“Who do you work for?” Moss demanded, turning back toward me sharply.
A cheer rose up from the club. I blinked in horror as I noticed close to a dozen people and animals crowd in toward the glass, each vying for the best spot. Oh, great. Octo-Cat and I had become the unwitting stars of some kind of twisted, magical reality TV program.
“We ain’t telling you nothing!” Octo-Cat shouted, then spat dramatically on the ground. This antic earned him a few polite chuckles from the audience.
“Actually, there’s nothing to tell, seeing as we don’t work for anyone,” I explained, quietly willing Octo-Cat to ignore the lure of this momentary fame and let me handle things. “Unless Longfellow, Peters, and Associates counts,” I added with a forced calm.
“Peters,” Moss said, rubbing his chin with a paw. “Interesting.”
“Not that Peters,” I corrected with a quick glance toward the audience. Peter stood just on the other side of the glass, watching with a disturbing hunger in his eyes. “Bethany Peters. She’s nice.”
“They’re all the same, sweetheart,” Moss said with a chuckle. Did he know Bethany? Was Bethany—gasp—like him? How could that even be possible?
And why did it feel like everyone else was playing out some kind of old-timey movie? Even Octo-Cat had stars in his eyes now that he realized we had an audience.
Me? I just wanted to get home safe and put this whole ordeal behind me. If it meant never learning the truth about my abilities, then so be it. I’d rather be alive than informed.
“Are you really working with the dogs?” Octo-Cat asked, then spit on the ground again. When nobody laughed this time, his expression fell.
“Will you just stop spitting?” I demanded with an exacerbated sigh. Now I was equal parts annoyed and terrified. I’d much preferred being tied up or held at gunpoint as I had in my previous misadventures. At least then I’d known what I was up against. Here, everyone was crazy and unpredictable, super-powered and spry.
I definitely didn’t like my odds, being that I appeared to be the only semi-sane, semi-normal person around.
“You can talk to him,” Moss pointed out, narrowing his eyes at me as he tilted his head sideways toward Octo-Cat. We were getting nowhere fast, seeing as Moss wanted to revisit all the previously established facts.
“Yes, but you already knew that,” I said, raking my hands through my hair in frustration. “Also, why does it even matter? Obviously, everyone here can talk to him, too.”
“Who sent you?” Moss demanded yet again.
I glowered at him as I explained, “You’ve already asked that, and I’ve already explained that nobody sent me. Well, except Peter.”
“Are you a double agent?”
A low ooh swept through the crowd. Apparently, this was a very important question. Too bad I didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer it.
“What? I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Shift,” Moss demanded, looking from me to Octo-Cat and back again.
“Um, we can’t.” I rolled my eyes to show him how ridiculous I found this whole thing.
Octo-Cat spit on the ground again and said, “No can do, fuzz.”
Oh, jeez. I had really thought he’d remain silent after his last joke was met with zero applause. I already knew the more he spoke, the longer this would take. Luckily, Moss seemed more interested in me than in my cat.
“Shift,” Moss said again, raising a threatening paw with claws fully extended.
I didn’t even flinch. “I told you I can’t,” I said through gritted teeth.
Moss apparently did not like this answer, because he hurled himself at my face and sunk his claws into my cheek.
Peter’s voice rose above the others as pain exploded on my cheek. “How do you like it now that the tables are turned?”
Blood dribbled down onto my shirt, but I was too scared to focus on the pain. “You can torture me all you want, but I don’t have a different answer to give you,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Nobody attacks my human and lives to tell the tale,” Octo-Cat shouted, surging forward to tackle Moss.
“Stop!” I screamed at them both. Octo-Cat couldn’t take a beating so soon after losing that last life. As noble as I found his choice to defend me, this was one fight I knew he’d lose.
“Just stop!” I begged Moss whose teeth were now at Octo-Cat’s throat. “I’ll tell you everything I know. It’s not much, but I’ll tell you.”
