Page 36 of Disenchanted

Sage frowned. Cats.

“Mal, can I get you a snack?”

He peeped open one eye. “Oh. Well. Only if you’re making something. Don’t go to any trouble on my account.” He trotted back to the kitchen, tail perked upright immediately, and Sage found she had no choice but to follow after her talking cat.

Having bribed him with half a kipper, followed by a teaspoon of leftover cream, Sage cautiously invited Mal to join her in their usual setup on the sofa. She wondered if this changed anything but soon realized that nothing was remotely different. A brief display of him cleaning the cream from his whiskers began, followed by her simply gawping in fascination while Mal insisted that a frog had actually run directly under his paws that morning, and it really was no fault of his own, there was nothing he could have done about it. Then Mal cleared his throat importantly.

“Anyway, I certainly have some questions,” he purred.

“I could say the same to you. You aren’t normally quite so…vocal.” Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Mal was an extremely chatty cat. Especially now that he was a little older and into his more gentlemanly years. He tended to chirp, chat and meow fairly consistently as he wandered around the house. His vocals verged on shouting when it came to circling her ankles at breakfast, second breakfast, lunch or dinner time.

“Maybe you’ve just never been listening well enough,” he said. “I tell you things all the time, just as you tell me.”

That was true. Sage did often pick up on meanings and messages from her familiar that others were not privy to. She could sense when he was content, full of love, playful, satisfied. She could also sense, a fraction of a second earlier than anyone else, when he was the exact opposite of all of those things and about to treat someone’s hand like prey.

“Your point is well made,” she replied.

Mal spun around a few times before deciding that the centre of the cushion was the right spot to resume the loaf position. Sage took the other end of the sofa and sat cross-legged, facing her familiar.

“From what I could gather last night while you were whittering away to yourself in the wee hours, and as we can safely assume from this newest development, a spell has gone awry,” Mal said.

Sage nodded. “That’s putting it lightly.”

“And far be it from me to speak out of turn, but from peering over your shoulder and reading your notes, it seems as though all of the resulting mishaps so far have actually been kind of the cat’s pyjamas, have they not?”

“Certainly not unpleasant,” Sage conceded with a nod. “Laurel…you know, my sister?”

“Of course I know Laurel. She’s the one who gives particularly good back scratches.”

“That’s her. She has a theory that magic is attempting to teach me some sort of lesson, to show me that it can be…something good.”

“As opposed to what? Wicked?”

Sage shifted uncomfortably. “Something like that.”

Mal gave a sigh that moved his entire little body. “I thought we’d moved past those feelings.”

Sage was suddenly determined to focus on the zip of the cushion she was hugging tightly. She twiddled it mercilessly. “I have, I have…Well, they don’t keep me up all night crying into your fur anymore, at least. Mostly because I haven’t the time to contemplate them as much. They’re just dormant feelings these days, spirits turned to stone statues. I’m not sure I’ll ever be rid of their presence.”

She always found that confessions to her cat came more easily than to anyone else.

“You cannot be a wicked witch, Sage. When have you ever known a wicked witch to have a ginger cat, for one thing? That’s not how the stories go.”

She gave him a reluctant twitch of a smile. “You’re a little biased.”

“I’m a cat. We’re not ones to worry about hurting feelings. If I thought you were an awful human, I’d tell you. And then join in whatever evil plans you were cooking up. I’m loyal that way.” Sage swore she saw the smallest smirk appear between his whiskers. He stretched out a languid paw in her direction. “You’ve told me what happened hundreds of times over and I still don’t believe you’re to blame.”

She held his round green gaze for a moment. “But it was my spell.”

“You were just a kid,” Mal said firmly, shaking his head. “There’s no way your magic was capable of it—or you as a person, for that matter.”

“I can only tell you the facts, Malachite. The flowers that I picked combined with my magic, I conjured some kind of poison, and some kind of dark Earth Sorcery went horribly, horribly wrong. The next morning, Mum and Dad were…” As always, when the rare moment came that she had to say the words out loud, they turned to stone in her throat. Heavy, jagged and stuck. “Mum and Dad were gone. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Perhaps you should,” Mal said with a nose twitch. “I know life feels easier when everything fits into a box that can be labelled, taped and stacked, Sage, but that’s not always possible. Sometimes—”

“Sometimes a stupid, lost little girl believes she’s meant for special things, tries to prove it to everybody else and kills her parents.”

Mal’s ears scooched back in surprise. The cold words came out so sharply that Sage reeled back from them once they’d tumbled from her mouth. She hastily gathered her composure and tucked a ringlet behind her ear, trying to ignore the tremble in her hand as she did so.