Boots (2 page)

Kasha rose with a languid stretch and a sharp-toothed yawn. He trotted over to a cabinet by the cot and hooked a claw under the door's bottom corner to pop it open. With his teeth, he snagged a wool blanket and pulled it out, the cloth unfolding behind him to three times his length as he dragged it across the floor to Willem. When he tried to repeat the process with the down comforter from the cot, Willem finally snapped out of his shocked stupor.

"Hey, um, maybe we should just sleep on the cot."

"Warmer by the fire," Kasha muttered with his teeth still closed on the comforter.

Can't argue that.
Willem rose on shaking legs and made them a nest of blankets on the hearth. He curled up with Kasha snuggled in his arms, the gradual spread of warmth calming his jangled nerves.

His father was dead and he wasn't certain how he was supposed to feel. Numb, definitely, numb. It was all so inconceivable, that Horst Aufderheide, larger than life, never satisfied, never-still Horst, could be gone. Not that he had ever been close to his father. His contempt for Willem's "doodling," his constant irritation about his lack of "drive" and "initiative" had built a Kinzua Dam-sized wall between them.

Kasha began to purr, soothing vibrations rippling through his chest. "Go to sleep, Willem. You need to rest."

Between fire crackle and purr, Willem drifted off.

Poor, unhappy boy, what are we to do with you?
Kasha sat by the glowing embers, watching Willem sleep. Trouble was, the boy was no boy any longer. He had grown tall and strong, with deliciously long legs and shoulders broad enough to sleep on. The face that had been elfin in childhood had transformed into even-featured angelic beauty, full, soft lips and all.

The kasha had wondered, twenty years ago, why the spirits had directed him to Horst's household. The man didn't seem to need help, nor would he have accepted any. His wife had died after the birth of their third son, but he had coped well enough. The boys grew up flawed, but not too much more than other humans. Gunther lacked imagination, content with a small, provincial life. Kurt grew up cool and distant, not an evil man, but insular and self-absorbed. Then there was Willem, the dreamer, the wool-gatherer, though he had seemed settled as a welder, stable and secure.

When Willem's life had disintegrated around his ears, that's when the kasha understood. Not for Horst, this little jaunt so far from home, not for the oldest son, as it had been so often in the past, but for the youngest.

He was here to help Willem. As he blinked luminous green eyes at the lovely creature sleeping on the hearth, he realized he might enjoy the task for once.

Rain fell, regiments of water soldiers drumming double-time on the roof. Willem thought the downpour had woken him until he felt the soft breath against his throat.
Oh, damn...

Someone lay in his arms. Had he been drinking again? He didn't think so, but things were fuzzy. He couldn't recall where he was until he blinked the fireplace into focus, the flames burned down to embers. He pulled back in confusion and his breath hitched hard.

His arms were wrapped around the most beautiful young man he had ever seen. Thick, black hair tumbled to his shoulders. Almond-shaped emerald eyes gazed out of a heart-shaped face with high cheekbones and a slender, elegant nose. Willem moved his hand along the young man's back, feeling only the silken slide of naked skin. He must have been drinking, to forget this gorgeous boy.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

"Hush, Willem," the lovely vision murmured in a throaty baritone. "Go back to sleep." He leaned in and brushed his lips over Willem's. "Sleep."

The command seemed reasonable and impossible to disobey, in any case. Willem's eyelids drooped as if weighted with stones. His last bit of awareness was of the stranger snuggling closer, resting his head on Willem's shoulder. For some reason, he found it comforting rather than odd. His last waking thought was that Kasha had been right about the rain.

"Wake up, dear boy, I have breakfast."

Fingers of gray light filtered through the cabin's window. Willem woke to stiff muscles and the smell of...
what the hell is that?

He sat up with a groan to find Kasha sitting beside him, with look-what-I-just-did smugness. At his feet lay a walleyed bass, nearly as long as the tomcat.

"Whoa. How did you... I mean, it's too big for you."

Kasha made a sound between a sneeze and a growl. "You're welcome, I'm sure."

The bass stared up at him with its strange, milky eye. He half expected the fish to start talking as well, but that was ridiculous, of course. Dead fish don't talk.

