Out of sight, he—
“Palul.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Controlling myself, I found Jasper standing behind me. It had been a mere instant since he’d vanished into the brush on the other side of the road; he was frighteningly fast.
“Jasper,” I said, trying to calm my beating heart.
Jasper lay down next to me, rubbing his head. As he washed his face, he said, “Didn’t expect this sort of behavior from you.”
“Has there been gossip?”
“Cole was concerned enough to come see me. Said you weren’t behaving like yourself.”
“I felt sorry for her,” I said.
This wasn’t an excuse, but it certainly came out like one.
Jasper paused licking his foreleg, confused.
“For who?”
The fact he had to ask just proved I really wasn’t acting like myself.
I hung my head, flattening my tail on the roof.
“For Tika,” I whispered. “She’s a weak fool, but I didn’t want to see her killed.”
Jasper chuckled.
“You’re beginning to feel protective? You’re getting old.”
“I don’t know any devils.”
“Mmm?”
I’d lost him again. This really wasn’t like me.
I thought for a moment, trying not to repeat the error. Be like a cat, precise, and ever nimble.
“No cats do. We all know the blight, but none of us actually saw the one who became that blight.”
“Hmm.”
“So we can’t recognize the signs. I can’t just laugh it off as the young cats overreacting. Ulthar’s history is older than any of us.”
“That makes sense. What is it you noticed?”
“A smell. I was far away, so I couldn’t be certain, but…”
“Your nose doesn’t lie,” Jasper said.
“I’m not so sure. Now he just smells like an ordinary child.”
Today, the boy had seemed perfectly normal.
Jasper pondered this a while.
“Right,” he said at last and sprawled out on the roof.
We were side by side. I watched the boy, and Jasper sunbathed.