And there it was, that familiar perfume. A little like fresh plums and custard, with a touch of clean, green, cut-grass outdoorsiness. The scent stopped me dead in my tracks on the front porch.
I could see nothing of her at first. My morning walk with Matt had taken me through a light shower, and sunstruck droplets still clustered on the stiff hair around my eyes, filling my vision with stars. Then the sun went in, and the dark question mark on top of the ceramic urn resolved itself into a familiar shape.
“Hello, stranger,” said Lu Lin.
She was sitting on the urn, hunched forwards in her old fashion, feet drawn up neatly beneath her. While I was staring at her, Matt walked into the house and closed the door behind him.
Lu Lin was smaller than I remembered, and I was suddenly aware that her head would comfortably fit inside my mouth. And yet, standing in that unwearied gaze, I became a shambling youngster in an instant. Her great, blue eyes were luminous and bottomless as ever, and now they had a mesmeric expectancy.
I shook the rain out of my eyes, and with it the blithe, unthinking contentment that I had been enjoying for the last year. Lu Lin was back. If I wanted to talk to her, I needed to remember how to think in that dark, twisting fashion that came so naturally to her. And as soon as I started to think, of course, something occurred to me.
“You’re dead,” I said.
“Do you know your tongue was hanging out?” she retorted. “Disgusting.” She stared intensely into my eyes without betraying the slightest expression, then leaned forwards precariously, laying her cheek against mine for a moment. “I really have missed you, Benjamin.” I could feel her shaking a little. Perhaps her legs were trembling with the strain of balancing. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.” She straightened again, and her tail returned to its question mark.
“I’ve only been for a walk,” Something was wrong. “Matt – he’s shut me out, and he hasn’t tied me up…”
“You know the really depressing thing? You’re probably the most intelligent friend available.” Lu Lin’s contralto was as smooth and toneless as cream, but I sensed that this was not intended as a compliment. She dropped softly from her seat on the urn, paws thudding softly on the turf like raindrops. “You’re not wearing a leash. What does that tell you?”
“It… fell off?”
“So you think Matt put it on when you went for a walk with him. Oh, Benjamin, think. I taught you to think, my sweet, didn’t I?”
So she had. I believe at first I had thought she was my mother. I know I once tried to follow her onto the sofa back and balance along its length. I remember my fear of her strange moods and incomprehensible expectations, my desperate desire to win her approval, the torture of trying to follow the nocturnal swirls of her mind.
Only as I came of age had I realised that she was not my mother, but something fascinatingly and eternally other. When confronted by her slender, snaking form, I had found myself gripped by guilty, powerful urges, many involving chasing and trees. Lu Lin had seemed to sense my change, but had taken a wilful pleasure in provoking me, seizing every opportunity to flaunt her toothsome allure.
“Think. Can you remember this morning at all, before your walk? You can’t, can you? Let me explain. Matt didn’t attach your leash this morning, because he couldn’t see you. He thought he was going out alone.”
I had an uneasy feeling that this was meant to reflect badly on Matt. I yawned and licked my nose, a nervous habit I have when I’m suppressing the urge to bite something.
“Oh, I’m not casting aspersions on your precious fellow. In fact, right now I’m the best friend he has in the world – excepting you, of course. But let’s discuss this inside.”
“I’m not allowed in when I’m wet and muddy,” I pointed out quietly.
“Darling, all those rules are lovely in their way, but now is a good time to find out which ones you can break, and which ones you can’t. And don’t worry about the door. Just close your eyes and follow me.”
I think I knew that all my choices rested on that one moment, that I could still return to my happy thoughtlessness. But along the other path stalked Lu Lin. Her every limb seemed as supple as a tongue, and moved as if tasting the air. Perhaps that blood-instinct that should have sent me chasing her to the high ground had been twisted out of shape, so that instead I felt compelled to follow her eternally. And perhaps that poisonous question mark of a tail had hooked deep into my soul, so that I too felt a need to ask questions. Even a terrier cannot be raised by a Siamese without ending up a little feline-minded.
I closed my eyes and followed her into the dark. Something brushed past my muzzle, my flanks and my tail like a cobweb. I opened my eyes, and I was standing in the hall.
“Go quietly here,” said Lu Lin. “Gerbil district. I’ll explain later.”
