Anna Leonard is the nom de paranormal for fantasy/horror writer Laura Anne Gilman, who grew up wondering why none of the characters in her favourite gothic novels ever seemed to know a damn thing about ghosts, vampires or how to run in high heels. She is delighted that the newest generation of heroines has a much better grasp on things. “Anna” lives in New York City, where either nothing or everything is paranormal…

She can be reached via http://www.sff.net/people/lauraanne.gilman/ or http://cosanostradamus.blogspot. com/.

For KRAD and TO

May your life together be filled with love,

joy, satisfaction and success.

Eight times before she had traveled this dream-road; traveled, and been lost. Eight times before, the same sensations haunted her sleep. The feel of the sun’s intense heat between her shoulder blades, the heavy slip of linen across her shoulders, the sweat of fear down her neck. The sound of scorn in his voice as he cast her aside. Most of all, the low vibrating purr, the gentle rumble that chilled her, made her eyes scrunch closed and pray to a vengeful goddess that mercy would at last be granted her….

And the Voice, echoing forever in dream-memory. “As you destroyed, so must you repair. Until then, child-of-mine-no-longer, walk these sands as one forgotten, never to be judged worthy, never to rest—”

“Mother, please…” She wasn’t sure what she was asking for. Forgiveness? Absolution? A chance to explain, to make an excuse?

No matter. It did not matter. It never mattered.

Eight times she bowed her head to the inevitable, knowing there was no excuse she could make, and no explanation she might offer that would wash the blood from her hands. Her birth and position would save her from public humiliation and shame, but inside, in her ka, she would always know. Always remember.

“Mother, I am sorry. My children, I am so very sorry….”

A soft touch against her skin, fur stroking skin. She flinched from the comfort, welcoming the pain that followed. Agony, the sharp downward stroke of betrayal, over and over and over again. Then…darkness.

When she woke, she would remember none of it. She would forget.

Eight times, she always forgot.

This was nine.

Chapter 1

Lily Malkin undid the barrette holding her hair out of her face. The thick black curls slid past her shoulders, and she reached up to run her fingers against her scalp, feeling herself relax. The headache that had haunted her all morning, residue from her usual insomnia, eased a little more.

“Mrrrup?” A tiny paw batted against her knee, demanding attention, and the chance to claw those curls.

“Hello, Rai.” Lily scooped the tiny silver tabby up in one hand, easily keeping the needle-tiny claws away from her hair. The kitten complained, and she soothed it by stroking the soft head until the outraged expression was replaced by heavy lids and a gentle purr.

Lily could almost feel her own eyelids lowering in response. Kitty nap-vibes, the other shelter volunteers called it: the sincere conviction that everything in the world could be made better by stopping to nap in the sun. Oh, if only that were true. She raised the kitten higher and touched her nose to the little pink one. “There you go. Life’s not so bad. And it will only get better for you now, I promise.”

The kitten, secure in her grip, kneaded its claws sleepily against her skin, but didn’t otherwise respond. Lily only wished that her problems were that easily solved. Never a particularly good sleeper, she had been averaging less than four hours a night for the past month, and it was taking its toll.

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change ready. The old joke was even less funny now than it had been in college, she thought. At least then, she had exams and a social life to blame for her exhaustion. Now…Now there were only dreams that she couldn’t remember, and a sense hanging over her that there was something, somewhere, she needed to do. Something important.

The sad truth of the matter was that there wasn’t anything really important in her life. Not in the way that niggling dream was telling her.

Maybe it was time to go back to therapy. Or visit a psychic. Or start taking sleeping pills. Something.

Rai dug tiny needle-claws into her hand, informing her that the petting had stopped, and why had the petting stopped? An obedient human, Lily stroked the downy head again, until the claws relaxed.

A deep voice above her, filled with laughter, broke her concentration on the tiny animal. “You, Lily Malkin, are a miracle.”

“Me?” Surprise made her voice rise, making the word even more of a question, but she kept her attention focused on the kitten, afraid to startle it and ruin the progress they had made. She felt like many things right now, but none of them were miraculous.

