“Two weeks this has been going on,” Santiago complained to me when I showed up for our regular visit. I hadn’t given much thought to it, for there were far more troubling behaviors you might assume than pretending to be a cat.
“Apparently he’s been doing the same thing at school. When I told him to answer me like a young man, he hissed at me.” Santiago shook his head. “Bared his teeth as well. Is that a Nephilim thing?”
I suppressed a smile. It could be a Nephilim thing, for our teeth were our most handy weapons, and we bared them in moments of aggression. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
“It’s terribly rude, and I won’t tolerate it.”
There were several behaviors Santiago wouldn’t tolerate—mostly those having to do with children in general. Thankfully, his devotion to Xavier superseded his irritations, and whenever he’d work himself into a tizzy over you, Xavier was there to calm him down.
“He’s holding court.” Santiago pointed across the yard to where you knelt in the grass surrounded by five of your cats. “Perhaps it would be better if we got rid of them. They’ve killed all of our songbirds. He insists on removing their bells.”
They can’t hunt with bells, you’d told me.
“Let me try talking to him,” I said, and in an attempt to mollify him, I added with a rumble of seduction, “It’ll be just fine.”
Santiago’s features softened and some of the tension left his face. “It’ll be just fine,” he murmured, and I nodded in agreement, but soon enough, his scowl returned. “I’ll be inside. Tell Vincent that if he wants lunch, it will be served at the table with utensils. And he’d better change his clothing, so the cat hair doesn’t give Xavier an allergic reaction.”
Santiago left and I observed your interactions with your cats. One was bunting against your back in long, leisurely laps. Two were grooming themselves. One was stretched out on its back, sunning itself in the dappled light, and the last was crouched as though ready to pounce, staring at you intently with its cabbage yellow eyes. I couldn’t always keep track of their names, but I knew that one—the black stray—was named Spooky, for obvious reasons.
As I approached, a few of your furballs shot me insolent looks, but Spooky took no notice of me. Her level of fixation on you was truly unsettling. I wondered if the animal wasn’t already susceptible to your influence.
“Hello, Vincent.” I knelt in the grass nearby.
Your gaze flicked up to catch mine before quickly dropping again. Your lower lip jutted in an adorable sulk. Judging from your swollen eyes and tear-streaked face, the altercation with Santiago had upset you. You hated to be reprimanded. It was one of the reasons I rarely raised my voice with you. After a few more moments of silence, you began licking the back of your wrist as though cleaning yourself. Fully in character. Despite Santiago’s threat of withholding lunch, I’d brought with me a bowl and a bag of blood. Denying a Nephilim their bloodmeal was never a wise idea.
“Hungry?” I asked. You mewled with indifference, but your dark eyes centered on the bag.
I poured the blood into the white porcelain dish and set it before you as a peace offering. A couple of your cats showed interest, but you hissed at them to back off. With a budding Nephilim grace, you crawled over to the bowl and tried to lap up the blood, but it wasn’t easy to accomplish with your human mouth. Then you tried slurping it, but only ended up making a mess. Finally, you sat back on your haunches, scooped up the bowl with both hands, and drank from it greedily. You tilted back the dish and went so far as to lick the bottom clean. Your parents would have been abhorred to see it, but I sympathized with your reluctance to leave even a drop behind. Even when our stomachs were full, the craving never left completely.
I offered you my handkerchief to tidy up your blood-smeared face, but you only jutted out your chin for me to do it myself. Such a little prince.
A mellow mood settled over you as your eyes shone brighter and you sighed contentedly.
“Care for a pet, cucciolo?”
I held out my hand, and you leaned toward me so I could comb my fingers through your thick hair, then sidled up next to me and purred. We sat like that for a while, with you lying in the grass as I gently stroked your head and back. Your eyes dipped as though you might have fallen asleep for a spell. I hoped you might feel secure enough to open up to me, since pushing only made you more intractable. Some things never changed.
“What does cucciolo mean?” you asked softly. You’d propped yourself up on your elbows and peered at me over your shoulder with a cowlick of hair obscuring your eyes.
“It means puppy in Italian.”
I remembered the first time I’d ever called you that. It was the way you’d looked at me, like an eager puppy. Now, I stared at your large, inquisitive eyes. So many memories between us. It was a risk for you to remember and a risk for you to forget.
“Would you rather me call you gattino?” I asked. “It means kitten.”
You bit at your lower lip, breaking the skin so that you could sample your own blood. It was a self-soothing habit, similar to sucking one’s thumb. The cut would heal quickly enough that I needn’t worry too much.
“No, I like the way cucciolo sounds when you say it.”
My heart expanded, and I wondered if some part of you might already recall threads of the past, like a string of notes you’d thought was forgotten until you heard them again, two lives overlapping like melodies sung in perfect harmony.
“Why are you a cat now, my darling?”
You rolled over onto your back and shielded your eyes from the sunlight filtering in through the flamboyant tree above us. I gave you my sunglasses to make you more comfortable.
“I don’t want to be a boy anymore. I’m not like the other boys at my school.”
That was certainly true. None of them were godlings.
“What are the boys at your school like?”
“They’re big and fast and sweaty. And they play sports.”
“You fence and practice Aikido. Those are sports.”
“Doesn’t count. It has to be a sport with a ball, and even if I did play, they still wouldn’t let me sit with them. They make me sit with the girls.” You crossed your arms over your chest, then turned away from me to hide your hurt feelings.
I recalled your cat funerals and birthday celebrations. From what I’d observed of your social sphere, most of your closest companions were girls, but I’d assumed it was by choice.
“Why won’t they let you sit with them?”
“Because they hate me.”
How anyone could feel that way toward you baffled me, but I supposed I couldn’t be objective in that regard. In light of your admission, deciding to be a cat made perfect sense. As if knowing you needed comfort, your subjects came and arranged themselves around you. Spooky lay sprawled across your waist like a blanket. Or a shield.
“My cats love me,” you said to a chorus of purrs. Their furry bodies overlapped so that it was difficult to tell them apart.
“I love you. And your Papa and Daddy love you.”
“And Mater,” you added, sneaking a furtive glance at me. Perhaps I hadn’t hidden my contempt toward her as well as I’d intended.
“Yes, Mater too.”