The hall was darker than I expected. The lights were off, as they always were during the day, but the light from the window was blocked by a thousand tiny, tireless, winged bodies – flies, wasps, moths, a few blundering bees and a gangle of crane-flies. Occasionally a tiny body would tumble to the sill, spin giddily on its back, then find its feet again.
I flinched when a goldfish swam slowly past through the air, gills slack and eyes lugubrious.
“Poor thing. He’s trying to circle his bowl, but he can’t remember where it was.” Lu Lin laughed softly.
“How long has there been a goldfish?”
“Oh, it was before your time. There was a goldfish… for a while.” She narrowed her eyes so that the moonstones inside them glimmered. I smiled back, without knowing why. “Come, we need to get out of the hall. I think they’ve noticed us.” There were sounds of activity in the under-stair darkness, and the scrabble of tiny claws on wood.
“But the gerbils…” I remembered a series of sad little lumps half-buried in sawdust. I recalled a hutch being scrubbed in ugly-smelling bubbles on the front lawn, and then taken away in a stranger’s car.
“You’re starting to understand, aren’t you?” She looked at me dispassionately. “Poor darling. Let’s go into the lounge.”
Here too the windows were black with maddened flies. Feeling the soft, cream-coloured carpet underpaw, I remembered my wet coat and felt a frisson at the wrongness of my presence. And, yes, it was a frisson not unmixed with excitement.
Lu Lin leapt onto the arm of the vast, shabby sofa that stood before the fireplace, with a faint snick of claws catching in cloth. Tail erect, she inveigled her way through the cushions, here and there sinking almost chest deep in patchwork and satin.
I trotted around the sofa and found her lying at full stretch. Her apparent ability to triple her length at will always fascinated me. My tongue stuck in my throat as I noticed that she had reclined belly-uppermost, an almost unprecedented gesture of trust and affection. I was almost driven to do something rash, like licking her across the nose, but I restrained myself.
“Take a seat,” she said. “No, silly boy, not down there, up here.”
“I’m not allowed on the sofa.”
“No one will ever know.” The tip of her kinked tail often seemed to move with an independent will. Right now it was flicking to and fro, half-teasing, half impatient. “Look, Matt is in the most desperate danger and trouble, and I’ve just about made up my mind to tell you about it, but I won’t breathe a word until you’ve joined me up here.”
I was tortured by the image of Matt rapping me on the nose, his face patient but reproving. However, I gathered my will and with a swift kick of my back legs I was up. The sofa was soft and shapeless, subsiding in unexpected ways beneath my weight. It smelt of Matt and spilt bolognese. And Her, of course. Lorraine.
The silken bulges of the cushions were cool against my nose, and I struggled to concentrate.
“Matt’s in danger?”
“Mm? Oh. Yes.” Lu Lin narrowed her eyes again, but this time not in a smile. “Do you remember the ‘bad man bark’ you sounded a few nights ago?”
“Yes – bad man in the garden. Bad man.” I growled a little. “I scare him away.”
“Oh, don’t go doggy on me again. Try to focus. The bad man is a friend of Lorraine’s. She and he have been making kittens. I know the smell, even if Matt doesn’t.” I did not really understand what she meant, but I kept listening. “Anyway, you bad-man-barked four nights in a row, when Lorraine’s friend was coming to help her make kittens, so she put something in your food. Something to make you dead.”
Dead.
My mind squirmed away from the word. I felt my muzzle pucker, trembling between a growl and a whine. A bitter taste came into my mouth, and with it a memory of eating at Lorraine’s feet while she tousled the fur of my neck.
I felt a sick lurch, a sinking sensation. Like the treacherous cushions, my happy, little world was giving way under my feet.
“I’m sorry, my sugar mouse,” Lu Lin said quietly. Perhaps she really was. “But you need to listen. Because now she’s putting it in Matt’s food. She’s trying to make him dead.”
That was something I could hold onto. Something I could sink my teeth into and grip.
Matt was in danger. That was all that mattered.
Matt was in danger, and... it sounded as though I was allowed to hate Lorraine at last.
“But you…” I struggled to think clearly. “You were always Lorraine’s friend. Me with Matt, you with Lorraine. Why... why are you changing sides?”
“I have my reason. In fact, you’re sitting on it.” Lu Lin extended a single claw and plucked at the worn corduroy of the sofa arm. “I’ve known Lorraine a long time, and recently she’s been laying strips of cloth against everything.”