“You, yeah. Three years ago, just looking at a cat made you break into a cold sweat. Now?” Ronnie, the director of the Felidae No-Kill shelter, sat down on the floor next to Lily, where a pair of inquisitive kittens immediately pounced on her. The two women were in the middle of the “socialization” room, a space filled with climbing trees, catnip mice and rope nets—and almost a dozen cats and kittens in various stages of sociability. “And now? Now you’re our very own ‘cat whisperer.’”

Lily made a face. She hated that nickname, and “cat talker” and “cat lady” and all the other terms the other volunteers and media people had stuck on her. But there didn’t seem to be any way to get rid of it, now.

It was ironic, really. Despite her last name having a traditional, if unfortunate connection to cats, from the time she was a child being around cats had made her uneasy both physically and emotionally. Physically, she got dizzy, sweaty palmed and nauseated. Emotionally…she had nightmares triggered by something as simple as hearing a cat meow.

Despite that, cats still seemed drawn to her, climbing in her lap and weaving in and out of her legs at the slightest chance.

“It’s because you’re scared and sit so still,” people had told her, as though that made it all right. And, in truth, she had always—from a distance—admired cats, with their easy strides and poised gracefulness, and the way they could curl up, nose, toes and tail, and be instantly comfortable anywhere. But the unease kept growing, to the point where she could not visit homes of friends with cats, or even watch a cat-food commercial on television without changing the channel.

Over the years, that unease had transferred to people, too. She watched them the same way she watched cats, wondering what they wanted from her, what they expected, and when their demands would overwhelm and consume her.

It wasn’t rational, but nothing Lily had read about phobias over the years indicated that rational thought was involved.

When she had moved to Newfield three years before, it had been with the plan to make a new start after the collapse of yet another relationship, her fourth since graduating college. This time, she had told herself, she would not make the same mistakes. New town. New start. Except that she didn’t know how to begin.

Her problems had started with cats—she thought maybe she could start there, and work her way up to people. A helpful therapist and a lot of pep talks had gotten her to the door of the Felidae No-Kill shelter, meaning simply to volunteer in the front office, maybe greet people when they came in, help maintain their Web site, or…

It hadn’t quite worked out that way. The fact that she was where she was, the ranking volunteer with the most responsibility…

Maybe Ronnie was right. Some days even she could barely remember the person she had been the first time she set foot in the doorway two and a half years ago; shaky, sweaty and ready to pass out at the sight of the first inquiring whisker. It had been that much of a change.

With cats, anyway. Lily still had trouble with really connecting to people beyond casual friendships and working relationships.

But she didn’t speak cat, or have any kind of supernatural connection with them, the way some people seemed to think. Cats were just easy to understand. The things they wanted were simple: scratching, and feeding, and a warm place to sleep and to be left alone when they were enjoying all those things.

People? People always wanted more, and they never seemed able to just come right out and ask.

“I think this guy’s going to be ready to adopt soon,” was all she said, lifting the tabby and putting him next to a large orange tom named Willikers, who promptly started grooming the kitten. “And he’d be fine in a house with older cats. Maybe even a dog, if he was used to cats.” Talking about cats—and their adoption chances—was easier than talking about herself.

“I’ll note that on his chart,” Ronnie said, accepting the change of subject. “In the meanwhile, you should try to scrape off some of that cat hair. There’s someone here to see you.”

“Me?” Again, her voice rose, this time almost to a squeak. Maybe that was what she needed to work on next, not sounding so anxious when people noticed her.

Her boss nodded, absently petting the calico she had chosen. “Your faithful mechanical Mountie just stomped in, looking for you.”

Oh, Lily thought. Then, uh-oh. She knew what that meant.

Resigned, Lily stood up and brushed without much hope at the denim of her jeans. She had quickly learned not to wear wool or corduroy at the shelter, but cat hair could stick to anything, and with the multicolored cats they were currently housing, there wasn’t a color you could wear that wouldn’t show the inevitably shed fur. Giving up, she gave her cotton sweater a tug, ran her fingers through her hair to get the overlong curls off her face and went out of the glass-enclosed socialization room and into the lobby.

