Run in with the Cat

A piece I wrote in Iowa for a writing studio. Short stand-alone.

Part of his chest was exposed by the black V-neck he wore. The shirt stretched taunt across his slender but muscled form until it flared out at the sleeves. Long waves of black hair fell past his closed eyes and a violet ring scintillated in the sun. He leaned comfortably against the massive graying pillar that supported the weathered academy behind him. 

Every college student and visiting parent that passed within fifty feet of him gave him a wide berth. They all shot awkward glances at him, but from what Andrew could see as his feet took him closer his dorm; the man hadn’t batted an eyelash. Andrew thought that he looked like a cat, or perhaps a panther, surrounded by skittish mice.

The humidity frustrated Andrew: it always made his hair curl. As he brushed the blonde strands out of his eyes, he glanced to his left and noticed the woman walking next to him blatantly staring at the slender figure as she walked, so Andrew tried to cast his eyes elsewhere. He spotted a red flash dart out from behind the pillar on which the man was leaning. Andrew spun to observe it and discovered it to be a cardinal bigger than a crow, causing the pine branch on which it now rested to bend slightly. 

Andrew shrugged and turned round again. The man was gone. He looked at the woman next to him. She was shaking her head and pulling her gaze away from the entrance to the pillared building. Andrew’s eyes raced up the stone steps and caught a flash of black as the large wooden door of the academy swung closed.

Andrew pressed his lips together and glanced down the road to his dorm building. With a jerk of his head, he leapt up the steps, his backpack jostling but failing to slow his stride. When he got to the top he wrenched open the door and slipped in. He shut it quickly behind him, as if he shouldn’t be here. 

The room in which he stood was enormous. Three sets of staircases stood in front of him. The middle was a large marble staircase leading down. It went so far that the sunlight could not reach it and tiny yellow lights served to provide the path to what looked to be an aged door. Its neighbors were both smaller and ran upward. 

 A glint to Andrew’s left caught his eye. He turned to face a tall mirror. It was bordered by flying golden cherubim and the upper left corner was cracked. Andrew managed to forget for a moment that he was chasing someone and turned to face the mirror, smoothing out his shoulder-length hair, which had become disheveled during his dash up the outer steps, across the right side of his face and his dark blue eye.

Turning back to the scene in front of him, he scanned the room and strained his ears for any sign of his prey. Sensing nothing, he skipped down the middle staircase. It seemed fitting that any odd-seeming person would choose to go down the dark, long set of stairs, rather than those that led up into the sun. 

Andrew started looking back over his shoulder when the passageway became tighter and the echo of his footsteps began to crack against the walls. He passed the dim lights, set into the walls behind rusted iron bars and stopped at the bottom of the stairs, directly in front of a worn gray door. He looked down to check the handle and saw the shadow of something small on the lowest step. 

Andrew dropped down to grab it. He held it up to the light and found it to be simply a large crimson feather. His lip curled as he let it fall from his hands and he yanked on the metal door handle. He paused for a moment when it turned freely. He watched the feather spin to the ground, opened the door, and stepped through.

It was instantly cooler. Andrew favored this as well as the fact that it was now also very dark. The small amount of light seeping in from under the door revealed only a dim outline of the narrow hallway in front of him. He smoothed his hair across his eyes and then dropped into a crouch, spinning his backpack off his back and onto the floor in front of him as he did so. He unzipped the bag and scanned the rough walls around him. He slipped his hand into the pack and deftly his fingers closed around a familiar grip. 

Andrew left his pack against the wall and moved hastily but with carefully measured steps down the passageway, never letting his feet slap too hard the cold stone floor.  He walked for a few dozen feet when he spotted a sliver of light up ahead. He moved on and quickly the yellow ray was coupled with a low murmur and a high crooning sound. A soft click echoed out from tool Andrew’s right hand. The muttering continued unabated.

Andrew drew near to the source of light and found that it issued into the hallway from a side room, the door slightly ajar. Andrew sidled up to the wall, brushed his hair out of his eye and shifted just enough to peer in. 

The room inside was cluttered with tables stacked with papers and iron shelves in which pint-sized vials of multi-colored liquids bubbled. Long tubes ran from the containers to an uneven hole in the wall. The man in black was perched on a high wooden table with his legs folded over each other and his back against the gray wall. His right hand was raised as he languidly stroked the beak of a large cardinal that was perched on his shoulder. 

The man’s eyes were closed but he was speaking to another person that Andrew could not see. The other man seemed to be flustered.

“I just need you to be quick,” he was saying from the side of the room Andrew could not see. “They’re after my blood and you know it! What do you think that I’ve been paying you for?” 

The man on the table opened his eyes at this, and for moment Andrew thought he saw hate glitter in their stygian depths.

“You pay us so that we can acquire these, Damien,” said the man on the table, waving his hand in the direction of the vials. “And you will be taken care of as usual.”

