Harvest Season

4. A Little Gorgon and Sailor Sleuthing

The scraggy cat landed on Blakely's beak with a screech, and when the tip pricked its stomach it lurched on to his eyeglass. Paws scraped and clawed at the lens with the relentless ill-intent of a cat on a mission.

As Blakely struggled to pull the animal from his mask, the little gorgon sprang towards the door and swerved right down the stairs. The cat clawed and flailed on top of Blakely's mask until she left a crescent-shaped crack in the left eye. Then, when the girl was long gone, she nimbly jumped off, now calm, and purred with content. The feline perched herself on the window sill, her previous hysteria long forgotten.

Her part had been done.

Blakely cursed the cat and ran out of the room. He was along a single corridor that stretched in both directions. A staircase was to his right, and another bedroom stretched to his left. He heard the quick thumps of that little gorgon's feet, stomping around downstairs but not moving farther away. Gripping the bannister tightly, Blakley jumped straight down to the first floor. The ground shook when he landed, but recovered, Blakely followed the direction of the thumping.

He was in another bland living room. A cold hearth lay in front a single, moth-bitten armchair. Grey paint lined the walls and slowly eased into an off-white as Blakely entered what he saw to be the kitchen. Another cardboard box was at the foot of a chair, which in turn was under a small, round dining table. There was a tiny stove, only about as wide as his arm was long, and a little girl adjacent to it. Hardly above five feet, she stood there with brows drawn, eyes vicious and a fork clutched between her talons. She held it against her chest before jerking it in Blakely's direction.

"What do you want now?" her voice trembled, the fork in her hands shaking, "I won't let you take anything again."

Blakley frowned and raised his hands. "Put the fork down, little girl."

"You can't take anything! Mr Barley says you can't!" she screeched. What vocal cords she possessed. 

Regardless of her proficiency at aural torture, Blakely had no interest in what a man named after a cereal had to say. 

She clearly did. 

Seeming not to have heard Blakely's earlier command, she lunged forward with the fork pointed directly at his heart. Blakely slid back, unperturbed, and secured her hand in a vice grip. He grabbed the fork from her paw and it fell to the floor with a clang of metal. There it rattled for a few seconds before stilling.

"A rather impulsive child you are," he commented. "But I suppose that's redundant."

The little girl, barely more than thirteen, turned away swiftly, eyes cast to the floor. Her lower lip quivered like a leaf. "You people in those masks always come here and take what's not yours!"

Blakely ignored her cryptic retort. He cared not about any previous intruders in their house donning similar masks to his. He cared not why this little girl lived a house devoid of any personal items. He also cared not how familiar the circumstances were. He only cared that for some reason, the entire house was a dismal grey, but only her room seemed to glow green. Why here of all places? he pondered to himself, why a place like this?

Blakely hadn't let go of the child's hand. Now he turned it over and examined her palm. It was filled with scratches.

"How old are you?"

Her eyes wide and vicious, she glared at him in her reply. "I will call The Watch on you!"

That caught Blakely's attention. "Will you now?"

"I will too!" she yelled, attempting to twist her hand out of his grip. Blakely didn't bat an eye.

"As enthralling as this conversation is, I'm afraid I'm pressed for time." Blakely grabbed the girl's other arm, chanted a few words in some foreign tongue, and before she knew it, her hands were stuck together. He repeated the same thing for her legs, and in no time she was bound.