Two men were waiting for her. One was an older man, craggy-faced, wearing casual slacks, a button-down shirt and a gray blazer that had seen better years.

“Detective Petrosian.” Formal in the presence of a stranger, for all that they had known each other for two years now.

Aggie—Augustus—Petrosian looked up, and Lily knew for certain that she wasn’t going to want to hear what he had to say. It was going to be worse than her usual calls, which were more along the lines of removing a litter of kittens from the inner walls of a building that was being torn down, or getting someone’s illegal pet—last month it had been a half-grown ocelot—out of an apartment without anyone getting bitten. When he showed up with those sorts of problems, Aggie never looked as grim as he did right now.

“Lily. Thank you.”

She smiled at him. He always said that, as though she was going to hide in the backroom and pretend he wasn’t there.

“Lily Malkin, this—” and he indicated the man next to him “—is Special Agent Jon T. Patrick. He’s with the feds. Visiting us here in the burbs to help out on a case.”

“Patrick” as a surname sounded as Irish as it got. This guy, Lily thought immediately, wasn’t even remotely Irish; not unless they had packed up and colonized somewhere more exotic when history wasn’t looking. Intense black eyes looked out from deep-set sockets. Those rather amazing eyes, emphasized by a thick, short cap of black-and-gray curls above and the high brace of cheekbones below, were all you saw at first. Lips were thin, ears ordinary and skin a soft golden tan that gave her the urge—briefly—to lean forward and find out what he smelled like. Sandalwood, she thought, without knowing what sandalwood actually smelled like.

Oh. Also, oh. If she were a shallow woman, her mouth would be watering right about now.

All right, so she was a shallow woman on occasion. It wasn’t a crime.

He looked her up and down and then directly in the eyes, and the intensity of that gaze felt as though he was undressing her almost casually, as though he had the right to do so. That kind of arrogance pissed her off, so she stared back at him, daring him to continue. At least she had been discreet in her observation.

You’re not that hot, pal, she thought, now annoyed by how quickly she had responded to him. It hadn’t been that long since she’d…All right, maybe it had. That was still no reason to react like a tabby in heat.

Detective Petrosian finished the introductions quickly, as though he sensed the undercurrents. “Agent Patrick, this is Lily Malkin. Lily’s our local cat expert.”

Her lips quirked at Aggie’s words, despite her irritation. Between him and Ronnie…She wasn’t any kind of expert, really, just cheaper and easier to get hold of than any specialist they could afford to hire, even if one were available. Newfield was a small city, as cities went, and they had an equally small budget to cover a lot of far more urgent needs.

Agent Patrick didn’t seem too impressed, by either her or her credentials or his surroundings. His gaze was still on her, but it had become a polite, indifferent look, and his mouth—too thin, she decided, and not to her taste—was held flat, as though he was biting back a comment.

So much for her federal rating, she thought. He probably preferred athletic blondes. Not that he was her type either—she preferred her dates to be a little less obviously high-maintenance.

Agent Patrick did dress well, though. Or maybe that was in contrast to Aggie’s familiarly rumpled self—the gray suit and white shirt was probably issued in bulk at FBI headquarters, but it fit Agent Patrick’s tall but solid form, and his tie was not the usual power red, but a dark gray-on-gray pattern that was both stylish and surprisingly soothing.

The agent hadn’t looked away from her yet, despite his disapproval, and Lily felt the back of her neck prickle under that steady regard. He needed to blink, at least. If she had been one of her four-legged charges, she might have hissed and arched her back to look more fearsome and drive him away.

“Lil.” Petrosian was speaking again. “Lily, I’m sorry, but I gotta ask you to do something ugly.”

