Cat Tales Read online

  "Who are you?" I whispered, staring at her.

  "I'm the Protector," she said simply, sitting back in her chair. "This is what I do, I take in the wounded of this world and this house, this garden, can make them whole again. This is a safe house, safe from darkness, safe from harm. Summer lives in this garden, and sweet dreams under my roof. I am here to give to all strength and sustenance, and the will to go on… and, when the time comes, the will to fight what I fight – to one, and one alone. So – it is to be you, I think. The Protector who comes after me. You know. You understand. You stood up to fight the darkness, all alone, on your own. You have the mark of the Protector on you. With me… it was later, and the pain already had a foothold in me, the damage was already done. With you, it might have come just in time – the true poison has been taken from you, although you were close enough to smell it, to understand what it truly means."

  "But I don't," I said. "I don't understand any of this."

  "You felt fear, but you were not conquered by it," she said. "That is a Protector's strength. We understand what lies underneath, we have to before we can rise to fight it. But it cannot destroy us."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You, my child, are what comes after me. There are only a handful of us in this world at any one time – the healers, the ones who make a safe haven and who guard it, sometimes by a word or an invitation inside for a cup of tea, sometimes with our own blood and tears. This is not your safe house, it is mine – but some day you will make your own haven. It is coming."

  I should have known long before now, but it was only in this moment that I really made the connection in my mind.

  "You are the tabby cat," I said in sudden understanding.

  "Sometimes," she said, smiling. "And yes, although you don't think you remember that now, you've seen me here at least once in the aftermath of a battle with some demon out of shadow. Human stupidity, or arrogance, or greed – something that comes out of the dark and has the power to hurt the innocents in its way. I Protect."

  "How…?"

  "It will come to you, " she said gently. "It is given to all of us to find the one who will succeed us eventually – and I can see that someday you will take my place. Not here, but somewhere else, in a safe house of your own, in some other corner of the world where there is a need for healing magic and a healer to wield it." She paused, hesitated slightly as though she were weighing something in her mind, and then came to a decision and reached to lift a slender silver chain over her head. It bore a pendant, a single round stone, golden except for a dark vertical streak in the middle, looking like a lion's eye. Before I had a chance to protest, to refuse, the chain had slipped over my own head, the pendant coming to rest over my heart. "This will tell you when it is time," she said. "I only have a little time left – and when I am gone you will make a safe house, and it will grow old roses in the garden, and call to the sick and the wounded and the ones who need protection. And in that stone lies the spirit and the wisdom that I myself inherited once from all the ones who came before me. I have learned all it needs to teach me – it's yours now. You are the Protector. This house remains a safe haven for as long as I stay here – but the shadows come for us all, it is what a Protector knows from the very beginning. Make another safe house, for all the hurt ones in this, your corner of the world. It will take as long as it must… but don't let it take too long" She leaned over and actually kissed me on the forehead, as though in benediction. "Go, now. And remember."

  My mother died when I was sixteen years old. The authorities came for me and for my brother, and took us from our father's house – they separated us, and I don't know where he went, in the end. I never saw him again after that last tearful goodbye, when they tore us apart from one another and he was put in one car and I in another and we were driven off in opposite directions. I was placed with several foster families, but nothing ever seemed to work out – not least because I was given to bringing in stray cats from the neighborhood, and speaking to them in a quiet gentle voice, and holding the feral animals until they stilled in my arms and looked at me out of glowing eyes that were blue or bright green or tawny orange-gold – and we had an understanding, that I would heal, and protect and care.

  And then, before I turned seventeen, my hair turned silver-gray overnight.

  I had not worn the cat's-eye pendant which the witch from the cottage had given me; I had kept it safe, but I taken it off from around my neck as soon as I was able to after she had placed it there that night. But on the day that my hair turned the color that hers had been, I took the pendant out of its safe place and hung it openly around my neck. And I walked out of the house in which they had placed me, taking nothing with me except that pendant – and I found an abandoned house at the end of a once-genteel street, and walked inside, and closed the door behind me. It was empty when I fell asleep curled up on the bare floor against a wall whose wallpaper was peeling in rotting streamers – but when I woke, the cottage had dreamed itself into being around me. There was a fireplace, and a lamp which shed warm golden light, and an oddly familiar black cat walked in from the back garden and yawned and took possession of the window-seat in the bay window.