“What do these solutions even do?” asked Damien. “I haven’t been able to but dozens of priceless paintings because I’ve been paying for your protection and you turn my fortune into a few ounces of liquid.”

“Your fortune and others,” the man said. “I believe the time to test one may be soon.”

“Great,” Damien said. “Let’s see what it can do.”

“Leave or you’ll die.”

“What?” Damien asked. 

Andrew spun into the room and flung out his arm at the previously hidden Damien. Damien’s eyes went wide for a brief moment before a deafening crack rang across the room and a chunk of his head seemed to launch itself at the wall in a stream of blood. His body flipped a table as it fell and a stack of papers flew into the air. At the sound of the gunshot, the man on the table flinched and the cardinal cawed loudly and flew out of the room. Andrew spun the gun to face the man.

“Cat of the Calens,” said Andrew. “Good to see you again.”

“Poor rich fool,”’ said the man called the Cat. He sat up and arched his back as he turned his eyes from the corpse and blood-soaked papers to meet Andrew’s cold stare. “You Mirens have never been pragmatic, and yet you remain strangely predictable. You gunned down an unarmed man who meant you no harm, and yet now you’ll hesitate to kill me.”

“He was paying your organization,” said Andrew, sidestepping to keep his maroon Berluti shoes out of the pool of blood oozing toward him. “As for you, you can be sure that you’ll be dead within the hour, but I’m sure my boss will have some things to ask you before you go.”

“I would be glad to speak with him,” said the Cat. “However, I still have to tie up a few loose ends in the Calen guild. Considering I am quite busy at the moment, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”  

Andrew laughed openly. “If you really are that stupid, maybe I should just kill you now and go back to headquarters. You know what, tell me exactly what those liquids do and I may let you live.”

“Certainly,” the Cat said, “If my life is on the line. But never having used one before, I really don’t think that I could describe it to you.” With this, he slid off the table and moved toward a vial.

“Hold on,” said Andrew, taking a step forward. “You think I’m just going to let you pick it up without knowing what it does?”

The Cat stopped. “If you want to play with it go ahead. In truth, I don’t even know what it does.”

Andrew narrowed his eyes and walked over to one of the jars, keeping his gun trained on the Cat at all times. The liquid shimmered with many colors, but the majority of it was purple. Andrew pulled the tube out of one and the bubbling subsided. Andrew smelled it and swished it around. It was very thick and had no smell. Careful not to touch his skin to it, Andrew dipped a bit of his sleeve into it. Nothing happened. 

“Is it a poison?” Andrew asked. “You must have purchased these from the Alchemists if you paid as much for them as it seems, so I doubt that they’re defective.”

The Cat took a languid step back and reached his hand out for the vial. “May I examine it?” he asked.

Andrew was directly across the room from the Cat now, with only a small table dividing them. If the Cat tried anything, he would be dead in less than a second. Andrew hefted the gun in two hands and nodded.

The Cat lifted the tube out of the jar and picked it up. He went through the same procedure that Andrew had to the same effect. He then began to pour out the entire contents onto the floor. 

“You’re wasting it,” said Andrew, taking a step forward. He was aware that anything the Alchemists made was beyond precious.

“Wait,” said the Cat, “Perhaps it will react with the stone.” He held the vial upside down until the last drop seeped onto the ground. The liquid began to turn a uniform purple. Starting at the middle, it slowly began to glow. Andrew took another step forward, taking in the violet light. Violet, like the Cat’s ring. Andrew’s eyes fell on it and saw that it had begun to shine as well. Andrew looked up, straight into the Cat’s eyes. In a heartbeat, the Cat raised his ringed hand and the potion shot up into a wide wall around him.

Andrew shot three bullets into the wall that seemed to have solidified. They glanced off, blasting splinters off tables and shattering one of the vials. Dagger-like pieces began to split off of the wall. Andrew turned to run as a piece lanced deep into his calf. He knocked a table over and tried to take cover behind it as little purple blades pummeled the wood and stone around him. 

Andrew blotted out the pain; he had been hurt far worse than this before. Now that the Cat was shattering his own wall, Andrew might be able to get a shot on him. He rolled out from behind the table. For a second, he saw the cat standing only a few yards from him, holding a blade of lavender. A harsh screech split the air and all Andrew could see was red. The bird’s beak drove into his forehead as he pulled the trigger. The cardinal’s body was flung at the ceiling in a shower of blood and feathers. 

Blood from the cut on his forehead trickled down Andrew’s face as looked up to fire his last bullet straight into the Cat’s heart. The Cat’s arm was extended and Andrew couldn’t figure out why he didn’t try to hide until he looked down and saw the purple shard protruding from his chest. He pulled the trigger, but the bit of liquid he had dipped his sleeve into was now blocking the barrel of the gun and it flew from his hands. Andrew sank to his hands and knees. As his vision blurred, he saw the Cat catch the falling body of the cardinal. He looked across the room, staring into Damien’s one intact eye. Andrew’s hair fell in front of his eyes and he saw no more.