Her attention left the fed and narrowed to the expression on Aggie’s face: regretful, but determined. She had been right. Whatever it was, it was going to be bad, especially if a federal agent was along. Lily had no idea what she might be able to help with, at that level, but she trusted Aggie Petrosian as much as she trusted anyone. He was, maybe, the only person she truly did trust. He asked of her only what he asked, and nothing more. No hidden agendas waiting in the shadows. He had always been up front with her. Like a cat. And because of that, if he needed her to do something, she would do it. It was that simple.

Even if it meant being in the company of this Agent Rude-stare Patrick.

“All right.”

Special Agent Jon T. Patrick wasn’t usually so obvious when he checked someone out; contrary to popular opinion, the bureau did install some couth and control in their people. And his mother would have slapped him over the sofa if he was rude to a woman. But from the way this woman—Ms. Lily Malkin—was shying away from him, he’d been both obvious and obnoxious about it.

Nice move, smooth guy, he thought in disgust. But she had taken him totally by surprise.

When the detective had collected him at the airport, Patrick had expected that they would go directly to the site, since it was still relatively fresh. Instead, as he loaded his bags into the back of the unmarked sedan, Petrosian had informed him that they were going to make a stop along the way, to pick up another consultant.

Patrick bristled at being called a consultant—if he wanted to, he could have used his credentials to argue for the lead in this investigation, and the detective knew it—but instead he merely nodded and let his gaze rest on the scenery. Newfield wasn’t much to look at; the airport was just outside city limits, and they were passing the usual patch of warehouses, followed by bluecollar neighborhoods of two- and three-family houses, then into the city itself. He thought they might stop at the university, or maybe the police department.

The last thing he had expected was to find himself in the lobby of a run-down animal shelter, being introduced to a black-haired, peach-skinned pocket Venus wearing faded blue jeans and a black V-neck sweater that made you want to run a finger down the crevice…

He jerked his attention back to the woman’s face as Petrosian asked her to accompany them. Her skin was smooth, with wide-set hazel eyes, a sweetly rounded face and a chin that was just blunt enough to keep her from being cute. Malkin. An old, useless bit of information filtered through his magpie memory and into recall; an old slang term, meaning a slatternly woman, or a scarecrow. It also, ironically, had been used to mean both rabbit and cat. She had the nervous posture of a rabbit, but the sleek lines of a cat.

And Lily? Lilies had long necks, like…

Patrick shut that line of thought down, aware that his brain could sometimes go off on totally random tangents. Work related: that was good. Libido related? Less so. Keep it official. Keep it on business.

The detective didn’t explain to Ms. Malkin what was up when he made his request, and she didn’t ask for details, indicating that they had done things like this before.

Patrick was reassured by that, the familiarity and the trust, both. Consultants, in his experience, usually asked too many questions up front. That prejudiced their read of the site before they even got there, making their evaluations useless. So she was not only sexy, but smart. And, apparently, from the coolness in her hazel eyes while she looked at him, wanting nothing to do with one special agent.

Blew that before you even knew you were doing anything, didn’t you, Jon T.? He could hear his mother scolding him, across seven states and two time zones. How will you ever meet a nice girl if you scare them all off?

Yeah, yeah, Mom, I know, he told the voice. Very smooth. I’m a moron.

Not that it mattered. He was here on business. The case—ordinary enough on the surface—might be nothing more than a garden-variety cat killer howling at the moon, which he could leave for the locals. Or this guy might in fact be an embryonic serial killer just starting his progression: if so, finding what triggered him would support his own personal theory, and stopping the guy would help cement his standing in the bureau. A federal officer’s career was all about reputation: making it, and keeping it.

It was never good to alienate a local expert, however dubious her standing, this early on, though. Petrosian thought enough of her insight to make a special trip to ask for her assistance, and the cop had come across as a pragmatic, by-the-book guy.

Patrick rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Well, if he suddenly needed to borrow the brain inside that lovely casing, then he’d pull out the professional charm and make her forget that she’d ever thought badly of him. The fact that she rang his bell would just make that job pleasant, rather than a chore.

“Let me get my coat, I’ll be right back.”

“Patrick.” The cop got his attention with a thick, stubby finger waved under the agent’s nose. “Don’t underestimate her,” Petrosian warned. “She may look like a little girl, but she’s smart. And tough.”

