Slaying Monsters for the Feeble - Annette Marie Page 0,17
arms.
“Cats can’t get turned into vampires, right?” I asked Zora.
“No, but I’m not sure a cat can survive a—”
“I need to go. Come on, Z—” I caught myself, biting off Zylas’s name. “I mean, are you coming, Zora? Or staying here?”
“We have to report the kill and wait for MPD cleanup,” Zora replied. “If you stay, you can have a cut of the bounty. You did—”
“That’s fine. It’s all yours.” I hurried past them, silently asking Zylas to follow me. “See you later!”
They called bemused farewells as I took off through the trees, my demon on my heels and a precious bundle in my arms.
Chapter Six
“Hey, kitty,” I murmured. “How are you doing?”
I knelt beside a large dog crate, holding a cat treat through the bars. Inside was a fluffy cat bed, scattered mouse toys, a litter box, a water dish, and a food bowl full of drying chicken pâté. The vampire’s victim crouched on the small bed, huge green eyes fixed on my face and tail fluffed to twice its size.
“It’s okay, little girl,” I cooed. “Want a nibble? It’s a yummy treat. You need to eat to get strong again.”
The frightened, half-grown kitten let out a low warning growl. Sighing, I dropped the treat through the bars, then crawled backward before rising to my feet. The vet had said the kitten should recover with food and rest, but she’d gone almost twenty hours without eating a bite.
I hadn’t specifically intended to adopt the cat, merely get her to a vet before she died, but someone had to take care of her. The vet had assured me—after I’d invented a story about finding the injured animal in an alley—that the kitten’s chances of survival would be much better with me than at a shelter, but if she wouldn’t eat, what good was my care?
I turned toward my bedroom door and started in surprise. Zylas was leaning against the threshold, arms crossed and light gleaming across his left armguard.
“Why are you wasting time?” he asked in a low, biting tone.
Ignoring his question, I squeezed past him into the apartment’s main living area. It wasn’t much—at one end, a tiny kitchen with a short breakfast bar that fit two stools, and at the other, a living room overflowing with a single couch, a coffee table, and a small TV on a cheap stand.
The TV was secondhand. Amalia had purchased a brand new one to start, and after setting it up, she’d made me give Zylas a stern lecture about treating it with care. He’d put his barbed tail through the screen ten minutes later.
Keeping a demon entertained wasn’t easy. He could survive a few days without anything to do, but then the restlessness set in. And a restless demon was destructive.
He could speak English but couldn’t read it, so books weren’t an option, and he hated screens. After questioning him, I discovered framerates that appeared smooth to the human eye were aggravatingly choppy to him. So all TV, movies, and video games were out. How did you keep a battle-hardened demon entertained in an 800-square-foot apartment?
A few days into the pinnacle of my flu, I’d sent Amalia to the department store with my credit card and begged her to bring back every game she could find. Zylas wouldn’t touch most of them, but when Amalia dumped a 500-piece puzzle onto the floor, he’d wandered over to watch.
Amalia spent four hours on the puzzle, then broke it apart, shook up the pieces, and dumped it out for Zylas, daring him to beat her time. He laid all the pieces out face-up as she had, then, for a full ten minutes, he simply stared at the disassembled puzzle.
Just as Amalia and I wondered if he understood the game, he picked up two pieces and fit them together. Then picked another out of the 498 scattered bits and fit it in. Then the next. Then the next. One by one, he fit each piece together, only occasionally needing to test two or three to find the right one. If he got it wrong, he set the piece back in its original spot.
We watched speechlessly as he assembled the puzzle in minutes.
The next day, Amalia returned with a 1000-piece puzzle. He did the exact same thing, staring at the pieces—not even sorting them first—before assembling the puzzle as though following invisible instructions. We watched him complete four puzzles before I figured out what he was doing.
He was memorizing the pieces. Every one—its color, shape, and