Authors: Amber Benson

Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy fiction, #Fiction - Fantasy, #Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Fantasy - Contemporary

Cat's Claw (7 page)

BOOK: Cat's Claw

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“No, your aura—the visible representation of your soul—leaves the body upon death and that is what passes on into the Afterlife for reassignment. So, as long as the body still lives, the aura remains.”

“Jesus . . .”
I breathed, my heart starting to hammer excitedly in my chest.

“An exception to the rule,” Madame Papillon replied in a surprised tone.

“Huh?” I said, my brain only half listening to the woman now.

“Jesus was one of the few exceptions to the rule. He ascended bodily to Heaven, but that was an odd case.”

“Excuse me?” I said, my attention slowly returning back to its senses. “Jesus
what
. . . ?”

“There are always exceptions to the rule,” Madame Papillon continued, “so, I suppose that my answer to your question
was
incomplete, as you’ve so succinctly pointed out. A dead person
can
have an aura, as long as
said
dead person is Jesus, or someone of his ilk.”

Now I was even
more
confused—and it had nothing to do with Jesus and his corporeal ascension to Heaven. What I wanted to know was if Daniel was still alive somewhere, hiding out where no one could find him. If our auras were still intertwined, then that had to be the case, right?

Or maybe I was just being single-minded and stupidly hopeful. Maybe the coalescing had absolutely
nothing
whatsoever to do with my superweirdo aura issues.

God, the whole thing was totally starting to give me a major-league headache.

Ignoring the throbbing in my head, I asked the one question that I
really
didn’t want to ask, but that I really needed an answer to:

“Look, I have to ask you something kind of important, Madame Papillon, but please, please, please, I would be grateful if you would just keep it to yourself—you know,
not
share it with my folks,” I finished, grimacing.

She nodded, but I had no way of knowing whether she was really trustworthy or not. She could be a pathological liar and I wouldn’t know a thing about it until it was too late.

“Ask your question and I will keep it between us,” the older woman said, patting the puff of hair that was Muna. “Even my Minx will not be told tale of this privileged conversation.”

Boy, it was starting to feel just like a trip to my therapist’s office. Only,
I
wasn’t the one paying for the privilege this time.

“I’ve done some . . .
coalescing
,” I whispered, feeling strangely dirty about the whole thing. It’s not like Daniel and I had ever had sex or anything, so I don’t know why I was feeling like such a prude.

“Oh,” the aura specialist said, then cleared her throat. “I see.”

“It was done to save my existence, I think, and only the once.” I gave her a pitiful smile and she patted my hand in r eturn.

“My poor little one, there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” chided the aura specialist. “There’s nothing wrong with coalescing . . . especially if it was done to help you.”

“Could that cause my aura to get all intertwined with the guy’s aura?” I asked, feeling like a sixteen-year-old virgin in a sex ed class who hasn’t really grasped the concept of how one acquires an STD.

“Yes, I think coalescing could cause something like this to happen,” Madame Papillon said sagely. “I’ve never seen it before, but theoretically it
could
happen.”

She set her mug of tea down on top of the construction worker and sighed deeply. She took my hand in her own and squeezed it.

“You asked me if the dead have auras. Was this in reference to the person you coalesced with?” she asked.

I nodded. “I thought he was dead, but now I don’t know . . .” I stammered, but she shook her head, silencing me.

“Take this to heart, my dear,” Madame Papillon said and I noticed for the first time how beautiful she must’ve been as a young woman. She had the most exquisite bone structure and truly haunting eyes, eyes that could almost hypnotize you if you weren’t careful.

I blinked to dispel the image that I had conjured in my mind of the younger, more beautiful Madame Papillon, and that was when she hit me with it, the one thing that could turn both my heart and brain to mush:

“I have it on good authority that your young man is
anything
but dead.”

four

Alone in my messy apartment, I sat on my Pottery Barn sofa and slowly pulled on the piece of thread that Muna had excised from the upholstery, wondering what my next move was going to be.

After the whole emotional blow of finding out that Daniel wasn’t dead after all, well, the rest of Madame Papillon’s visit had just seemed to fly by. Of course, it wasn’t until she and her wily Minx were long gone that I realized exactly how out of it I had been.

I had agreed to let her give me a magic lesson.

And not just any kind of magic lesson, mind you. I wasn’t just gonna
spell
something. Nope, I was going to let the aura specialist teach me how to summon and navigate wormholes, something that I had never ever been able to do in my entire life.

All I had to do was summon her and the lesson was mine—free of charge.

My older sister, Thalia—who was now safely ensconced in a tiny cell in the nether regions of Purgatory as she served out the one hundred years of solitude she’d gotten as punishment for her part in my father’s kidnapping—had once told me that I was magically inept, that I wasn’t even fit to be the
servant
of someone who could wield magic. I was only twelve at the time—and going through a sensitive, pudgy period where nothing about my body and/or mind felt right, so her accusations of magical ineptitude really felt like they were just par for the course. But still, I couldn’t
totally
blame Thalia for my feelings of magical inadequacy.

Puberty is when magic really starts asserting itself in young women—must be something to do with all the hormones kicking through their systems—but for me, puberty came and went without magic ever manifesting itself at all. I was horribly embarrassed by my lack of magical talent and even more embarrassed by how ecstatic my father was about my magical duncehood.