Patrick raised his eyebrows at Petrosian’s wording. The last thing he would ever describe that woman as was “little girl.”

“Aggie. You driving?” She was back, a denim jacket pulled over her sweater. Clearly, the chill air outside didn’t bother her at all. Spring in New England, ha. He was already homesick for D.C.’s milder weather.

“Yeah. I’ll bring you back after, okay?” Petrosian was already herding them out the door. That was fine by Patrick—the crime scene wasn’t getting any fresher while they stood here. The sooner he got to it, the sooner he could determine if he had any business being here at all.

The dark green sedan slid through traffic, heading away from the downtown area into more residential blocks. Petrosian left the radio muted to a quiet squalk and their cat lady didn’t seem inclined to talk, so Patrick took advantage of the time, sitting in the backseat, to go over his notes and compare them to the official file on this incident. There wasn’t much in the update Petrosian had given him at the airport, and he closed it without having made any more progress than he had since getting the original material via the local bureau office the night before. The information was too slim: he needed to see the site himself, form his own impressions. That was why he was here: his skill was in transforming direct observation into a working and workable theory. Someone else’s observations, with their inevitable biases, were useless to him.

“Please, don’t let anyone have fubar’d the scene.”

“What?” Petrosian raised his eyes to the rearview mirror to look back at him.

“Nothing,” he said, gesturing at the files in explanation. Thankfully, Petrosian just nodded and went back to his driving. Bad form to tell your host that you expect his men to be incompetent. No, Patrick thought ruefully, he was not getting off on the right foot with anyone here so far.

Ten minutes later, they parked outside a small storefront, a single-story corner convenience store in a neighborhood of small, neatly maintained houses with neatly, if unimaginatively, tended lawns and a grade school down the block. There were two squad cars out front, but no yellow tape to be seen anywhere. Ms. Malkin got out of the car and waited for Petrosian, who gestured her toward the front door. She nodded once, her body language changing from uncertain to aggressive, and moved up the walkway. Another thing to like, Patrick noted: she took possession of her scene like a pro. It took them a year to hammer that into cadets at the academy, and some of them never learned how to do it.

Lily had been aware, the entire ride, of Agent Patrick’s presence directly behind her. Oh, he hadn’t done anything, hadn’t said anything, but she could practically feel him looming behind her.

All right, “looming” was overstating it. He was sitting normally, going through an official-looking file of papers and photos, barely even glancing up as Petrosian took corners too quickly, only once muttering something she didn’t quite catch. But when he did look up, she felt his gaze like a physical touch, as soft as a cat’s tail flick and just as unmistakable. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly…but it made her uncomfortable.

He made her uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just because he was good looking. Or even because he was arrogant. Lily had seen better and worse examples before, both on her job and in dealing with the cops and the press. But there was something about this guy that was putting her on edge.

Or maybe it was this…whatever it was that Aggie had called her out for, and Agent Patrick was just catching the fallout. She wished that she had asked for more detail before agreeing, but…

It didn’t matter, not with regard to Agent Attitude. Either way, it wasn’t as though she was going to have to deal with him for long; she could put up with the arrogance and just enjoy the eye candy while it lasted.

When they arrived, she got out of the car before Aggie had even finished parking, looking around curiously. She had lived in Newfield for three years, but she didn’t know this neighborhood. It seemed a little rundown, but reasonably safe. Although, she admitted, that might have had something to do with the noticeable police presence on the street.

“Up here,” the detective said, waving her toward the storefront. She swallowed hard and went inside, passing a uniformed officer in the doorway.

There was no warning: one moment she was moving forward, and the next she was knocked back on her heels, a full-body slap.

Aggie had said it was ugly. Ugly wasn’t the word for it. Lily stopped just inside the doorway and blanched, the back of her hand pressing against her mouth while she swallowed, hard, and tried not to breathe.

“Oh God.”

