Hello, dear reader. It's been a while hasn't it? Enjoy this last word from me about cats and demon cults. I think...

A few hours earlier. Or a lifetime later.

"Hello."

"You're a cat."

"So I am. And you are human. For now."

"Cats talk?"

"I do."

"What's your name?"

"Priyanka Chopra. Now, piss off."

I looked at myself.

It was time to remember again. This was me, after all. The real me. The corporeal one. The one with blood in her veins and grace in her heart. Not the ugly machine I became. Not the automaton I was now.

She, or I, was beautiful. That was plain to see. There was something beneath this surface of mine. Some memory. Some gut emotion of standing in front of a mirror and looking at myself. Holding my breasts up. Pinching my belly together. Tugging at my hair.

An inspection only you can do to yourself. An old, cold memory of self-loathing.

Scars. Scars criss-crossed around my ribs.

Freedom.

Pain brought freedom. And I knew it. I knew it even before I was put into this runt's body. My mother, my grandmother. Everyone. Pain and freedom were leitmotifs for this haggard little clan.

And me, of course.

Whatever the fuck I was.

She stood up, dressed to kill. Herself.

She pissed off, like I told her to.

I turned. I walked back in.

Fisk was just where I knew he'd be. At the bar cabinet, his back to me. His t-shirt stretched across his back, revealing his wrinkled hands, still sturdy and rope-like.

I'd known this one for fifty years.

He could snap me into two.

But I had to finish this job. I owed it to her. The one who came before me. And the one enjoying the last bicycle ride of her life.

Not if I could help it.

I coughed up a hairball.

He turned, his eyes red. This must have taken a toll on him, this life. Lived for a dead cult and a mad god.

Probably didn't exist, this god. I used to look for scientific explanations to what happened to me, but there weren't any.

There was just this death of mine. And this rebirth.

"You ready to finish this?" I asked him.

"Since I was twelve." he answered.

We stare at each other for a while. Then we laugh. Long and hard, him inebriated with expensive whiskey, me with cheap, long, unravelling time.

We were drunk in excess, him and I.

"You really have what it takes to kill that girl?"

"Ask yourself." he told me. "I'm just the blade."

He pulled out his little carved knife and it glimmered in the lamplight.

"Just an old, dried out blade."

I smiled. I checked my watch. Any time now.

"I'll just go to the toilet, then. See you in a bit."

"Yeah. Okay." I told him.

Fisk left.

I clambered on to the bar cabinet, opened out the drawer. I found the little sachet I had stashed under there earlier. I opened it with my claw and sprinkled it into his Whiskey. And into the bottle.

He came out, nodded to me and lifted his glass. He drank.

"Let's do this."

He didn't make it out the door.

I'd been saving that little packet for a long while now.

It was good to get all that baggage over and done with. To be free.

Pain was freedom.

I ran.

I ran as fast as my feet would carry me and the city brushed past me. They see the city looks beautiful at night. I had other things on my mind.

I clambered up to the park entrance, picked my way up the gradient and looked back, just to see the bobbing head of her bicycle. I had beaten her to it. Somehow.

I found the bench.
I cried.

I pulled myself together. I found the little bomb right where it was before. It wasn't beeping yet. I grabbed it in between my teeth and ran with it.

I threw it deep into the compost pit in the middle of the park.

I ran back. I hid in the bushes. I waited.

She was there. Mesmerized by flashing lights and mad with shock and grief and life and death and love and loathing and poetry and drugs and smoke and sex and music and a vivid, pulsating legacy of sin and suffering and inherited guilt.

And I watched.

And I waited.

Oh, how I waited. 

The End