I said, I know the city because I lived here, about twenty years ago, more or less.
“What a surprise, you hardly look a day over ten,” came Jonathon’s sarcastic reply. “You are a remarkably well preserved cat.”
The cat bristled, the hair on his tail poofing out a little. Like uncle, like nephew. Were all the Hightower men born with acid wit, or did they learn it from one another? Do not mock me, Jemmie Hightower, he snapped. And keep a civil tongue in your head. I knew your uncle, and I knew you when you were still in nappies.
The magician stopped dead in his tracks and swiveled to look down at the cat. His voice shook a little. “No one—has called me ‘Jemmie’—since—”
Precisely why I used that name with you. You surely don’t think I am an ordinary cat.
“Well of course not! You’re a magical—” Jonathon stopped, and a dumbfounded look came over his face. “No magical construction could be half as clever as you. Most of them could never even think for themselves, much less some up with the wild plans you have. What are you?”
I am a cat, replied Thomas, primly.
“You are as much a cat as I am a Bartholomew Faire conjurer. I say again, what are you?” The cat looked up and saw Jonathon’s eyes narrow. “Or is the right question not what, but who?”
Thomas sat down on his haunches, and wrapped his tail tightly around his legs. You must swear never to tell Ninette. If you do, I swear I will scratch your eyes out, and pee in all your stage props.
Warily Jonathon nodded. “All right.”
The cat sighed. He hated letting these secrets go. He had hoped to carry them to the grave. I was as human as you are, and no, I am not reincarnated in cat form, as Wolf claims to have been. I was an Earth Master, and this is a permanent transformation. I lost a magician’s duel, and my opponent froze me in the last shape I took. Not surprising, really; she was a truly vindictive and jealous wench, and she never forgave me for running away from her—and even less was she inclined to forgive me when she tracked me down and discovered I had married someone else. He still remembered the look on Helen’s face when he told her. The fury—it had been enough to make him take a step back at the time. And if he had thought for a moment that he might be able to run away from her again, that expression had utterly disabused him of the notion. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned . . . I am inclined to think they are right. Kipling also says that the female is more deadly than the male. I am in a position to corroborate that.
He could almost see the thoughts running through Jonathon’s head as the Fire Master ran through all of the Earth Masters in the last forty or so years he had ever heard of that came from hereabouts—sorted out all the ones that had gone missing or that could not possibly have known his uncle or clapped eyes on himself as a baby—then eliminated all those too young to be the one in question—
Thomas recognized the moment when Jonathon put all the clues together. His jaw dropped.
“Thomas Dupond?” the mage gasped incredulously.
The cat sighed. The same.
“But—” another clue floated to the surface, and Jonathon almost reeled. “But—you must be Ninette’s missing father!”
Now you know why I did what I did. The cat’s tail lashed angrily. I did not abandon my wife and child! I was ambushed, and they were threatened. Helen Waring tracked me to Paris, sent a private detective to find me, and confronted me literally no more than a block from my home. She threatened to make life unendurable for Marie and Ninette, and you know very well that she could have, and would have, and she would never have had to use a bit of magic to do so. The only way I could distract her was to call her out in a magician’s duel. Which, as you must have deduced, I lost.
“But now we know who the magician that is trying to kill Ninette is!” Jonathon crowed. Thomas sighed.
You are leaping to far too many conclusions, the cat told him. No, in this case, you are quite wrong. Helen Waring is not the Earth Master we are looking for.
“Why do you say that?” Jonathon demanded.
Because she is dead, Thomas said flatly.
Silence for a moment. “How can you be sure?” Jonathon asked, after a pause.
Because I killed her.
More silence. Then Jonathon cleared his throat awkwardly. “Ah . . . how did that come about?”
She intended to go through with her threat to torment my wife and child. I expect she had some idea of capturing me as well, but I got over the shock of finding myself permanently a cat a great deal faster than she had thought I would. I crept into the hotel where she had rented a room that same night, Thomas told him, reining in the anger and hatred that still lashed him whenever he thought of that cruel, cruel woman. How he despised her still! Had she been a man, her evil nature would have been uncovered and dealt with long before it had come to this pass by her fellow Elemental Masters, but since she was a woman . . . they had laughed at what they called her “folly,” and had never taken her seriously. Perhaps that was why she had obsessed over Thomas; he had taken her seriously. He had known she was, or at least one day would be, a menace. He had realized that she was dangerous to him, when he had begun finding her creatures spying on him. And she had money, a very great deal of it, being the only child of a shipping magnate who had left her his entire fortune, while he was as poor as a church-mouse. She had assumed she could buy him, as she had bought everything else she wanted, including the best of tutors in her magic. It must have come as a tremendous shock to her when she discovered he had fled. I waited for her at the top of the stairs, he continued, reliving that night. And when she stepped out of her room, and was not looking, I ran between her ankles and tripped her. It was a new hotel, in the latest fashion they called Art Nouveau. There were terrible stairs in that place; very steep, beautiful marble with sinuously curving iron railings, and treacherous. She broke her damned neck exactly as I intended she should. I was glad I did it and I would do it again.
Another long pause. “But . . . you lost the chance to have the transformation reversed—”
Which she swore that she would never do, Thomas said bitterly. In fact, her last words to me as she sealed the spell were “I hope you enjoy mice, for you will be living on them from now on.” At a stroke she doomed my poor Marie and Ninette to starvation or worse, and me to a miserable existence either running from her, or as her captive. My only regret is that she did not suffer as poor Marie and Ninette suffered. I did what I could for them, but I was limited by . . . well, real life. I stole purses and left them where Marie would find them, but I had to be careful, and I had to make sure it was nothing too generous nor too often. Marie herself would have started to question where they came from, and if she started looking too prosperous, the gendarmes would start to ask questions to which she would have no answers. How well he remembered his horror when Marie decided that Ninette would have to become a courtesan! And to see his lovely wife trading her favors among the artists for the sake of a few sausages . . .
It made him angry, ashamed, and vengeful, all at the same time. It still did.
“I—see,” Jonathon said, slowly. “I mean, I do see. I’d have felt the same in your place . . .”