long black hair and large dark eyes. Too young and too pretty to be safe alone out here on a night like this.
When it was clear he wasn’t coming down, she turned back to the dumpster and hauled herself up onto the thing’s slick blue side so she could bend in at the waist to scrounge.
She came back up with the chicken breast Tom had been nibbling, as well as part of a ham sandwich. She used the bread to swipe yellowing mayonnaise off the scrap of gray meat she seemed to have deemed edible, then flapped it in the rain to wash it off a little more.
She crouched down in the lee of the supermarket building, trying to take advantage of the minimal shelter it provided, and tore a small strip of meat from her piece of reclaimed ham. She raised it to her mouth with a shaking hand and forced herself to chew it. Swallowing took an obvious effort.
Eating from the trash was a new experience for this girl. Tom had to wonder what had happened in her world that she was out here like this, suffering like a miserable stray. She had her eyes squeezed shut tight and her breathing turned shallow as she fought to keep down the morsel she’d managed to eat.
After a minute or so her shoulders began to shake, right before she lost her struggle with nausea and gagged up her one bite of dumpster ham.
She started to cry, hugging her knees to her chest.
This was nothing old Tom wanted to see. His heart went out to the little one, and for a second his slow blood boiled with rage against the ugly, poisoned realworld that would throw this child away, leaving her to eat other people’s garbage and sleep out in the rain.
Why not?
He drew back deeper under the ivy, and sent his mind out. His kitten wouldn’t survive this effort (meaning his mobile old soul would die with it, once and for all), but right now, he didn’t care.
He found the market warm and bright inside, the aisles mostly empty of shoppers as the rainy evening gave way to an inhospitable night.
Tom condensed his awareness down near the express checkout lane, the one closest to the store’s front entrance.
He didn’t like to steal, but when the checker got distracted by some old bat’s raft of questions regarding a fifty-cent detergent coupon, he delved into the cashdrawer and popped the mechanism that held it closed. Tom had always had a knack for getting into things. He’d studied the locksmithing trade for a time, in his youth.
He raised the springclip that held the ones down in their slot at the same moment he sent out into the electric eye that controlled the market’s automatic door, triggering it and letting in a well-timed gust of cold, wet wind.
A single crisp dollar bill fluttered out and landed in the next lane, unseen, before the checker nudged the errant drawer shut with her hip and made some comment about the weather to the crusty old coupon-hound who had begun to laboriously count out her purse full of dimes.
Tom’s formless point of awareness tugged the dollar under a nearby rack of chewing gum and trashy magazines, and then he marshaled his strength.
When the aged cheapskate left, lugging her discounted soap out toward her Mercedes, Tom floated the pilfered bill out after her, like a tiny magic carpet.
The wind outside blew it to the ground, where it stuck to the wet sidewalk.
Someone other than the intended beneficiary might find it at any minute, and he wouldn’t get a second chance at this.
Behind the market, Tom’s cat took a deep breath and let it out, very slowly.
He sent his mind out as wide as he could and then pulled it back in tightly, drawing fine particulate matter off the ground and out of the air, coalescing the dust down into a form that reflected light and possessed at least a little bit of mass.
Tomas Delgado (or at least a pretty good approximation thereof) reached down and peeled the damp dollar bill up from the sidewalk. He felt his blood pounding through his distant kitten’s ears as his projection of a human form strolled nonchalantly around the side of the market, leaning on a cane.
Just the way he remembered himself.
The crying girl looked up to see a hunched old man with kindly eyes and a wry grin standing over her. He could tell she hadn’t even heard him walk up. Her emotions were very palpable, to him.
He held out a dollar bill.
Tentatively, the lost girl took it. “Th- thank you,” she stammered, her sinuses well clogged from weeping. She wiped her eyes. “Thank you.”
The old man nodded and tipped his hat, then turned and walked away from her, without ever having said a word. The girl watched him go. He seemed somehow to vanish into the rain and mist before he’d made it all the way down the alley that exited onto Coldwater.
Tom managed to open his cat’s eyes again, with an effort. He was lying on his side in the mud, panting shallowly. The effort of appearing as a man for a minute or two had depleted the kitten, used it up, and Tom knew he wouldn’t be able to send himself out again.
So this was it. His long, strange sojourn on the earth plane would finally draw to an end, before this night was through.
Still, as Tom watched the young runaway or whatever she was hurry around to the front of the store with her newfound money, he was comforted to know that his last act of will in this world had been a good one.
He’d always been a sucker for a pretty face. He didn’t regret the action sentiment had prompted him to this time, though. Not one little bit.
The girl came back in less than two minutes, clutching a small paper bag.
She approached his hiding place in the wall-topping ivy carefully, and Tom managed to sit up, wondering what it was she thought she was playing at.
When she took a can of cat food out of her shopping bag, Tom felt the weary old heart he’d been carrying around for better than a hundred years shatter within his fragile cage of tiny kitten ribs.
This starving girl had gone and spent her single dollar on
“Hey there, little cat,” she said, peeling the pulltab-equipped lid off the top of the can and setting it down in the relative shelter of an overhanging tree branch. “Come on out. I thought this might do you some good.”
And then, at that point, although he wouldn’t have thought it possible thirty seconds before, Tom found he had the strength to run to her.
He clawed his way right up the front of her jacket to nuzzle in against her neck. Her skin was warm despite the chilling rain, her cheeks aglow with mild fever. Still, she laughed delightedly and put her hands around his tiny body. He thrilled to feel her gently stroke his fur.
Shelter, then, was the first order of business regarding this one. Warmth, then food, and not garbage from a can, either. No more of that for her, not ever again. If Tom had to hunt down a live chicken to provide a decent goddamn meal, then he fully meant to do it.
When the girl set him down, he ate the food she’d purchased for him. He
Old Tom had remembered that he used to be a lion, in his dreams.
Then he became a cat that only dreamed he was a man. And he’d stayed that way for so many years, hiding from the King through four decades of bobcats and panthers before the encroaching city drove those so deep into the hills that common housepets became his most reliable vehicles into the modern era.
But now he’d be that lion again, on behalf of this generous girl who needed an ally in this world as much as anyone Tom had ever seen. She would never walk alone again, he vowed, or be without defense. He’d teach her every secret he had ever learned. He’d arm her up with magicks so old and deep and true that she’d be the match of any operator, imaginal, or ordinary jerk that fate could ever throw her way.
Tom was prepared to trust her with everything he knew, worlds be damned, after fifteen minutes of acquaintance.
The child may not have known it yet, but her initiation as a witch had already begun. Her teacher had selected her as his pupil, and an ancient pattern might now play out anew.
Assuming the girl wanted to learn, that was. She had to be willing, as the sorts of truths Tom meant to share
