His behavior was exemplary even as Bastet had promised, but he remained cold and aloof, sleeping alone and barely tolerating an occasional caress of his silky head or back.
Gift considered it a major concession that he permitted that much contact. The care and consideration he received were excellent, in keeping with the divinity's assurance. He had to admit that in basic feline honesty, and common politeness required that some recompense be given for it, but chiefly, he was moved by the promise the transfigured Turtle had wrung from him. They had spoken together at length before his return, and she had pleaded so earnestly that he not be cruel to her Partner! him!-that he had in the end agreed to allow limited physical approach.
No trouble followed that lessening of his guard. Certainly, no blows came from the human's small hand, and she made no attempt to force further intimacy from him, though it was easy enough to read her desire for a great deal more. He began to feel guilty about that but steeled himself with the knowledge that she had been fully warned about what she might expect from him and had agreed to shelter him on those terms. If the human was not satisfied, well, let her bring in a kitten as she and Bastet had discussed.
Matters drifted on thus for some time, and Francie could see no sign that their relationship might better soon or at a future point. Despite her foreknowledge, her frustration grew in proportion to her deepening love for the beautiful animal.
Her heart came to close to breaking the evening she unexpectedly lost the very large sale she had hoped to close that same week. The woman sat wearily on the end of the chaise as Gift jerked away from her hand. Her head lowered, and the memory of her first sight of Turtle swept over her, a minute, orphaned kitten sprawled in a shoe box, her head and legs extended, her tiny tail sticking out behind, for all the world like the little turtles Francie and her sister had kept as children. She was sincerely glad her friend had found the happy place Bastet had described and would not wrench her away from it again for anything, but how she longed for the warmth of the little tortoiseshell's company right now. One simply could not feel like an utter failure while hugging a cat.
A failure she was, too, or so it seemed at the moment. She had let a seemingly sure sale slide through her fingers, losing the finest commission she had ever yet been in a position to earn and drawing her boss' well-merited anger down on her. As if that were not bad enough, she then had to come home only to be faced by her inability to reach the heart and gain the trust of one poor, formerly abused little animal…
Suddenly, a warm, furry cheek rubbed against hers followed by the quick rasp of a tongue.
Francie almost jerked away in her surprise but managed to control her response and raised her eyes to meet the somber, knowing ones of the black cat. 'Oh, Gift,' she whispered, stroking him timidly with two gently wielded fingers. 'Thank you, my little friend. I did need you just now.'
A rumbling purr, the first she had ever heard from him, answered that, and she stroked him again. 'I don't expect you to be another Turtle. I love you for yourself, and none the less because I also loved and still love her.'
The purring continued, this time a genuine rather than a forced response. Bast's Gift knew misery and unhappiness, none better, and he would indeed be cruel if he did not help Francie. She was good and certainly not worthless like she had felt herself to be. It was a pleasure for him and an honor to use his power to comfort in her cause.
If the cat did not greet his human at the door each evening after that, he did rouse himself to rub against her legs, and he gradually took to sleeping at the foot of her bed.
He also began to play, or work out, rather, with her, an advance she particularly welcomed. She had feared he might lose his sleek form and fine muscle tone if he maintained too sedentary an existence. Francie would wrap her arm in a towel or sweat shirt and wrestle with Gift, allowing him to release both energy and aggressive tension. To the black's credit, although he rabbit punched with his hind legs and used both claws and teeth to grapple with the padded arm, he never forgot himself and either scratched or bit in earnest.
For still more active sport, she used a device consisting of a short fishing rod with a string attached to its tip and a small piece of cloth tied to the cord. It provided a lively, moving target, and they battled it around the apartment several times a week in very vigorous sessions lasting half an hour or more.
Of the other toys that had intrigued and occupied Turtle for nearly all of her long life, he took no notice. Only one type of plaything drew and held him, life-sized mice fashioned of real fur. Ordinarily, Francie would have refused to have anything to do with the things, but when her sister Anna had brought one of them on her last visit to the city and Gift had reacted so favorably to it, she had swallowed her scruples and bought more of them.
She soon discovered that several were necessary. No sooner did she give Bast's Gift one than it would vanish beneath some dresser or chest from which she would then be summoned to retrieve it. When this happened for the third time in the space of an hour one Saturday morning, she gave her innocent-looking comrade a quick look. Was this the stirring of the playful mischief that should be so basic a part of a young cat's personality but which had been entirely absent from his behavior thus far?
Bast's Gift came to enjoy their time together, although he was not as yet willing to ease up any further on the guards he had set about himself. Francie seemed to be everything Turtle had said, but humans were humans. She was far the bigger and stronger of them, and there was little he could do to protect himself from her if she went into a rage against him, nothing except try to keep his heart from breaking along with his body.
It happened in the end, as he had been telling himself it must. The woman flung open the door of the apartment, and he cowered down, sick with the terror of the fury he could read and smell on her.
Francie saw the cat's body shrink in upon itself and realized what had happened. She dropped her bag and tote on the table and went to her knees near him. 'It's not you, baby. You're about the brightest, best thing in this whole city, at least as it impacts on me. I was just furious with something I'd read in the paper.'
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