The inside of the front room was splattered in red; walls, counters and empty glass-fronted display cases. In a photograph it might have looked like paint; the smell told the real story. Some atavistic sense in the back of her brain told her what the tinge in the air was, and what the spray, by default, had to be: blood, with the undercurrent of meat starting to go bad.

But the floor was what caught her attention: a cleared space in the middle of the room, the pale green linoleum tiles covered with a black cloth about four feet square. On the cloth, seven still, limp forms were arranged in an odd-shaped circle, nose to tail.

Cats.

And, without warning, she was back in the echoes of a dream. Cats, sprawled as though basking in the sun. Only there was no sun, and their heads turned wrongly, their tails stilled, their voices silent…. A shadow rose behind her; despair and terror flooded her throat….

“Oh, the poor moggies,” she heard Agent Patrick say behind her, and the faint flash of not-quite-a-dream shattered. Her mouth was dry, her skin clammy. Where had it come from, that flash, that overwhelming, painful visual? It wasn’t a memory, nothing she had ever seen. She would remember something that horrible. But where had it come from, then? Television, maybe, or something she had read?

It didn’t matter, she decided, trying to shove it away. The here and now was disturbing enough.

“Who did this to you, little ones?” she heard the agent ask, obviously speaking to the cats, and the discomfort she had felt in the agent’s presence earlier was diluted by an instant and unexpected kinship with him. Arrogant as he might be, there was real sympathy in his voice. They weren’t just animals to him—they were victims.

“I’m going to need photos from every angle,” he barked to Aggie, taking command of the scene as if it had been deeded to him. Clearly, no matter how much he might have felt for them, he was all business now.

The arrogance that had annoyed her earlier was reassuring now. Attitude was much more appealing when matched with clear competence.

Lily took a shallow breath, and regretted it. The bodies weren’t fresh. More than a day, from the smell, but not much longer, or it would be worse. She thought it would, anyway. Actually, she had no idea, and wasn’t able—or willing—to turn around and ask Aggie for an answer.

“You were the one who found the bodies?” Patrick was now asking the young cop nearest him, who nodded. The man—a boy, really—looked as ill as she felt.

Intellectually, Lily knew that people did things like this. The first year she worked at the shelter, around Halloween, she’d been asked to help with two black cats that had been tortured by a couple of wannabe Satanists, to see if the cats could be used to identify and hopefully convict their abusers. It had been a slow news week, and the media had gotten hold of the story. The shot of her leaving the scene with one of the cats clinging to her, his triangular head hidden in her hair, had run every time they touched on the story. That had been what started the “cat talker” nickname. The press had hounded her for a week afterward, even though she refused to give any interviews or sound bytes. Petrosian had sworn to run interference with the press from then on.

Lily didn’t like being in the spotlight. It made her nervous, the same way the unblinking scrutiny of cats once had, as though someone was judging her, finding her lacking, unworthy. Not the way Agent Patrick had, but deeper down, where it mattered. Where you couldn’t avoid it. Connection, a therapist had told her once. She wasn’t good at maintaining connections. The responsibility made her nervous, made her wonder how she had failed, even when she knew that she hadn’t, couldn’t possibly have.

But nobody was watching her now. Even Aggie had turned away, joining Agent Patrick in talking to the cops on the scene, giving her a moment to regain selfcontrol.

“Your people have already been through?” Agent Patrick, his voice still and intense again, as though the lapse into emotion had been a—well, a lapse.

“Last night, yeah, when we made the discovery of this new source.” Aggie’s gravelly rumble was soothing by comparison. “Everything’s been documented and swabbed, but since no humans were involved, we left the scene itself intact, as per your request. As soon as you’re done here, we’ll bag and tag it.”

Lily stood over the circle, wondering what she was doing there. Normally, at a scene, there was a live cat present, of some breed or another, that she could observe and interact with. Normally there was something she could do. Now, all she could do was to take in the details, look at the still, unmoving, cold bodies, and wonder who could have done such a thing.

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The Night Serpent

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The Night SerpentAnna Leonard

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

The Night Serpent
Anna Leonard