Shadow examined her drawing. “So what do you know about big black dogs?” he asked.
“The one in Shuck’s Lane?” she said. He nodded. “They say the barghest used to wander all around here. But now it’s just in Shuck’s Lane. Dr. Scathelocke once told me it was folk memory. The Wish Hounds are all that are left of the wild hunt, which was based around the idea of Odin’s hunting wolves, Freki and Geri. I think it’s even older than that. Cave memory. Druids. The thing that prowls in the darkness beyond the fire circle, waiting to tear you apart if you edge too far out alone.”
“Have you ever seen it, then?”
She shook her head. “No. I researched it, but never saw it. My semi-imaginary local beast. Have you?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe.”
“Perhaps you woke it up when you came here. You woke me up, after all.”
She reached up, pulled his head down towards her and kissed him again. She took his left hand, so much bigger than hers, and placed it beneath her sweater.
“Cassie, my hands are cold,” he warned her.
“Well, my everything is cold. There’s nothing but cold up here. Just smile and look like you know what you’re doing,” she told him. She pushed Shadow’s left hand higher, until it was cupping the lace of her bra, and he could feel, beneath the lace, the hardness of her nipple and the soft swell of her breast.
He began to surrender to the moment, his hesitation a mixture of awkwardness and uncertainty. He was not sure how he felt about this woman: she had history with his benefactors, after all. Shadow never liked feeling that he was being used; it had happened too many times before. But his left hand was touching her breast and his right hand was cradling the nape of her neck, and he was leaning down and now her mouth was on his, and she was clinging to him as tightly as if, he thought, she wanted to occupy the very same space that he was in. Her mouth tasted like mint and stone and grass and the chilly afternoon breeze. He closed his eyes, and let himself enjoy the kiss and the way their bodies moved together.
Cassie froze. Somewhere close to them, a cat mewed. Shadow opened his eyes.
“Jesus,” he said.
They were surrounded by cats. White cats and tabbies, brown and ginger and black cats, long-haired and short. Well-fed cats with collars and disreputable ragged-eared cats that looked as if they had been living in barns and on the edges of the wild. They stared at Shadow and Cassie with green eyes and blue eyes and golden eyes, and they did not move. Only the occasional swish of a tail or the blinking of a pair of feline eyes told Shadow that they were alive.
“This is weird,” said Shadow.
Cassie took a step back. He was no longer touching her now. “Are they with you?” she asked.
“I don’t think they’re with anyone. They’re cats.”
“I think they’re jealous,” said Cassie. “Look at them. They don’t like me.”
“That’s . . .” Shadow was going to say “nonsense,” but no, it was sense, of a kind. There had been a woman who was a goddess, a continent away and years in his past, who had cared about him, in her own way. He remembered the needle-sharpness of her nails and the catlike roughness of her tongue.
Cassie looked at Shadow dispassionately. “I don’t know who you are, Mr. American,” she told him. “Not really. I don’t know why you can look at me and see the real me, or why I can talk to you when I find it so hard to talk to other people. But I can. And you know, you seem all normal and quiet on the surface, but you are so much weirder than I am. And I’m extremely fucking weird.”
Shadow said, “Don’t go.”
“Tell Ollie and Moira you saw me,” she said. “Tell them I’ll be waiting where we last spoke, if they have anything they want to say to me.” She picked up her sketchpad and pencils, and she walked off briskly, stepping carefully through the cats, who did not even glance at her, just kept their gazes fixed on Shadow, as she moved away through the swaying grasses and the blowing twigs.
Shadow wanted to call after her, but instead he crouched down and looked back at the cats. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Bast? Are you doing this? You’re a long way from home. And why would you still care who I kiss?”
The spell was broken when he spoke. The cats began to move, to look away, to stand, to wash themselves intently.
A tortoiseshell cat pushed her head against his hand, insistently, needing attention. Shadow stroked her absently, rubbing his knuckles against her forehead.
She swiped blinding-fast with claws like tiny scimitars, and drew blood from his forearm. Then she purred, and turned, and within moments the whole kit and caboodle of them had vanished into the hillside, slipping behind rocks and into the undergrowth, and were gone.
V. The Living and the Dead
OLIVER WAS OUT OF his room when Shadow got back to the house, sitting in the warm kitchen, a mug of tea by his side, reading a book on Roman architecture. He was dressed, and he had shaved his chin and trimmed his beard. He was wearing pajamas, with a plaid bathrobe over them.
“I’m feeling a bit better,” he said, when he saw Shadow. Then, “Have you ever had this? Been depressed?”
“Looking back on it, I guess I did. When my wife died,” said Shadow. “Everything went flat. Nothing meant anything for a long time.”
Oliver nodded. “It’s hard. Sometimes I think the black dog is a real thing. I lie in bed thinking about the painting of Fuseli’s nightmare on a sleeper’s chest. Like Anubis. Or do I mean Set? Big black thing. What was Set anyway? Some kind of donkey?”
“I never ran into Set,” said Shadow. “He was before my time.”
Oliver laughed.
