Blind Tiger
Page 71

My skin began to itch as fur sprouted all over it, sprouting like grass grown in fast-forward to cover my entire body. Pain shot through my teeth as they grew longer and sharper. As they rearranged themselves in my mouth, like the handiwork of some psychotic dentist.
And finally, when the ordeal was over, I lay panting on the filthy concrete, waiting for the echo of pain to fade from every nerve ending in my body. Stunned, as usual, I needed a moment of stillness—a moment of quiet—in which to understand what had just happened.
Would the process never seem natural? Would my mind never come to terms with the reality my body could no longer deny?
“Robyn?” Titus knelt next to me on the balls of his feet, looking more limber and agile on two legs than I was on four. “Are you ready?”
In reply, I stood, and with my first truly deep breath, alarm resonated through me like the echoing vibration from a cymbal. Never in my life had I smelled such an amazing and startling array of scents. My muzzle bobbed as I sniffed the air, taking them all in.
Titus chuckled. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
Feline, bovine, porcine, equine, avian. I smelled moss, and mold, and rot, and bleach, and the dry, grainy scent of some kind of food pellet. And water. Not chlorinated or salted, like pool water, but fresh yet stagnant, like a pond with insufficient circulation.
There were so many scents I could hardly distinguish them. Too many to concentrate on, yet I couldn’t afford to simply block them all out, because I was looking for one scent in particular.
Justus.
Like Titus, but not.
Unlike a dog, I wouldn’t be able to track him, but if I could detect some trace of his scent, I’d know we were in the right place. We had come an hour early, hoping to see and smell all the partygoers as they arrived, including what would hopefully be the only guest on four legs.
Other than me.
“Let’s go,” Titus whispered as he climbed onto the trash bin against the fence at the back of the zoo. “You’re first.”
Instead of following him onto the bin, I hunkered down in a four-legged squat, muzzle pointed at the goal. Eight-foot vertical jump. No problem. I launched myself into the air with my rear legs. My whiskers flattened against my cheeks. The ground fell away.
My back feet caught the top of the fence, my paw pads curling around it for balance. My front paws hardly brushed the chain-link, then I pushed off against the fence, as I had against the ground. An instant later, I landed on concrete. Inside the zoo.
Chain-link rattled at my back. Titus landed in a squat, backpack square on his shoulders, one hand on the ground. His tongue wasn’t his only limber body part. “Okay, let’s find some place to hide, where we can see the entrance to the herpetarium.”
Fortunately, the zoo’s pathways were lined with flora to look like a wilderness trail, and in the dark, the gaps between the individual plants and shrubs would be even harder to see. At least for humans.
We found a spot behind several large ferns, and Titus squatted next to me, his arm stretched over my back, one hand on my shoulder. “Can you see anything?” He nodded to the herpetarium for clarity.
I stared at the low brick building. There were no windows. If anything was happening inside, I couldn’t see it. Nor could I hear it, even when I rotated my ears to face the building.
“Well then, we’ll just have to wait,” Titus said. But we’d only been hiding a few minutes when I heard a shuffling sound from down the paved pathway in front of the herpetarium. Seconds later, I heard a giggle.
I whined, low and deep, and pointed my muzzle in the direction of the sounds, which Titus couldn’t hear yet, with his human ears.
He stared down the path, and we both tensed when a small group of people came into view, arms weighed down by heavy bags, whispering softly to each other as they “snuck” toward their destination. As if somewhere nearby there was a sleeping security guard who might wake up if they spoke aloud.
I could tell from the way Titus dismissed them that Justus was not among the group.
For the next half hour, we watched small clusters of people my age or younger walk in carrying bulging bags, pushing rolling beer kegs, and lugging cardboard boxes full of portable speaker components. But Justus did not appear, and the novelty of our stakeout soon faded.
No house cat in the history of either houses or cats has ever sat still for more than fifteen minutes without falling asleep, and by eleven forty-five, I was nearing my limit.
I stood and stretched. I yawned, subtly getting Titus accustomed to the idea that I could make small movements in the foliage without alerting anyone to my presence. Then I padded silently through to brush to the left, moving parallel to the path the party-throwers had all come down, combining reconnaissance with movement, to keep myself alert.
“Robyn!” Titus whispered fiercely. “Where are you going?”
I had no way to answer, so I kept moving.
Naturally, he came after me. “You can’t wander around the zoo looking like a cat!”
If I could have spoken, I would have pointed out that wandering around looking like a human would have been just as dangerous, after hours, and probably more illegal.
No one ever accused a cat of trespassing.
“Robyn!”
But it wasn’t Titus’s irritation that brought me to a total standstill in the brush. My nostrils flared slightly, and my head bobbed as I scented the air, trying to pinpoint a direction.
Titus saw my reaction and dropped onto his heels. “Is it Justus?” He scanned what we could see of the path, and tension flooded his scent as clearly as it came through in his posture.
I gave him a small shake of my head. Not Justus. A scent I knew even better.
Leaves rustled across the path, and my focus homed in on the movement with an ease and precision my human eyes could never have managed. Cats may experience the world through taste and smell, but they hunt with their eyes and their ears.
Titus followed my gaze, and when the leaves rustled again, he spotted the movement.
“Not Justus.” He set his backpack on the ground and dug quietly through the front pocket. “Do I need a weapon?”
I rolled my eyes at him, but I had no way to tell him that we were in no danger, except….
I looked down the path to make sure no one else was coming, then I stepped boldly out of the bushes onto the narrow paved road, staring right at the place where the leaves had moved.
“Robyn!” Titus called in a whisper hardly loud enough for me to hear, but I ignored him.