He pushes himself upright on buckling paws. Gets to his legs, wobbles like a cub. Good cub. He is still full.
He had heard of the old days. Feast and famine, the elders called it. Wild days of hunt and hunger, one first, the other second. Always hunt or hunger. He had not known hunger until these last hours, these last three sunfalls and sunbeams.
Now it is dark.
No, not quite dark.
It is a dark filled with the balls of the two-legs’ light. Warm when you sleep under it. Cool as sky-brights when it is far away.
He moves a step or two, feeling his pads sink into the shaven grass. He brushes a rock. One of the two-legs’ rocks that sits on legs.
It shudders and shakes, as if oncoming hooves are thundering. He has heard hooves here. Like the great tall beasts in iron shoes he has seen from time to time, who also play for the two-legs.
The four-legged rock tumbles onto its side, as he had done not long ago, dropping some things that tinkle like stones and shatter.
He sees a long low shape in the night, much like his mother to his cub eyes. He goes to rub against it for warmth and purr and recognition. But it is cold and still, though somewhat soft. He stretches and feels a need to sharpen his dulled claws. Rip, rip, rip. They sink in as they have never done before, catching in the mother shape, making a sharp, shearing sound that both frightens and pleases him. Now there is a smell. Raw meat. Tangy juice.
He leaps back, his claws snagging as they never have before. The mother shape wobbles, then falls over on its side with a loud thud.
He leaps away, free, and skitters across the short grass, his amazingly long and sharp claws digging into polished wood, sending rags flying as he courses through the darkness shuddering into rocks and hummocks and toys, perhaps, like the huge smooth balls he has learned to perch on.
Noises follow this progress as they do in the dark lair lit by falling stars to which he is brought almost every night to perform his rituals that bring food.
Hunting, he calls it. He performs the rituals, and the food follows and he is full and happy and gets to sleep afterward for long, lazy hours.
He knows the rhythm of that life and those places, but all here is jangled and misplaced. He is clumsy and hurling into unseen, unsuspected barriers, all vaguely familiar, but all specifically strange.
His heart is pounding, as is his head. He is glad he has eaten, because the Hunger that was with him earlier was like a ravening ghost of himself and he could not say that he would be friend to any two-leg no matter how familiar because the Hunger said Eat, and the two-leg was to be Eaten. That is a terrible thought. Thank the Mother-cub that came to feed him. He is not driven by the alien Hunger. He is himself, though lost and confused and afraid.
A noise.
The startled sound of a two-leg.
A bright light sunshine all around him so he can see nothing through his narrowest slits of vision.
A two-leg, roaring with surprise or anger.
Osiris knows he is in the wrong place. He must return to where he is supposed to be.
He runs past the two-leg.
For a moment he scents flesh and running blood beneath it and his fangs and tongue yearn, as they had for so many unsatisfied hours. But he is fresh-free now. Good boy. Handsome boy. He runs past the flailing figure, butts it in passing, feels it overturn like the mother shape.
He senses for a moment that the Hunger is with him again, and says stop. Sniff. Lick. Bite.
But he is full. Good boy.
He runs until he is in the dark again, and feels safe.
Nothing smells like his home lair. Now that the Hunger is quieter he feels another yearning. Home lair. He wants to be in home lair. He is a good boy.
Chapter 21
Taxidermy Eyes
“I can’t believe it,” Molina says.
It is 5:00 A.M. and she stands in a living room as upscale as a high-roller suite at the Bellagio, staring down at a corpse.
The captured killer stares down at the corpse too, eyes dilated, whiskers visibly twitching.
Molina regards the full-grown leopard.
It stands in the cramped cage brought to the crime scene by three animal control people, who have retreated to the room’s threshold to stare wide-eyed at the entire scene, as if they were sleepwalking.
The leopard roars plaintively and everybody jumps.
This is one perp who can plead diminished capacity and get away with it.
Molina turns to the other exotic animal in the room: the widow.
“It’s a good thing you knew how to corral the creature,” Molina comments.
She doesn’t mean a word of it, she just wants to get the woman talking so she can figure out what happened here.
All she knows so far is that victim is moneyed, that his body bears the tracks of a big cat. And that he has fallen onto the stuffed head of an oryx (she thinks) whose unicornlike horn has performed a quadruple bypass on his major cardiac organs.
Which beast is the actual killer: the live one, or the dead one?
The widow might be dead too. She has said nothing, but sits staring at a huge square glass-topped cocktail table. Carved wooden elephants with upheld trunks support it at each corner. Even in a wooden form elephants have to work.
Molina blinks bleary eyes. She is surrounded by the glassy taxidermy eyes of a couple dozen trophy heads staring down from the two-tiered living room’s walls. She can’t name all the species, except that they run the gamut from hooved to clawed. The beastly atmosphere is so overwhelming that she is beginning to think the widow looks like a mountain lion.
“Mrs. Van Burkleo?”
The woman’s oddly small eyes seem absent without leave in the overbearing frame of her massive facial bone structure. Her face looks like it has been trampled by an animal. She also has taxidermy eyes. Glassy amber eyes, bizarre somehow. From the age difference between the skewered corpse and the comatose widow, Mrs. Van Burkleo was a trophy wife. Fit right into the decor, especially with that lion’s mane of thick tawny hair.
“Mrs. Van Burkleo, how did the leopard get into the house? Was it a…pet?”
“A leopard is a wild animal,” the woman answers in a deep, low voice. “It’s foolhardy to keep one as a pet.”
“Did you and your husband—?”
“No. I don’t know how the leopard got here. There was no cage, nothing. Just the leopard. And Cyrus.”
Molina walks toward the body the widow regards with dazed indifference, as if he were now part of the trophyscape. Cyrus was a nondescript man in late middle age, thick of middle, thin of hair. Sixty-something.
The widow could be anywhere from twenty-nine to forty-nine, one of those high-fashion icons who freeze-frame into permanent limbo in the aging department.
Must take all of her spare time, and—Molina was finally believing the evidence of her own eyes—a lot of plastic surgery. Unsuccessful plastic surgery, or maybe too successful. The woman’s face seemed kissing cousin to more than one head on the wall.
Van Burkleo, he was Homo sapiens at its most uninspiring, a figure of power for his money alone, surrounded by figurative reminders of what enough money and high-caliber equipment will buy the aging white hunter.