  I was home. And I knew what I had to do.

  The shadows knew me, and came for me when I patrolled the neighborhood streets in the night, when the house lights were down and other people were sleeping. And I knew them, and faced them. And this, she didn't tell me, the witch – this I found out the hard way, myself – every battle is like the first battle, and every victory is like the first victory, because you are always fighting on two fronts – as the Protector, standing between innocents and harm, and as yourself, fighting your own fears and terrors and the shadows in your own soul, things you can never allow to win, because the moment you bow your head before them all the battles of the future are already lost.

  I don't remember exactly the first time I fed a crying child the special cookies that allowed it to come running to me in the guise of a kitten when it was hurt or scared. But somehow, very quickly, the rest of my life disappeared somewhere into a dream – and this was all that I had ever done, all that I had ever been, and I could smell the old roses which had always been there in the garden of a cottage at the end of a suburban street.

  And then came the day I saw a wary, rangy teenager poised ready to flee on my doorstep, staring at me with huge, wounded dark eyes, so much like mine had once been, full of a world of hurt – and yet defiant, ready to take on a world which seemed to be gathered against her. And I understood, and smiled.

  She was who I had once been. And one day she would become what I was now. This was a new Protector, still young, still a chrysalis, but she would understand.

  "Come in," I said softly, beckoning with one hand while the other closed around the eye of the cat on my breast. "This is a safe house."

  -----0-----

  Reviewers say…

  Midnight at Spanish Gardens: "Alexander's language is lovely and poetic...the imagery is beautiful, the setting is compelling...But it's the characters that drive this story, in all of their imperfection, in all of their passion or disconnection or feeling of failure." -- Alana Abbott, Flames Rising

  The Secrets of Jin-shei: "Vivid and involving'... both an exotic journey into the imagination, and a graceful exploration of the heart." -- SF Site

  Changer of Days: "Powerful characters and a powerful setting help to deliver what I am thrilled to say is a great bloody book." Altair

  Gift of the Unmage: "This latest book seems as if it is going to be your standard coming-of-age magician tale, but then you realize it is so much more. It is philosophy, it is science fiction, and it is beautiful." -- Kelly A. Ohlert

  Other books by Alma Alexander

  Midnight at Spanish Gardens (Sky Warrior Books USA 2011)

  Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories (Macmillan, UK, 1995)

  Houses in Africa (David Ling, New Zealand, 1995)

  Letters from the Fire (Harp
er Collins New Zealand, 1999)

  Secrets of Jin Shei (HarperCollins, USA, 2004/2005)

  The Hidden Queen (Eos, USA, 2005)

  Changer of Days (Eos, USA, 2005)

  Embers of Heaven (HarperCollins , UK, 2006)

  Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax, (Kos Books 2010)

  WORLDWEAVERS Series

  1) Gift of the Unmage (HarperCollins, USA, 2007)

  2) Spellspam (HarperCollins, USA, 2008)

  3) Cybermage (Harpercollins, USA, 2009)

  Contact Alma Alexander

  Website: http://www.AlmaAlexander.com/

  Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander

  Email: [email protected]

  Figure 1 Alma Alexander

  About the Author

  Alma Alexander was born on the banks of an ancient river in a country which no longer exists.

  She began telling stories as a child and never stopped. To date, Alma has written close to three million words in more than a dozen published books. Her novel, The Secrets of Jin-shei, has been published in 14 languages in more than a score of countries. Her popular Young Adult Worldweavers series features New World magic and a heroine who is as American as Harry Potter is British.

  The woman underneath the author likes books, embroidery, music ranging from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to Dvorak's New World Symphony, animals, coffee, chocolate, snow, velvet -- and, in people, kindness, intelligence and an off-the-wall sense of humor.

  She is a punaholic, a chronic worrier, sentimental and passionate. She is married to a man who wooed her over the Internet and lured her to America, where she is currently owned by two cats.