“Why sleep with you?”
She nods.
I wanted to tell her because she was easy, but that wouldn’t be
very modern of me. She was no easier than I was. We had both
bedded people we didn’t know. Whereas I had intended mine to be a
one-night stand, she obviously had not.
“I was drunk and you were there.” Damn it, I hadn’t meant to say
that either.
“You know what, fuck you.”
And that had been the moment I became a cat. One minute I was
sitting sprawled out on a chair in obvious relief of not fathering a
child with this loopy fucking cunt, the next I was an itty-bitty ball of
fur in the middle of the chair cushion.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she snarled down at me. “You are
still cute in that form. Every woman who lays eyes on you will want
you, but not in the way you will want them to want you.”
That was not what I was thinking. I was thinking that when I
shifted back into a man I was killing the bitch. As I thought this, I
tried shifting, but nothing happened. I screamed at her in anger.
What came out of my mouth was a hiss, and she had the nerve to
laugh at me.
“Don’t hiss at me.” She cooed and tried to rub me between the
ears with one of her fingers. I took a swipe at her with one of my
paws and scratched her good with a long, sharp nail.
“Why you little shit,” she spat, sucking on the wound. “You made
me bleed.” Shrugging, she said, “I’ll have the last laugh anyway. In
case you haven’t figured it out yet, your condition is permanent. I’m
a very powerful witch if you haven’t noticed, and you have
thoroughly pissed me off. I was going to keep you for myself, but for
this,” she held up her bleeding finger, “I’m sending you to the pound.
They kill animals there if no one comes in to adopt them. And the
ones that are adopted are neutered.”
With a flick of her hand, I was in a cage on the front steps of the
Smith County Animal Clinic and Shelter in a small town across the
Tennessee/Alabama state line called Austin.
I spent the first five minutes I was there cursing Mave. When I