Neither do cats.

"Um... I guess I'll cook it for us?"

"You do whatever you like with your portion." Kasha turned half away to clean his front paws. "Just give me the head and I'll be happy."

Did I offend him? Do cats get offended?
"Thank you. For the fish. I'm not awake yet. Had the strangest dream."

"Oh, yes?"

"There was this boy. Really hot. He was... " Heat climbed Willem's face. "Never mind."

"No need to be embarrassed. You obviously haven't had a good fuck in some time."

Somehow hearing the word out of a cat's mouth embarrassed him more than discussing a naked-hot-boy dream.

He shoved all the strangeness of the past day into the back of his mind to concentrate on the practical concerns of preparing fish. The cabin had a good set of knives, from which he selected a scaler and a heavy chef's knife. Once he'd hacked off the head and handed it to Kasha as promised, he fell easily into the task made familiar by so many summers spent fishing with his brothers. Off with fins, tail, and scales, hook in near the tail, slice it open, and clean out the guts. While he had never been good at catching fish, the cleaning had a meditative rhythm to it, good for getting lost in his thoughts.

Kasha didn't speak again until he had a fire going, the fish cooking on an improvised spit. "I have some things to see to today. While I'm gone, I have a task for you."

"A... what?"

"Task, Willem. Something I require you to do," Kasha went on, apparently unperturbed by his confusion. "I need a good pair of boots. Perhaps a nice, wide-brimmed hat as well. A well-tailored jacket would be asking too much, I suppose. But most important are the boots. I need you to purchase a pair for me."

"Boots."

"Yes, as in were made for walking. A pair of Luccheses would be ideal, but I'll settle for Ariats, or anything well made. I suppose--"

"Why would a cat need boots?" Willem blurted out.

Kasha sighed in a most un-feline way and then did something else unexpected. He stood. This wasn't in the way a cat will get up on its hind legs for a moment to take a look at what's on the table or to gauge a leap. No, this was standing as if he were normally bipedal and walking on two feet was the most natural thing for him.

Willem felt as if a giant vacuum had sucked all the air from the room. He stared, fighting his frozen lungs for a breath, and finally forced out, "You're not a cat, are you?"

"Of course I'm a cat, you twit," Kasha snapped. "What do I look like, a turnip?"

"You're... " Willem gulped a breath as he tried to calm his slamming heart. Really, what did one more thing matter? He'd already conceded the loss of his sanity when the cat started talking. Nothing should surprise him, then. Fairy dust, winged horses, magic beanstalks, he should expect to see just about anything now. "You're not just a cat."

Kasha gave him a slow, unreadable blink. "Correct. Not just." He dropped back down to all fours. "I am your friend, though, Willem. I want to help you. Do you understand that?"

"Yes." He found he meant it. If Kasha was a hallucination, he was a beneficial one. If he truly was some sort of... something, otherworldly being, magical creature, he had always been Willem's friend.

"Good. Then finish your breakfast and go down into town to get me some boots."

"What, um, size?"

"The smallest you can find, dear boy. I don't have very large feet."

No, and they're not the right shape for human boots.
"Okay. But you still didn't answer my first question."

Fish head held between his front paws, Kasha ignored him and attacked his breakfast. Finally, after picking the skull clean, he tipped his head to one side and asked, "What is it you want most? If you had no need to worry about money or what others thought, what would you do?"

Willem shrugged. "Don't know. Go to college, maybe."

"And what attraction does higher learning hold?"

"See, I--" He broke off, shaking his head. "It's stupid. And just not practical."

"That's your father talking." Kasha rolled onto his back, thick tail thumping the hearthstones. "Never mind practical. Tell me your most outlandish, outrageous dreams."

Willem cracked a little smile. His most outrageous dreams, the ones with gorgeous male bodies and various edible items such as garden tubs full of whipped cream, weren't ones he would share with a cat, even one who wasn't just a cat. He peeled off a bit of fish to test if it was done, forcing his brain back to the question. "I wanted to go to art school, maybe in Philly or Pittsburgh or Carlisle. But it would have been a waste of money. I mean, you pony up all that cash, and then you're left without a steady income when you graduate, probably strapped with loan payments, too."