I stared at her.
“It means that she’s going to change everything,” Lu Lin explained. “Old things go out, new things come in. She wants to make the whole house her territory, and smell of clean.” She looked up and dazzled me with those luminous eyes. “Oh yes, she had a comfortable lap and was good at stroking, but she wants to get rid of my sofa, so she has to go.”
I thought this over, with great care.
“Do I bite her?”
“Oh, you’re sweet to offer, but it wouldn’t do any good. I’ve experimented, and she doesn’t notice, though it does seem to make her nervous. But... if I put my mind to it, I can move things.” She kneaded idly at one patchwork cushion. “Providing I used to toy with them when I was alive, that is.
“Now, listen, Benjamin. Lorraine keeps her Bottle of Bad Death in her handbag. You used to fetch that bag for her, didn’t you? That means you can still move it. I need you to take it from Lorraine’s room while she’s sleeping, and spill it over the floor where Matt will find it when he gets up. Simple enough?
“You will have to be careful, though. The hallway and the stairs are gerbil districts. Oh, most of the gerbils just hover in the air where their hutch used to stand, and quiver a lot. But the others… have started taking orders from the radiator in the utility room.”
I shook my ears a little, but the words they had heard remained the same.
“Is it a... ghost radiator?” I asked.
“No.” Lu Lin narrowed her eyes. “Radiators don’t have ghosts. But for some reason that radiator is unusually talkative. I don’t know why – the gerbils won’t let me get close.
“I would get Lorraine’s bag myself, but I was never allowed to touch it. She didn’t trust me, you see.” Lu Lin smiled at me with two blinding azure slits, then contracted herself into her usual dimensions and sat up. She laid one paw in play-fight fashion against my muzzle, the very tips of her claws resting on the skin under the fur. “You will do this for me, won’t you?”
I spent the next hour barking at cars to clear my head.
Dusk crept in like a dingy stray. When Matt came to the front door in his stripes to put out the garbage, I crouched in the hall like a criminal and watched him.
Matt smelt ill. His hands shook when he knotted the garbage bags. Only when he had disappeared back upstairs did I dare to move.
A gerbil hutch had once stood on the high table in the hall, and this location was now a centre of tremulous, neurotic activity. Tiny, rounded, frantic forms scrambled over one another in mid-air, confined between floors and walls which could no longer be seen. One of them ran his legs to a blur in an invisible wheel.
I passed their hutch without sparing them a glance, and approached the stairs. Already I was noticing traces of the other gerbils, the rogue element. Lu Lin was right. They had changed.
Their scent was bold and fearless. Tiny, proud tooth-graffiti had been nibbled into the bannister base. From the shadows I heard the faint, grating sound of rodent snickering.
Then I saw one of them, sitting in the middle of the fourth step, chewing on something that smelt like damp plaster. He watched me approach without flinching or blinking. When I came within lunge-and-snap range of him, however, he gave a high, sustained squeak. It was echoed by identical squeaks from the stairway and hall behind me.
The first attack took me in the tail before I knew what was happening. Next moment my plaster-chewing friend had leapt for my ear, and a couple of his hutchmates had me by the hindleg. From the hallway more were coming, a legion of little claws fretting at worn wood and carpet.
I sprang, twisting in mid-air, and felt the gerbil front-runners lose their tooth-hold on my fur and flesh. I leapt and scrambled my way up the stairs, blundering headlong into the murk of the landing.
Lorraine’s door was always slightly ajar at night. I could just make out her door crack in the murk, a narrow slit of denser darkness.
The gerbils had not followed me. As I panted, however, I realised that I was not alone on the landing. From the shadows ahead came a thick, breathy, liquid sound, like somebody trying to drink from a hosepipe.
“No animals.” It was a slathering splutter of a voice. “No animals allowed upstairs.”
“Listen, I don’t want any trouble.” I took a couple of shaky steps towards Lorraine’s room, towards the voice.
There was a muffled scamper-thunder, and then a column of pale fur burst from the darkness and struck me in the chest. The impact rolled me onto my back, and then I struggling under the weight of a shapeless roll of carpet that seemed to have no head at all, just a neck with teeth. Sensing the precipice of the stairway at my back, I struggled free, and stared into a flattened face with doleful, insane, bulging black eyes.
“But you’re an animal!” My nose was filled with the scent of another dog. Angry dog, sick angry dog.