While he seemed aware of, but not overly excited about, Thalia’s prowess as a magic handler, with me, it was all about discouraging the ability. Something I still didn’t 100 percent understand, especially now that he was sending Madame Papillon over to my place for private lessons—and probably paying her more for her time than I made all year.

The one thing that my dad and I did agree on when it came to magic was that it was best to keep the supernatural aspects of one’s life under wraps. Especially when it came to letting humanity know anything about you and your abilities. I had taken that idea to heart, trying as best I could to kill all the supernaturalness inside myself. This was part of what had led me to take that forgetting charm, so that no one would
ever
take me for anything other than a human being while I was living out in the human world.

My dad’s approach wasn’t nearly as extreme; he had just put the kibosh on magic handling in the confines of his house.

Apparently, neither of my sisters had taken that rule very seriously, as both of them were pretty adept when it came to magic. I, on the other hand, couldn’t even open a can without a can opener, let alone jump through space and time by summoning a wormhole.

Well,
I decided,
I was gonna remedy that one
sooner
rather than later. Then maybe I could figure out how to get my hands on that wannabe corpse, the Devil’s protégé.

I thought back to what Madame Papillon had said about Daniel still being alive and I got both nervous and angry at the same time. How could he just leave me hanging like that, thinking he was dead and off to some other aspect of the Afterlife? I mean, I knew in my heart that I could never do something like that to someone I cared about . . . which then led me to a thought that made me feel even worse than I was already feeling.

Maybe he didn’t let me in on this whole still-being-alive thing because he didn’t give one rat’s ass about my feelings. I was just some girl he had coalesced with once and that was it.

Okay, so I wasn’t the queen of self-confidence, but no matter how much my brain kept telling me that I was being a total nut bag and overreacting, the insidious worm of doubt kept creeping closer and closer to my heart.

What if Daniel had faked his own death because he thought I was gonna go all stalker-y on him, or something? I mean, here I was thinking he’d saved my life when he took on the demon Vritra, but maybe that was all just some elaborate ruse to get away from me!

Looking back, I had to admit that I probably hadn’t been the nicest person in the world to be around—especially when I thought Daniel and the Devil were in league to steal my dad’s job and make my family mortal again—but I didn’t think I had done anything weird enough to make Daniel want to stay out of my life forever.

Not that I could remember, at least.

In fact, there had even been a time when I thought that maybe Daniel and I might’ve been making a sort of love connection, or something. Now, in retrospect, it seemed like the only thing Daniel and I had been making together was bad blood.

Okay, now I wasn’t just angry and nervous anymore. Nope, the two feelings had metamorphosed into something much,
much
worse. A feeling that I had never experienced until right that very moment:

Resentment.

I was a woman scorned and I wasn’t going to take it sitting down! I was going to find the jerkoid and make him explain to my face
why
he had pulled the wool over my eyes, no matter how long it took!

This was my new mission in life and I was just going to have to accept the fact that things were
not
gonna be pretty until I got my hands on the man and ripped the truth out of his cowardly little mouth.

Having accepted my new mission, I gave the piece of thread in my hand a good, hard yank, ripping off the entire side panel of the couch’s upholstery in the process.

“Shit,” I said out loud as I stared at the piece of fabric in my hand, seething.

Daniel, the Devil’s protégé, was going to rue the day he ever messed with me,
I thought angrily as I looked down at my shredded couch.

Now all I had to do was find the bastard.

And thank God I knew just the person to help me do it.

my younger sister Clio’s bedroom looked like one of those retro Japanese sneaker stores you walk by and then have to do a double take because you realize it’s a sneaker store only in retrospect.

Of course, her room hadn’t
always
looked so sleek and spaceshiplike—it had actually been a much more hospitable environment up until about two weeks before, when Clio had decided to completely remodel her room from floor to ceiling.

For someone like me, who enjoyed sitting in a chair that looked like a chair—and not a wedge of aluminum—the place looked pretty stark.

The floor was silver industrial-grade linoleum stamped with curlicues that perfectly matched the textured, gray-fabric-covered walls like they had been made to go together. The bed was one of those Tempur-Pedic mattresses set into the floor, so that when its silver, curlicue-covered comforter was all tucked in, it looked exactly like—you guessed it—the floor.

Something I discovered when I stepped on it and, unprepared for the floor to give way underneath my foot, fell on my face.

Not pretty, but not too painful, either.

There was also a large, metal modular workspace in the corner where Clio kept her myriad computer equipment. Beside it was a flat-screen television mounted on the wall, directly in line with the bed. Since I didn’t even have a TV in my bedroom, period, the idea of something so big and movie theater- like that you could watch while lying flat on your back and eating Cheetos seemed pretty novel to me.

I wondered how hard it would be to take my own TV—one that was little more than a curio since I didn’t have cable—and mount it on the ceiling above my bed, sort of like what they did in motels and hospital rooms. That might be pretty cool, huh?

Then I realized exactly how much I did
not
want my bedroom to in any way, shape, or form resemble a motel or hospital room and decided that it might be best to just leave well enough alone. My little twenty-two-inch TV was doing perfectly fine out in the living room gathering dust.

“I can come back if you’re busy,” I said as I watched as my little sister sitting in one of those delicious-looking ergonomic chairs in front of her computer, click-clacking away at the keyboard.

I was on the wedge of aluminum that only resembled a chair.

Without missing a beat, she turned her head in my direction and rolled her eyes.

“Whatever, Cal.”

BOOK: Cat's Claw

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