Game of Cages

with a fine layer of white cat hairs. Beside the sofa was one of those structures built of flimsy wood and cheap gray carpeting that are supposed to be fun for cats. This one was four and a half feet tall and three feet around.

A dead cat lay on the floor beside it. It had been stomped on, probably by someone with a heavy boot. Someone like Penny.

The kitchen was also coated with cat hairs. The smeary fridge had book reports and pop quizzes held on with magnets. The kid out front was a straight-A student—exactly the sort I used to beat up in my own school days.

Maybe, just maybe, the white stain on his face was temporary.

On the far side of the fridge was a set of stairs leading down to the basement. The sound of metal-on-metal sawing was coming from there.

The wooden stairs creaked under my weight. “Get out!” Penny screamed. “Get out of my house!”

The basement had a concrete floor and a low ceiling. There was a long workbench at one end and a stretching mat at the other. The mat had been repaired many times with duct tape.

Penny was beside the workbench. She’d managed to clamp a hacksaw into a vise and was rubbing the chain of the cuffs up and down the blade.

“Your son is outside,” I said. I had a pretty good idea how she would react, but I had to be sure. “He’s hit his head and is bleeding pretty badly.”

“Get out!” she screamed again.

“An ambulance is on the way to pick him up.”

“Get out of here before I kill you!”

Just as I’d thought. When she’d screamed not to take “him” away, she was talking about the sapphire dog, not her own son. It had touched her face and made her fall in love with it. It had fed on her.

She fumbled for a screwdriver on the bench. Her hands were still pinned behind her, and her charge was awkward and slow.

I yanked the screwdriver out of her hand and kicked her behind the knee. She fell onto the padded mat. I took a claw hammer off a hook on the wall. “That was a pretty little animal, wasn’t it?”

“Are you a fucking moron? It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. If you try to keep me from it, I’ll chop you into tiny pieces.”

“Yeah, sure. It needs a ride out of town, right? I’ll bet it wants to go to a city. Right?” She didn’t answer, but the hateful look in her eyes was all the confirmation I needed. “Now listen to this: I’m going to put you in the back of Steve’s car. If you fight me”—she began cursing at me, so I raised my voice—“if you fight me, I’ll break both your legs.”

I slammed the hammer on the concrete floor. She stopped shouting.

“Then,” I continued, “you won’t be able to take anyone anywhere, and the sapphire dog will find someone else to be with. Get me?”

She glared at me, her breath coming in harsh gasps. Just the idea of losing her precious pet made her eyes brim with tears. “Bide your time,” I told her, “or you’ll lose any chance you might have had.”

Penny let me lead her out of the house to Steve’s car. He told her an ambulance was on the way to check her son over, but she didn’t even look at him. She didn’t care. She sat in the back and I closed the door.

Steve rubbed his face. “We have a jail cell in the basement of the town hall. Sheriff uses it sometimes. The mayor’s on her way here with the key.”

“Good.” As long as she hadn’t picked up the predator’s knack for walking through solid objects, Penny would be out of the way for a while.

“Now. What in the Sam Hill was that thing?”

Before I could answer, the ambulance arrived. Steve waved Bushy Bill and Sue toward the crashed truck.

“That’s the first I saw of it,” I said.

“It … it was beautiful. And it vanished into thin air, didn’t it? I felt …”

“You loved it,” I said. “You loved it and you wanted it all to yourself.”

He squinted up at me. He’d come into contact with the world behind the world, and he didn’t even know what questions he should ask.

Information shared is information leaked. But he’d seen the predator, so he already had the most damning information. And I knew he would talk to Penny soon enough; I didn’t want her version of the sapphire dog to be the only one he heard. I had enough enemies as it was.

I said: “This is how it started last year with my friend. Understand? There was a creature that could make certain things happen. In my friend’s case, it healed his back and let him walk.” There was no need to mention Hammer Bay, so I didn’t. “This is something else, though.”

“I loved that animal.”

“It’s not an animal,” I told him. “It’s smart. It may be smarter than us.”

“By golly,” Steve said. He rubbed his neatly shaved chin. “Today I don’t think that would be too hard.”

“Not any day for me,” I said. “I’ve never been smart. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have to kill it.”

“Can’t we just capture it?” I could see the wanting in his expression.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. Steve winced at my language, and I was glad I hadn’t said what I’d originally meant