The Peke gave a thin, mad, “Yi! Yi! Yi!” of rage, and rammed me again. I fell backwards into space, then felt stair after stair bite me in the spine and flanks as I tumbled. I hit the hallway floor with a force that knocked the senses from me. For a long time I lay stunned and motionless.
There was a dark and delicate whorl painted on the banister. It reminded me of Lu Lin. I watched it until I could almost imagine a kink in it, and a playfully twitching tip. At long last something in my own mind began to twitch and stir, and I started to think. I started to think the Lu Lin way.
The little plaster chewer was back at his post when I approached the stairs again.
“Hey, you.” I said.
He stopped chewing.
“Not going to run away, are you?”
He started chewing again, but more slowly.
“You off your patch, doggy,” he chittered after a moment. “Not welcome. You looking for trouble?”
“No, I’m looking for answers,” I said, quietly. “Why don’t you take me to talk to the radiator?”
Once the radiator would have gleamed, creamy sleek. Now grey-furred cobwebs looped along the pipes, and a smudged hand-print on the paintwork had been commemorated in grime.
As I drew closer, my nose twitched. Behind the smell of dust and the cold scent of water slowly working its will upon wood and plaster, I detected something else – the fatty, fulsome smell of singed fur.
“Leave us.” The radiator’s rasping voice had a slight metallic echo. My gerbil entourage obediently melted into the shadows.
“Sir.” I decided to direct my remarks at a central grease spot that looked a bit like an eye. “I understand that you and your organisation control the hall and stairway. I need free passage so I can reach the landing.”
“Why, may I ask? For the pleasure of having your ears torn off by the Peke Pompadour?”
“Next time I’ll beat him.”
There was a pause.
“Draw closer,” it said. “I want to see you.”
I approached slowly, watching the wide, white surface for any sign of treacherous intent.
“No, to the side. Come, put your head against the wall.”
Somewhat perplexed, I obeyed, pulling my ears back, and sliding the end of my muzzle into the gap between wall and radiator. It smelt like a bonfire after rain.
“Good,” said a dark blot that crouched among the pipes. “Now, do not attempt anything irrational or aggressive. One squeak from me and my young friends will run in and tear you apart.”
The speaker was about the size of a grapefruit, and the colour of under-bed tumble-fluff. Through a faint, sickly pall of smoke I made out a grey-furred face riddled with deep wrinkles and grooves.
“I must apologise for receiving you in this murky environment,” said the Chinchilla. “I have… an aversion to light and open spaces.”
“Are you stuck?” I had noticed that the Chinchilla’s furred bulk seemed to nestle a little too snugly between the metal plate of the radiator and the slender pipe that ran along its base. There was a chill silence.
“I am quite content with my location. I will confess that, once upon a time, shortly after I had abandoned my hutch in search of a darker and more private abode, I did find myself incapacitated by the dimensions of this aperture. Its extremities of temperature were also... inconvenient. Now that I have adapted, however, I find it perfectly agreeable.”
I wriggled my muzzle in a little further.
“I can try to get you out of there if you like.”
“No need!” the Chincilla retorted sharply. “I have everything I require here. No light to offend my senses, no prying eyes, no gargantuan distractions. My young friends are my eyes and ears, and furthermore allow me to indulge at last my abiding love of strategy, something I do not expect you to understand. Every day I map a little more of this house in my mind’s eye, and plan its conquest.” The Chinchilla raised one tiny, grey talon before his face and wheezed out a lungful of smoke, then peered at me with coal-chip eyes. “So, how do you propose to best the Peke Pompadour?”
“By persuading you and your friends to help me.”
“Ah.” The Chinchilla laughed. “No doubt there is some excellent reason why we should do so?”
“Matt is in danger, and I need to carry a handbag down the stairs to save him.”
“The heavy-treading male?” The Chinchilla’s tone was cold. “He sometimes scrapes the mud off his boots against the radiator tap.”
“If he dies, Lorraine will own the house. She will want to change and clean everything – including your radiator.”
“Humans cannot see radiators,” the Chinchilla pronounced with confidence. “I have made a study of the subject. They never clean them.”
“So... your ‘young friends’ are afraid of the Peke?” I felt as if my stumpy tail might be snaking like that of Lu Lin. “Then how do they get past him to spy out the upstairs for you?” I saw a flicker of discomfort cross my host’s small, ravaged countenance. “I don’t think they’ve even seen them. None of your people can get past the Peke, can they?
