Because he had never unleashed his claws on her, she braced herself and swept him into her arms despite her uncertainty as to what he might be driven to do in his fear.
The cat merely lay against her as she held him close, listening to her voice more than to her words and to that which lay behind it. His dread faded under the magic of it.
"I'd never intentionally hurt you or be mad at you, my own little friend. It's this 'Jaws-of-Life Burglar' that's got me going." Her mouth hardened. "Only now, it's 'Jaws of Death.'"
Francie did not think it strange to be explaining herself thus to an animal. She had always done that with Turtle as well. She refused to walk around in dead silence like some sort of zombie except when she uttered a command or endearment just because there was no other member of her own species present. Humans were articulate beings. They spoke in sentences, put their thoughts into words, and she felt no constraint against doing precisely that when the occasion arose, whatever her company. Indeed, since her interview with Bastet, she felt courtesy required no less from her, that she was dealing with a creature of sensitivity and intelligence, albeit of abilities and gifts very different from her own.
The cat understood her way of talking by then; her meaning if not all her words. He knew what the paper was. Every evening after supper, or earlier in the day on holidays, his care giver went through a ritual of sitting down with the thing to the nearly inevitable souring of her mood.
It was a mystery he could not comprehend. When a cat encountered an unpleasant situation, he endeavored to avoid future contact with it, but Francie continued to court distress day after day. It was an astonishing display of idiocy on the part of a normally highly sensible individual.
The woman continued to stroke him, but her thoughts drifted back to the story that had so aroused her. For the better part of a month, the Jaws-of-Life Burglar had been in the news on and off. He normally struck moderately prosperous middle-class neighborhoods, cutting screens or glass or jimmying insecure locks in the manner of most of those engaged in his profession. He apparently preferred these easier targets even as did his peers to judge by the number of dwellings ransacked in the manner characteristic of his work in his signature raids, but every once in a while, he would strike a more efficiently guarded place. The bars and gates thwarting most of his kind posed no barrier to him. He cut right through them using a Forcible Entry Tool, the implement made famous by fire and police rescue units throughout the country, or something closely modeled upon it.
Anger rose in her as it did every time she heard the case mentioned. Those tools, or the Jaws of Life as they were more commonly known, had saved countless people trapped in fires and in the twisted wreckage of vehicle accidents. It infuriated her that an invention created to bring aid in time of crisis and dire peril should be used instead by the vermin infesting the great city to wreak still more misery upon its decent inhabitants, misery and now something more dreadful.
Always in the past, the violated houses and apartments had been empty, but last night, that part of the pattern had been broken. The burglar had found the occupant at home, perhaps by his intention.
There had been no bars to delay him or to arouse anyone inside with the noise of their breaking, just a screen over a window left open to admit the pleasant evening breeze. The intruder had sliced through that without difficulty and slipped into the living room from his perch on the fire escape.
Marian Sayer, the apartment's tenant, had been sleeping in her bedroom. The police either had not known at the time of the writing or had not divulged the sequence of events that followed, but when a neighbor had investigated the door boldly left ajar by the culprit when he had gone out that way, she had found the bedroom literally coated in blood, its unfortunate resident terribly dead, dismembered, her body completely severed at the waist, by the powerful cutter. The reporter had been careful to note that no one could say at what point death had ended the nightmare for her.
At least, his sympathy was clearly with the victim, Francie thought bitterly. That was more than could be said for his associate whose editorial followed the account. That individual dwelled instead on the killer, on the inner anguish and pressures and perhaps the early physical sufferings which might have driven him to strike against either woman or society in general in so brutal a manner.
Her eyes glittered coldly. If that butcher was sick, well and good. Let him be treated medically instead of jailed if he was caught alive, but she would save her sympathy until he was either dead or otherwise so confined that he was no longer a threat. A rabid beast was not responsible for its actions, either, but it still had to be prevented from spreading its infection to other creatures.
A case without apparent motive or significant clues had to be slow in the solving, and other tragedies, other scandals, soon replaced it in the headlines and in people's minds, Francie's along with the rest as she turned her attention and energies to the living of her own life with its specific demands and interests.
The woman woke out of a fitful sleep. By the bonging of her clock in the living room, she knew it was just three, and she sighed. It was still villainously hot. There would be no relief tonight now, she thought unhappily, and none at all tomorrow according to the weatherman. That meant no relief for her. The technician would not be coming until the day after that to fix the air conditioner, if it could be repaired at all.
She heard it then, a muffled scratching sound. There was a simultaneous hiss from Bast's Gift, and the cat leapt from the foot of the bed to the stacked boxes on top of the wardrobe which formed his favorite retreat when strangers were present.
Another noise, soft in reality but clear as a trumpet call to her straining ears.
Francie's heart beat so fast and hard that it seemed louder to her than the rattle that had set it racing. She slipped off the bed and crouched in the deeper shadow near the table by the closet.
A figure loomed in the doorway, a man, nearly as big in fact as he appeared to be to her terrified eyes. The features were clear enough, but she could make no hand of reading them save that he seemed annoyed at finding the bed empty.
He spotted her, and his mouth curved. It was more like a spasm than a smile. Certainly, any pleasure it mirrored had nothing to do with joy as she knew it.
Her own lips parted in a scream that would not become audible. The intruder held something in his hands, both hands. She recognized it all too readily and stared at it with fascinated horror. The tool was the smallest of its line, but it was still enormous even without the gas generator powering it harnessed to its wielder's back. It reminded her of a great pair of pliers…
The man took a step toward her. He said nothing, and he did not take his eyes off her to look about the room. He had not come for cash or property but for another person, another woman, to rend in response to the irresistible demand of the compulsion swelling inside him. He fondled the handles of his weapon in anticipation as the Jaws spread wider.
An ebony streak shot from the wardrobe to the back of his neck. Claw-clad paws tore forward, raking face and the left eye, gouging deeply so that blood that looked black in the lace-filtered moonlight poured from the ravaged cheeks and the shredded pulp in the socket.
The killer seemed unaware of pain, at least to the extent that it did not appear to affect either his purpose or his ability to carry it through. He shook his head violently to dislodge his tormentor, and when he failed to do so, he hafted the big cutter to strike backward with it.
A second challenger hit him in that moment, a small, tortoiseshell spirit of fury who rent his hands with teeth and claws that did not merely look like fire in the dim light but seemed actually to be fire.
This time, the man gasped, the first sound he had uttered, and the Jaws clattered to the floor.