Kasha batted at his shoelace, then captured it to chew on the end. "So the purpose of this outpouring of funds would have been to create, to become an artist."

"Yeah. Stupid, huh?"

"Terribly," Kasha said in a dry tone. "Are you so beaten down, Willem, that you no longer see the sky?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" He pulled the shoelace away gently. "Stop that. I don't have a spare."

"Do the few things I ask of you. Trust me for but a short while. I am, after all, a
magic
cat. I'm going to change your life, my boy."

"With a pair of boots."

"Yes."

Well, what the hell? Not as if three hundred bucks would last me all that long, anyway. And if I've lost my mind, might as well go the whole way to Crazytown.
"I'll see what I can find."

"Good boy. Now, I must be off. I'll meet you back here this afternoon." Kasha padded to the door, stood on his hind legs, and turned the knob to open it as a person would.

A shiver climbed Willem's spine on spider feet.
Magic.
Did that mean magic in the benign, stories-for-kids sense? Or was Kasha something far more sinister? The word "demon" came to mind. Shouldn't he feel some sense of menace, then?

He sifted back through memories of Kasha to see if there were any frightening ones. A scary hiss once or twice, but that was just him being a cat. No, most of the time he had just been Puss, comfortable, affectionate, and tending toward lazy. He had slept on his cushion at the brewery, prowled among the sacks of barley, and sprawled on Willem's lap in a purring, contented heap.

Any lingering anxious shadows cleared as he stepped from the cabin into the sunlight. The autumn rain had left half-frozen jewels on every twig and fire-hued leaf in sight, the woods decked out in society party splendor. Things had gone wrong, sure, but the world was still beautiful and evil supernatural things only existed in frightened human minds. He squared his shoulders and strode down the hill toward town.

Kasha sat on the bureau by the window in Willem's old apartment, watching the entwined figures on the bed.
Lazy slugs. Willem would never sleep this late.

The smaller boy, Joey, slept on his back, mouth open, hand cupping his balls. It wasn't a good look for him. Kasha had seen him with Willem before, though, and had never been impressed. Something in his restless, shifting eyes kept him from being a handsome young man. If once, just once, he had gazed at Willem with adoration rather than calculation, Kasha might have reconsidered what he was about to do.

The taller boy, the one he didn't know, stirred first. He had no quarrel with that one, except that he had been instrumental in causing Willem's pain. Any collateral damage would be little cause for regret.

The tall boy yawned and rolled over to slide a hand across Joey's bare stomach. He startled when he spotted Kasha.

"Fuck. That's one big-ass cat." He nudged Joey's side. "You didn't tell me you had a cat, babe."

"Cat? Wha--" Joey rubbed a palm over his face, one eye opening far enough to show the bloodshot evidence of heavy excess. "Don't have a fucking cat."

Prim and proper with his tail curled around his feet, Kasha did his best to give off a non-threatening air. While the slugs untangled from sheets and each other, though, he began to weave. Some spellcrafters saw magic as flowing streams to direct; for others it came in flecks and motes to puzzle together. For Kasha, magic was the complex pattern of threads that ran through all things, the very fabric of reality.

He pulled threads to him from Willem's ex-lover, from the street outside, from the woods outside of town. A bright green thread of poison ivy, a dark skein of spite, a brown, chitinous thread of bedbug, a vibrant thread of scarlet from Willem himself, and Kasha's own rainbow hues wove over and under into the pattern he desired. It was an inelegant thing with the feel of a rag rug, unsecured ends and all, but the spell wasn't meant to endure or accomplish anything elaborate. He sent it into Joey's underwear drawer.

"How'd the damn cat get in here?" Joey muttered as he opened the drawer and pulled out a pair of powder blue bikini briefs.

Kasha wrinkled his nose in disgust. The room stank of stale sweat and sex, and the boy wasn't even going to clean himself before he dressed? He truly deserved what he was about to receive. The new lover at least staggered to the shower first.

During his search over the floor for clothes, Joey began to scratch absently at his balls and his stomach. By the time his lover emerged from the shower, smelling a good deal better, Joey's scratching had become persistent.