“But I’ve seen some of the upstairs rooms. If you help me, I’ll tell you all about the bathroom, both bedrooms and anything new I see while I’m up there.”
The little pouches under the Chinchilla’s nose quivered as the tiny hands played lovingly along his whiskers.
“What if you burn out before you report back?” he asked sharply.
“Burn... out?”
“Moving things expends your energy, your essence. Dragging a handbag all the way down the landing could burn you out like a candle. You must tell me about the rooms now, just in case you do not return.”
“One bedroom now. The other bedroom and the bathroom when I get back safely.”
Another flame-crackle of a laugh, this time in assent.
Two stairs down from the top, I belly-hugged the stair-carpet and listened. On either side bristled an elite squad of gerbils, noses a-quiver. From the landing above, we could hear the irregular, soupy sound of breathing.
One twitch of the eyebrows as a signal to the gerbils, and then I took the last two steps at a bound.
This time the landing was not entirely dark. A bar of light spilt from Lorraine’s doorway, kissing the carpet crimson. It gilded the fur of the Peke, and sparked in his maddened eyes.
“Bad animal,” said the Peke. Black tears had worn little channels downwards from his nostrils and the corners of his eyes, as if he were truly saddened by my trespass. Then he howled like a hoover-blockage and charged.
This time I raced to meet him, taking the malevolent mop head on. He had weight and size on his side, but I had surprise. We rolled and hit the wall, a ball of fur and snarl.
Suddenly he pulled back and snapped at the air. His flattened head twisted this way and that, trying to fling loose the rodent forms which clung to his soft, shapeless ears. Others clung like rounded, brown burrs to tail and fetlock, collar and underbelly.
Seizing my moment, I leapt to my paws. I raced for Lorraine’s door, and squeezed hastily through. The counterpane fringe tickled me as I dived under her bed, slinking myself flat against the carpet.
Things were not as Lu Lin had predicted. The handbag was not under the bed, and Lorraine was not asleep.
I watched Lorraine’s feet walk past with their nails of pink metal. The door gently closed, leaving an arc of ruffled carpet behind it. Above me the mattress bulged and creaked, and the feet disappeared upwards.
When I crept out, Lorraine was stretched out on the bed in her shimmer-with-sleeves. She was box-talking very quietly, and she was twisting a long strand of her fur around her finger. Her voice made the same breathy, stealthy sort of sound as the door brushing across the carpet. It was a sound you could feel. To me it felt like being stroked wrong.
While she talked, she turned a little bottle around in her fingers. It was a cylinder with a cream-coloured cap, and a grubby label on the front. As I watched, she spilled four little white balls out of it into her palm, and put the empty bottle back into the handbag beside her.
My teeth tingled as I watched her lower the bag to the floor, and tuck it under the bed. I licked my nose, itching to snap at her fingers, but restrained myself because Lu Lin had said that might make Lorraine nervous. Instead I held still while Lorraine walked to the door, opened it again and slipped out.
I hooked my lower jaw under the slender straps of the handbag, with the deftness of long practice. This time, however, they might as well have been steel chains. My teeth could barely dent the soft plastic, and my jaw ached with the effort of lifting them. I heaved, paws scuffling for purchase on the carpet. The bag barely shifted.
Outside, I could hear Lorraine padding along the landing, and Matt’s door creaking open. I could hear Lorraine using her ruffled carpet voice. Matt answered in his kind voice, his hello-there-and-ruffle-the-tummy-coat voice. He often used that voice with Lorraine.
Then I heard Matt’s door shut. Lorraine’s steps creaked downstairs. There followed the sound of the kitchen door singing open, and a clatter of pans. For a moment I felt only relief. Lorraine was out of the way, and would not see her bag inching along the floor.
Then my fur brindled as I understood what Lorraine was doing down in the kitchen. She was preparing their bowls – Matt’s bowl. And she had taken with her four little white balls from the Bottle of Bad Death.
Desperate, I hauled, tugged and struggled with the straps. I was dragging a bungalow. My teeth were about to pop from my head. A roaring filled my ears, and I barely heard the slithering rasps as the bag yielded inch by painful inch.
Only when my tail struck against the door frame did I realise how far I had come. I shuffled my way backwards through the door, still dragging the bag. My legs were shaking now, puppy-weak. And as I tottered, almost slumping, the Peke hit me again like a furry train.
