Oh, jackal dung, as some of the priests had been wont to say.
I sprang, batted the elevator button in passing, and kept right on going. I hadn’t the time to wait for its ponderous door to roll open, even if it was waiting on this floor-and it was far more likely sitting at street level, two floors down.
Nor did I really have time to use the stairs-not when Father could “fade” through flights of them, to appear below and wait for me. Or could he? Surely its frame would be iron, underneath the carpeting and the sound-deadening sandwiches of foam and wood I’d smelled beneath it. I-window!
That window had not been open when we’d come up, but it was open now. I sprang, trusting in my claws on the wooden sill to slow me enough to keep from hurtling helplessly out and down. The sharp stink of fresh cigarette ash told me why the window had been opened. The caretaker with the vacuum who’d been fussing in the lobby when Steve and I arrived had been smoking, and had dumped-or more likely flicked-the evidence out this window. I followed, quickly.
The ledge I’d seen from the street was more ornamental than useful; certainly no human could have walked along it, even one who knew the wall-clinging spell I had. Yet wires ran along it-what happens when television satellite dishes are added to older buildings as cheaply as possible-which should keep Father from “fading” through any walls to get me. He’d have to follow me, and he was a lot larger than I was.
Traffic honked, below, covering most of his snarls of anger as he thrust his head through the window and saw where I’d gone. By then I was well along the ledge, passing Steve and our creepy dead or undead client again.
“Oh, you must stay, Mister Abernathy,” she was telling him, arms around him so ardently that he’d have real trouble trying to do anything else. “You can stay in one of the unused floors below us, or better yet my guest room, to try to solve my little problem. You can find your Sam and rid me of my ghost cat.”
Steve was frowning and shaking his head-but it was a frown of bafflement, not anger at her. “I-I-Yes, I must absolutely deal with your problem. Yet lacking my partner, I’m temporarily at a loss regarding the best way to proceed. She was crucial to, ah, ‘flushing out’ your ghost, you see, and-”
“Then stay, and we can talk this over. Coffee? Or something stronger, perhaps? Surely together we can think of…”
Father was out on the ledge, flattening himself against the wall almost bonelessly, and I couldn’t tarry any longer.
I’d run out of ledge anyway, because I’d run out of building. If I followed the ledge on, around two corners, I’d probably be able to jump off it, out into the tree I’d seen rising behind The Coachlight as we’d approached it.
Well, Steve certainly seemed smitten. Perhaps Waking-corpse, too, had magic-to ensnare men, in her case. Why else would he be interested in so old and crude a flirt? She was energetic in her seduction attempts but about as subtle as a dog in heat.
I’d done it much better. Steve had been head-over-heels for me as a human and eager for each new session of sweet hot lovemaking before he’d ever known I was a cat who could shapechange. As I said, we’re partners.
Now, however, he’d just have to fend for himself. I had bigger problems. Such as staying alive long enough to warn him about the true nature of Haughty Ms. Walkingcorpse-or anything at all, ever again.
Night was falling, of course.
Providing the right lighting for a lady cat to be chased by her murderous father, far across the city.
At least, I hoped I’d last that long.
The tree was old and gnarled; its branches sagged but held. Squirrel-like I scampered down them, then headed for the ground, well aware that Father would be right behind me.
Flattening himself out ribbon-thin must mean working a magic that made him temporarily boneless, because it certainly slowed him down. When I raced away along the top rail of a fence, he was two backyards behind me.
I had to stay ahead. He needed me trapped in a confined space, or immobilized, to have time to cast his life-stealing. If he could bite the back of my neck, or get a good swipe at me with both sets of front claws, he could manage the maiming he was so infamous for, and I would be paralyzed-and doomed.
Life had suddenly become so simple-and so precious and hard to keep hold of.
So, just how well did he know this city? How well did I?
The difference between those two answers was probably all that was going to keep me alive for long.
He was gaining on me, fast.
I turned a corner, ran out of fence, sprang onto one of those crazy “spiderweb on a pole” backyard laundry racks, and from there plunged deep into the soft soil of a flowerbed, not wanting to bruise anything this early in the chase.
“Early” I hoped, that is. I scrabbled my way onto firmer ground and ran, streaking through a cat door and right up and along the back of a dog that had been waiting outside it to bully some other cat.
The dog barked and twisted furiously, its roaring din nigh deafening, but I doubted it would last more than a swift bark or two against Father. If he bothered to fight it at all.
I raced across several yards, not bothering to try to hide or misdirect by zigging here or zagging there. Right now, just moving quickly was all that was keeping me alive.
Stay near iron barriers, stay near iron…
The dog shrieked in sudden pain, and fell silent. Father.
He was keeping close. Which meant I had to get out of this neighborhood, away from the darkness and the trees that every cat instinctively welcomes and turns to, and into the bright concrete noise of the downtown. Where there would be more cars and people walking; more obstacles.
I darted across a road right in front of a surging taxi. Its front wheel came so close to clipping me that it numbed the end of my tail. There was a littered sidewalk beyond, and one of those two-rows-of-offset-vertical board fences. I went left, toward the busier street.
It was a long way to the corner, and it occurred to me that if Father had caught sight of me and dared to risk himself that much longer in the traffic, he could “cut the corner” diagonally and catch up with me.
So I found an old dented drainpipe with many straps to hook my claws into, and got aloft, fast.
I hadn’t even made it to the lowest window-ledge of the apartments above this shop when I heard a furious scrabbling below. Father’s weight was too much for his claws to hold him in his haste; he was slipping, old paint flaking away in a little cloud. Slipping, but not falling.
I wasted no time in watching or taunting but just got myself along those ledges, leaping from one to the next, and around the corner. Where a handy tree-limb let me ascend to the next row of ledges, which would put me higher than the aging shingle roof of the next building along.
Father was faster than ever. There came the crash of a window being thrown up behind me, and a man’s voice shouting, “It was a cat! And here’s another!”
Father hissed in the man’s face as he raced past-and was startled to find that one human, at least, was just as fast as he was.
The man had been reading a book, and he thrust it hard into Father’s ribs, or tried to. He got Father’s rear instead and slammed it off the ledge into space, the rest of Father following it.
To land heavily atop the store awning below. It was as rotten as most of them, and it tore, but Father wisely kept his claws sheathed, and climbed up out of the small hole, to wade along the dirty canvas.
I made the next shingle roof and paused to snatch my breath and plan my route ahead.
“Daughter!” Father hissed, reaching the end of the awning and seeing he was facing an impossible leap to reach me; he’d have to jump down instead, and find another way up.
“Last life, Father?”