Octo-Cat backed away, hackles fully raised, his tail so poofy he looked more like a long-haired breed than his usual tabby self.
“Excellent.” Moss dragged his claws across the cold marble floor as if to remind me he could still do considerable damage, should we step out of line again. “Now, which one of you is magical?”
“Neither,” I answered, throwing my hands over my face defensively. “I never even knew magic existed until this week, and I couldn’t even talk to him until about six months ago.”
Moss came closer and stood on his hind legs. He pressed his front paws against my chest and peered into my face as he asked, “What happened six months ago?”
“I got zapped by a coffee maker,” I answered breathlessly. My cheek had begun to throb from his earlier attack. More than mad, it made me scared.
“And when she woke up, we could understand each other,” Octo-Cat finished for me.
“That’s rather anti-climactic,” Moss said. His voice now had the slightest hint of a twang. If he’d had an accent before, he’d done a wonderful job hiding it. I wondered if the fact it was coming out meant he was every bit as flustered as I felt.
Perhaps Octo-Cat and I could still win this yet.
“But you can’t shift?” he asked for what felt like the millionth time in the span of just a few minutes.
I shook my head so hard it hurt. How could I make him—and the others who were still watching hungrily—believe me once and for all? “No,” I said with as much emphasis as I could assign to the short, little word. “And I can’t do that memory thingy, either.”
“The memory… Oh.” Moss laughed a full-belly laugh, and the room joined in. “So, you’re a normie?” he asked at last, wiping tears away as he fought off the final throws of laughter. Octo-Cat had never been able to produce tears on demand. I wondered if Moss could because he was really a human.
“If that means a normal, ordinary person, then yes,” I told him with a stony gaze.
Moss nodded toward Octo-Cat. “And him?”
I nodded again. “Totally normal.”
“Excuse you,” Octo-Cat hissed, stomping over to join us. “I’m anything but—”
“Shut up!” I shouted at him. This was not the time for that overblown ego of his.
“What are you hiding?” Moss demanded, turning toward Octo-Cat but still watching me from his peripheral vision.
“Nothing. I swear.”
He studied Octo-Cat for a moment before breaking out in an unfriendly smile. “Ah, I get it,” he concluded. “He’s just your average, everyday cat with an unfailingly high opinion of himself.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in. “Yes. Exactly.”
“So, somehow you got hit with magical resonance,” he continued.
I couldn’t tell whether it was meant to be a question or not. “Sure?”
“And that’s why you don’t show up on any of our tracking systems,” he continued. “You’re a non-magical entity with a single magical ability.”
I nodded along. This explanation certainly made sense, seeing as I was sure about only two things here—one, I wasn’t magical, and two, I could talk to Octo-Cat.
A collective gasp sounded from the crowd. Why did they find me so interesting, especially when they could all do such extraordinary things themselves?
“Does that happen often?” I asked, suddenly desperate to understand more.
Moss shook his head. “No, it really doesn’t. This started six months ago, you say?”
I pumped my head in agreement. Finally, someone would tell me the answers. I could feel them bubbling just beneath the surface. Peter hadn’t helped me, but Moss would. I just knew it.
“That’s worrying,” he said.
“Why?”
“If you were a true magical person, you would have been born that way. If you were hit with some magical residue, it should have faded within twenty-four hours.”
“So, what am I then?” I asked as my heart hammered away inside my chest.
“That depends,” he said with a thoughtful expression.
“On?” I was so close to begging him for more. Couldn’t he see how desperately I needed to know?
“Your cooperation,” he answered with a pensive gaze.
Nobody said anything for a few moments until Peter appeared at the edge of the glass. “You’re either big trouble,” he said with a scowl.
“Or our greatest weapon,” Moss finished, his eyes now shining with an evil joy.
“No, no, no. I don’t want to be a weapon,” I argued, shuffling backward until my back was flat up against the wall.
“What about me?” Octo-Cat asked. “Am I a weapon, too?”
“You?” Moss laughed and shook his head. “You’re just an ordinary, everyday tabby cat.”