I nearly let go of the bag, but I did not. Some remnant of will kept my jaws clamped around the straps.
My strength was exhausted. The Peke was still in fighting form. But perhaps even that could be turned to account.
I staggered to my feet, offering a tempting, undefended flank, and he lunged for it, his momentum carrying us along the carpet. Again and again I managed to stand, always presenting a side-on target to be charged by the Peke. Again and again I let him bruise, buffet and roll me, always in the direction of the stairs.
“Bad animal,” slavered the Peke, with the voice like eggs in a blender. He had me pinned against the banister, and there was nowhere left to roll. “Bad animal.” The gerbil hanging from his eyebrow did nothing to increase the sanity of his appearance.
Then he faltered, jaw opening and shutting, rodent-beleaguered ears shifting nervously. Both of us heard a series of ascending creaks on the stairs.
Gerbils sprang out of Lorraine’s path as she climbed, a bowl of steaming red on the tray in her hands. The red smelt of tang, and summer, and… and the strange bitterness of my last meal at Lorraine’s feet.
The Peke sat back onto his haunches and made himself into a Toby jug of greeting, wiping his front feet through the air in front of his nose. Seeing him distracted, I lunged for the stairs with my last scrap of strength, the bag straps still clamped between my teeth.
I reached the top step at the same time as Lorraine. I felt my nose touch against well-washed person-skin, its texture somewhere between rubber and rose petal. Then the bag’s leathery weight struck Lorraine’s ankles, and one of her feet hooked in an unexpected strap.
There was a squawk from above me, and soup rained against the wall. Lorraine pitched forwards and landed with a crash, coming within inches of crushing me.
I lay helpless on the top step, panting for the breath I did not have and did not need, while Matt ran out to help Lorraine. Dimly I watched as he put his arms around her and helped her sit up, all the while using his hello-there-and-ruffle-the-tummy-coat voice. She sat rubbing at her leg, her shimmer gathered in ripples around her. Matt tutted over her spilt handbag, and picked up her shines and bobbles for her.
Then he stopped with inches of me, paused and frowned. Before darkness washed me away I saw him pick up a little cylindrical bottle with a cream-coloured cap, and stare at the label.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Lu Lin looked up from her urn-top meditation, and to her credit hid her surprise well.
“Benjamin!” She closed her eyes into the most entrancing sky-needles of welcome. “You are just the hero I thought you were.”
“When were you going to tell me, Lu Lin, or were you hoping it would never come up? When were you going to tell me about the burnout?”
Lu Lin yawned. With half of my mind I was fascinated by how beautifully she sleeked her ears when she yawned, narrowing her face to a point, and the way her tongue curled like a rose petal. With the other half of my mind I knew that this was a trick she used when she needed a moment to think.
“I don’t know what you mean.” A beautiful level contralto. Sweet as summer plums. Smooth as custard.
“This was never about a single sofa, was it?” I asked. “It was a territory matter all right, though. Up until now, you’ve had the garden, and most of the downstairs. That would never be enough for you, though, would it? Not while there were beds upstairs, and all those perfumed bottles on the bathroom windowsill begging to be nudged into the bath. But the little rodents that used to be so scared of you had taken the hall and stairs, and some crazy old veteran ruled the landing.”
Lu Lin smoothed her dark, grey gloves and said nothing.
“Was I supposed to come back at all, Lu Lin?” I demanded. “Or was I just supposed to eat my way through the gerbils, maim the Peke so you could finish him off later, then rain on Lorraine’s parade before I burned out and left you with the house to yourself?”
She stopped grooming and regarded me steadily. A tiny, pink petal-tip of her tongue was still protruding, forgotten.
“I think I always hoped you would come back, and I am doubly glad now.” There was no shame in Lu Lin’s voice, no remorse. “I always hoped that some day I might look at you and see the eyes of a cat smiling back at me.” She rose and stretched herself into a croquet hoop, pulling the pale sheath back from each precise translucent claw. “You and I, my darling, must have a long talk. You cannot imagine the plans I have for us, the ways we might spend our eternity…”
I watched her settle, mesmerised by her tail as it wound itself around her delicate feet. I ran my tongue over my nose.
“If you want me,” I said quietly. “I’ll be in the lounge, drooling on Matt’s knee.”