Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

nice to me since I’ve been helping with small projects. And since I’m with the Feds, I can perhaps find someone I can speak to about it and get it going.” She sat there for several minutes. Lach could see that her mind was going a mile a minute. “I keep coming back to number one. However, I know there won’t be justice served with that one. All right, number three. This one is a bit trickier. We’d have to catch him getting into the house. Since you’ve all moved out, I don’t know how to pull this off.”

“I know.” They all looked at Rebel. “I can say I’m going to be staying there for a few days until my new place is ready for me.”

“I don’t want to use Angie, but how do we make him believe she’s still there with you? As Thomas said, he’s fixated on her.” That was the tricky part. No one wanted to have a child used as bait. “He might think this is his last chance at her and be a little braver. What can we do to make him stupider than he already is?”

It was Thomas who had the answer. He could, he told them, make the man believe what he wanted. It wasn’t a trick he had had to use much on his side, but it was a bit of fun for him sometimes. The plan was easy enough, Lach thought, and that was what scared her. It was too pat, too easy for mistakes to happen. But in the end, it was all they had.

The plan was set, but Harris told Rebel she needed to talk it over with Rodney. Lach knew as soon as she said it that it was the wrong thing to say to her. Getting the okay from someone she barely knew wasn’t anything that Rebel wanted to do. However, when she stomped out of the room, going to get his permission, she said, Lach followed. There wasn’t going to be any way she’d come between the two of them, but she did worry for them.

They were both coming out of the office when the shouting began. It was Rebel doing most of it, but she could see that Rodney wasn’t any happier about what was going on than she was. It wasn’t until she started to step around them that she realized her mistake. She was much too close to them for them not to notice her there.

They were both angry enough to absorb energy from the others in the room. It was the only thing she could think that was going on. Rebel seemed to glow with the newfound power. Rodney as well, but his was very little compared to what Rebel was getting. If anyone would have asked her, she would have said it wasn’t possible for someone to feed off of energy, but it turned out to be true for Rebel and Rodney.

~*~

Rebel had only meant to move Lach out of the way. But when she went flying across the room, Rebel did the only thing she could think of and put out her hands to catch her. In her mind, that made perfect sense. However, she was a good ten feet or so away from the other woman, and she knew she couldn’t have caught her even if her life had depended on it. But just as she put out her hands, the motion of Lach coming down to the floor stopped.

She was suspended in the air like a person who had wires attached to her body to hold her. Moving toward her to help her to the floor, she was shoved out of the way by Oakley. Before she could suspect what would happen next, the room tightened so tightly around her that she couldn’t breathe for several seconds. Then she noticed that the room was filled with snarling cats with their fur standing on end.

Two of the cats leapt at one another. When she was knocked to the floor in their haste to kill one another, she heard a feral scream from one of them that made the hair on her arms and neck stand up. Getting up while the six cats seemed to be trying their best to tear out each other’s throats, Rebel went to the kitchen. She had had enough of this shit.

Handing her a bucket, Molly, their cook, smiled at her as she turned the water to cold, even going so far as to get some ice out of the freezer and pouring it in the bucket Rebel was filling. They could hear the cats in the other room.

The sound of breaking furniture pissed her off more. When Harris and the others joined her, they started laughing. Pulling the heavy full bucket out of the sink, she carried it to the dining room and tossed the contents on all six of the fighting cats.

They leapt back from the water, snarling at her now when she set the bucket beside her. Crossing her arms over her chest, tapping her foot, she was happy that Lach went to the door and opened it.

“Get out of this house.” No one moved when Rebel shouted. “Get the fuck out of this house, and you’re not to return until you can act like humans again. The nerve of the six of you, acting like animals. Did it occur to you to ask what was going on before you started—? What the fuck are you still doing in this house? I said to get out.”

They moved quickly now, tumbling over each other, still snarling and swiping at each other. When the last one slinked past her, she wanted to kick out at it, but she didn’t know who it was. She was going to have to figure that out soon, but not today. They were all on her shit list. When the last one was out, she heard the door slam as she was taking the bucket back to the kitchen.