The four of us watched fixedly as a pair of reflective eyes flashed in the darkness of the boulder’s hollow. A twitching nose poked out, angled toward the pile of sardines. As the cat moved out further, I realized its black snout was longer than normal, more like a canine’s. Huge amber eyes and silver-tipped ears followed the snout. 

Two rounded silver rods stuck up from between the cat’s ears, like someone had strapped on a couple of finger-length aluminum rods to look like horns. Was this some influencer’s poor pet? The silver markings on its black fur definitely looked like that might be the case. After all, most animals with gray fur weren’t as reflective as silver spray paint. 

Apparently oblivious to our existence, the cat stepped fully out of the hollow and chowed down on the sardines. Once fully exposed, it revealed an extra set of legs between the normal two, what looked like folded bird wings glued to its back, and a silver barb on the end of its tail. 

It was all I could do not to scream, but I didn’t want to scare off the cat before I could free it from its horrid trappings. How could Izzy just stand there, pretending to be as surprised as the rest of us, when it was so utterly obvious she’d done this? Then again, maybe she hadn’t. Maybe Vance had somehow broken into my room, taken pictures of one of my voidcat paintings, and set up this whole thing to make me look like a fool when I reacted like the cat was real. 

He’d vastly underestimated my intelligence—and my willingness to fight in designer clothing. I glared at him and spoke as sharply as I could while staying quiet. 

“What the hell is wrong with you? This is animal cruelty, and it didn’t even work. You haven’t fooled me. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to help the poor creature you’ve been abusing in a poor attempt to make me look crazy.”

Shaking my head, I dropped into a crouch and slowly moved toward the cat. “Here, kitty kitty, don’t worry. I’m not a big ol’ meanie like Vance. Come here, and I’ll take all that stuff off right now.” 

I vaguely heard whispered arguing going on behind me, but I ignored it to focus on the cat. It looked at me with those huge amber eyes and cocked its head. Licking its lips, the cat kept eating but didn’t let me out of sight.

Still murmuring in a baby-voice, I reached out for the cat’s scruff. Its tail twitched back and forth, a sure sign I was about to get bitten if I wasn’t careful. 

“Mars, don’t,” Aster shouted.

The cat arched its back, hissing.

I glared over my shoulder. “Don’t tell me you believe him. You’ve seen my voidcat paintings.”

He shook his head, even paler than usual. “He didn’t do this. That’s a wild cat.”

Vance held his hands up in surrender. “I swear, I just saw the thing run by and heard it talk. I didn’t get a good look at it. Didn’t know it was deformed.”

“Uh huh. Likely story.” There was no way a cat could have all the deformations necessary to look like a voidcat kitten. Extra legs, maybe, but not the horns or tail-spike or wings.

When I looked back at the cat, it had finished the sardines and was sitting upright, head still cocked. Its fake horns glimmered in the mid-morning sunlight. I winced. 

“You poor thing.” I cautiously held out my hand so it could smell me. 

The cat sniffed and rubbed its head against my hand, purring like a massage chair. I scratched its head around the horns, feeling for any sort of strap I could pull off. 

“Op swai, op swai,” the cat murmured in a distinctly feminine voice. 

I froze. Those words were all too familiar, drilled into my head after years of Shade’s lessons on the languages of his made-up planet. I’d scribbled a lot of my Bontair vocabulary in my diary, which meant Vance was even more of a snoop than I’d thought. He must’ve strapped a mini speaker to the cat and recorded Izzy or a computer voice saying a few common phrases. 

If he thought that would fool me, he was sorely mistaken. I doubted he’d programmed more than a handful of phrases into his phone or whatever he was using to transmit audio to the speaker. All it took was a simple question to prove as much. 

“What’s your name?” I asked in Bontair. 

“You speak Bontair?” She squeaked and fluttered her wings. 

Wow, Vance really had gone all out for this prank. Where did they even sell remote-controlled cat-sized wings? 

“Yeah, I speak it. Do you?”

She snorted. “Obviously. I’m speaking it right now. How’d you learn it?”

That was a lot more Bontair speaking than I’d expected Vance to be able to pull off. Still, he hadn’t outwitted me yet. “Shade taught me. He’s a dreamwalker.”

“A dreamwalker?” Her eyes narrowed, almost as if in concentration. “I’ve never met a dreamwalker named something like ‘Shade.’ Oh, is it a nickname?”

I nodded. “His real name is-” What was it again? He rarely used it, but the name was on the tip of my tongue. Oh, right. “His name’s ‘One Who Walks Through the Shadows Between Worlds.’ It’s a mouthful, so I just call him Shade.”

Eyes wide, she glanced between me and something over my shoulder. “One Who Walks Through the Shadows Between Worlds? He’s really here? I’ve been looking for ages, and my paws are so tired, and I thought I’d never find him. He’s a friend of my- my mom.” She sniffed. “She needs his help. She-”

Leaves crunched, and a shadow fell over us moments before Aster crouched beside me. Eyebrows raised, he murmured, “Can you understand her?”

“Of course I can. Why wouldn’t I know my own made-up language?”

He chuckled nervously. “Are you practicing your ventriloquism, or…?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. Vance stuck a speaker to the cat and programmed it to speak Bontair. He must’ve put a bunch of the words and grammar rules in the program, though, ‘cause I haven’t managed to trip it up yet.”

The cat pawed my arm. “Does he know Bontair?”

I shook my head. “He only knows Earth languages. So, what were you saying about Shade and your mom?”

She let out a soft mew. “Merlin has my mom, and unless Shade gives back the dragon egg he took, Merlin’s gonna hurt her.”

I gritted my teeth to keep from shouting at Vance. He must’ve read my diary cover-to-cover if he knew about Shade’s dragon egg story. As soon as this cat was safe and out of costume, I was going to break Vance’s other arm. For now, I had to keep calm if I didn’t want to scare her away. 

“It’s okay, little girl. I’ll help you. Just let me take you home, and we’ll find that egg for you.” Though I knew the cat didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, she seemed to respond to my intentionally soft voice. When I offered my arms, she jumped into them. 

I stood carefully and started back toward the house. Vance, Izzy, and Aster all stared at me as if they’d never seen anyone carrying a cat before. I shot a look at Vance. 

“It’ll take more than that to get me.”

“I didn’t do anything.” The honest confusion and shock in his voice made me pause. Nothing in his expression made me think he was itching to start a fight. He just stared at the cat in obvious disbelief. Was he really that good of an actor? No, he couldn’t be. This had to be Izzy’s doing. 

“If it wasn’t you, ask your girlfriend. I’m sure she has an explanation for all this.” Now that I thought about it, it did make more sense that Izzy was the culprit. She had significantly more free time and funds to pull this off than Vance did. 

Izzy gasped. I braced myself for a shrieking protest, but she just stood like a statue with her eyes fixed on something over my shoulder. Real terror stretched her cheeks taut. 

I spun around to see Shade looming over us, more wispy and smoke-like than usual. Aster grabbed my arm in a vice grip and dragged me behind him.