Chapter 845: Reunion [Bonus - ]

Chapter 845: Reunion [Bonus Chapter]

She pressed her lips right against his ear, and her purr vibrated straight into it.

“You’re a very naughty, very horny boy, Silas Graves,” she whispered wickedly. “I think I’ll tell Harper everything the moment she walks in… I’ll describe every inch of your reaction… Every single inch and how her precious Lord sat in a bath with another woman, Nyaa~.”

Silas’s eyes went wide though he smiled.

’Got you…’

He lunged, throwing both arms around her waist, fully intending to pin her down and throw a towel over her smug face before she could do anything else however he forgot one important detail.

…The upgrade had already settled.

Nitocris-Hathor wasn’t a fragile D-Rank stray with sixty Vitality anymore… She was SSS-Rank now, with every scrap of speed, reflex and grace that came with it.

His fingers were an inch from her waist when her body simply vanished.

POP!

A puff of purple-and-black smoke burst up out of the water, smelling faintly of incense and cinnamon as Silas’s arms clapped shut around empty air, and his face went straight into the bathwater.

SPLOOSH!

He shot back up, coughing water out of his nose and wiping his eyes.

Perched on the edge of the sink, already completely dry and sleek as polished obsidian, sat a small black cat.

Her fur gleamed with an impossible luster.

Her tail was curled proudly around her paws, and her eyes, now the same brilliant violet as her human form, glittered with mocking triumph.

“Catch me if you can, peasant, Nyaa~!”

She kicked off the counter and shot straight through the half-open bathroom door.

WHOOSH!

“Get back here, you little black menace!” Silas roared.

He vaulted out of the tub with what felt like half the bathwater pouring off his clothes, and his soaked socks hit the floor with frantic, squelching slaps.

SQUELCH! SQUELCH!

He burst out into the hallway just in time to see a sleek black streak rocketing toward the stairs.

She wasn’t running so much as flowing with her paws barely touching the floorboards before she launched herself down the staircase.

“Harper will hear of your crimes!” her voice echoed back up the stairwell. “I’ll demand fifty bowls of tuna as hush money! Fifty! Each, Nyaa~!”

“Fifty bowls of cold water is what you’ll get!” Silas yelled, taking the stairs three at a time and leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him.

They tore down the staircase together, a streak of black lightning darting between the banister posts, chased by a Lord dripping what felt like a small lake onto his own floor.

At the bottom, Nitocris whipped around the newel post with impossible, liquid momentum and shot into the kitchen.

Silas lunged after her.

She hopped onto the counter, ran the full length of it, and leaped clean over the fruit bowl.

Silas’s hand closed on the space where her tail had been half a second earlier and knocked an apple onto the floor.

THUNK!

“Missed, Nyaa~!”

She bounced off the top of the fridge, sailed over his head and landed on the dining table, skidding across the polished wood in a spray of Martha’s neatly folded napkins.

“…Nito! Those were folded!”

“Not anymore, Nyaa~!”

He dove across the table, however she was already gone in a black blur flicking between the chair legs, and Silas slid off the far end of the table before landing flat on his back on the floor.

’Do I really have to be serious for a cat…? Well she is an SSS-Rank cat.’

THUD!

He lay there for a second, staring up at the ceiling and somewhere above him, a soft paw tapped his forehead twice.

“Pathetic,” Nitocris said from the edge of the table. “You fought a god, and you can’t catch a cat, Nyaa~”

He grabbed for her however she was already sailing back across the room in a single bound, and she landed lightly on the back of the living room sofa.

Silas picked himself up off the floor and limped back into the living room.

He stood there panting with his shirt plastered to his chest and water dripping steadily off the hem of his jeans into a growing puddle around his socks.

…He’d fought a god beneath Iunu with less effort than this, and that particular god hadn’t knocked over a single dining chair.

On the back of the sofa, the black cat calmly lifted one front paw and started washing her face, as if she hadn’t just sprinted down an entire staircase at thirty miles an hour.

Silas let out a long sigh.

“You’re exhausting, you know that?”

Nitocris paused mid-lick and gave him a slow, lazy blink of her violet eyes.

“I am royalty, Silas Graves… Royalty doesn’t negotiate with damp peasants. Also, you’re dripping on the rug, Nyaa~.”

He looked down… He was, in fact, dripping on the rug.

He ran a hand through his soaked hair and wrung a handful of water out onto the floor.

He looked down at his ruined clothes, shook his head, and decided to cut his losses before Martha came home and had a heart attack over the floorboards.

He raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.

The wind answered as it uncoiled from his fingertips in a tight, spinning spiral.

WHOOOOSH!

A warm compact cyclone wrapped around his body, lifting his hair and whipping his clothes against his skin.

In two heartbeats, it stripped every drop of water out of the denim, dried his shirt, and swept the puddles off the floorboards into a floating orb of water that Silas flicked casually out the open kitchen window into the bushes.

He patted his shirt and smiled, it was bone dry and smelled faintly of fresh air.

He gathered up the napkins, set the apple back in the bowl, and picked up the chair the cat had somehow knocked over on her way through then he looked toward the stairs, where a long trail of wet footprints led all the way up to the bathroom.

He sighed and flicked two fingers toward the staircase.

The water obeyed him easily.

It peeled up off every step in thin glittering ribbons, drew itself up the stairs and down the hallway, and he could hear the splash of it pouring itself neatly down the bathroom drain a moment later.

“Show-off, Nyaa~,” Nitocris muttered.

“…You’re quite welcome.”

On the sofa, Nitocris watched him with open interest, her tail swaying lazily.

“Wind magic,” she observed. “Useful… My court sorcerers would have taken a week to dry a carpet. You may continue to be my servant, Nyaa~.”

“I’m not your servant, really. As you can see, I have a life.”

“You bathed me and brushed me and dried me,” she said with total serenity. “That is the definition of a servant… A very good servant. I’ll put in a word with Harper, Nyaa~.”

“You were literally just threatening to tell Harper—”

“Two different words, Nyaa~”

Silas opened his mouth to argue, then stopped as her tail had gone still.

She was sitting very upright on the back of the sofa, staring at the front door.

Her ears were angled forward, and the smug sparkling mischief had drained out of her violet eyes, leaving a feeling smaller and much more uncertain behind.

“What is it?” he asked.

For a moment, she didn’t answer.

“What if she hates me?” she said finally, very quietly. “She’d have every right… I lied to her… I took her body… I made her watch me do terrible things with her own hands… What if she sees me and screams? What if she throws me back into the street, Nyaa~?”

Silas looked at the small black cat sitting stiffly on his sofa, trying very hard to look like a queen.

“Then she throws you into the street,” he said gently, “and I’ll go pick you up again…”

Nitocris turned her head and stared at him.

“You’re an idiot, Nyaa~” she said, but her voice wobbled on the last word.

Silas sat down on the arm of the sofa beside her.

“She cried about you, you know,” he said. “After Khemet. She didn’t tell me why at first. She just sat on my couch for an hour holding a cup of tea she never drank then she told me the last thing you said to her… at night of course before she slept.”

The cat’s ears twitched.

“She doesn’t hate you, Nito. I’m pretty sure she’s been mourning you…”

Nitocris didn’t say anything.

She just kept staring at the door, and after a long moment, she shuffled one paw closer to him on the cushion until her side was pressed against his hip however he pretended not to notice.

Outside, an engine roared.

VRRRRRMMMMMM!

It was and deep and aggressive, the kind of throaty mana-engine snarl that made car alarms down the block chirp nervously… It swept up the quiet avenue, swung into the curb in front of the building and cut off.

Silas glanced at the window, ran a quick hand through his hair to push it back into place, and straightened his shirt then came footsteps with heels clicking up the path at a pace just short of running.

’Well good thing the gate is open…’

On the sofa, Nitocris had gone completely still as her claws sank slowly into the cushion, and her tail wrapped tight around her paws.

The front door swung open.

Stepping across the threshold in the bright afternoon sunlight was Harper Whitmore and she looked radiant.

She’d clearly spent every second of the past twenty minutes making herself look spectacular.

Her violet hair had been washed and blown out into soft, glossy waves that framed her face, and her wire-rimmed glasses were polished to a shine.

She wore a cropped tailored houndstooth blazer over a high-necked white silk camisole and high-waisted dark slacks that showed off the long lines of her legs, and she smelled of white tea and vanilla.

Her cheeks were still flushed pink from her workout and the phone call, and her violet eyes were bright and eager.

She’d put on lip gloss… She never wore lip gloss to spar, and she never wore it to anywhere else, and Silas was keenly aware that she’d put it on for him.

“Silas-kun~!” she called out, a huge, dazzling smile breaking across her face as she kicked the door shut with her heel. “I made it in eighteen minutes! I had to run two yellow lights because somebody said come quick, and if you think I’m going to let you shave those four little hairs before I—”

She didn’t finish, because her eyes had just landed on the sofa, and on the small black cat sitting on it.

From the back of the sofa, the black cat launched herself across the room like a cannonball.

She cleared twenty feet of open air in one silent perfect leap and landed with featherlight precision right against Harper’s chest.

“Oof…!” Harper gasped, and her hands flew up on pure reflex to catch her.

Her fingers closed around a small velvety body as she pulled it against her silk camisole to keep it from falling.

Silence dropped over the room.

Silas stood a few paces away with his hands in his pockets… He didn’t move and he didn’t speak, but his heart was beating a little harder than he wanted to admit.

He’d told Nito that Harper didn’t hate her as he believed it, mostly but he’d also been there beneath Iunu, in the chamber of the broken Sub-Suppression Engine, when Ititius was finally knocked out of her body.

He’d seen her collapse onto the cold flagstones afterward, shaking so hard her teeth chattered and staring at her own hands like she didn’t trust them to be hers anymore.

…There were some things people couldn’t forgive, even when they wanted to.

He watched Harper’s face and waited as Harper stood frozen just inside the door, cradling the cat against her ribs.

Slowly, she lowered her chin. Her glasses slipped a little down her nose as she looked into the small black face looking up at her.

The cat in her arms was trembling and Harper could feel it through the silk.

It didn’t scratch, and it didn’t hiss.

It sat comfortably in her arms with its front paws resting lightly against the lapels of her blazer, gazing up at her with quiet unblinking violet eyes.

Harper frowned, bewildered.

It was a beautiful cat, glossy and sleek and strangely elegant, with eyes almost exactly the same shade of violet as her own, and it was looking at her as if it knew her.

“Silas,” she said slowly, “since when do you have a ca—”

“Harper, Nyaa~”

The voice was small and soft and impossibly familiar.

Harper’s whole body went rigid.

She knew that voice… She’d heard it in a desert under three burning suns… She’d heard it inside her own skull, whispering promises from her bedside table… She’d heard it come out of her own mouth in Iunu, saying terrible things and then, at the very end, saying kind ones…

She’d heard it break in that frozen rotunda, whispering her name and an apology, a heartbeat before a golden hand closed and crushed it into ash.

Harper had floated there, helpless, and watched… now her fingers began to tremble against the velvety fur.

Her lips parted, and the words came out barely louder than a breath.

“N-Nitocris…? But… I watched you die…”