Aubrey and Richard left early the next morning before Mother or Andrew woke up. They caught a hack at the corner.
“I’ll fetch you at noon,” Richard told her as she descended outside Police Headquarters; a few police, heading out on morning patrol, watched idly from the steps.
“I’ll be waiting,” she told him.
The hack drove off; Richard waved a hand without looking back. Turning to mount the steps, Aubrey felt a pickle of unease. Fangs and claws crested. Even her ears seemed to prick.
She turned around. Richard’s carriage had already left the square. Yet her unease remained. She scanned the garden at the square’s center. The shrubs were scraggly and low; the lawn more rocks and weeds than meadow. Her eyes darted to the shadowed alleys between the townhouses that enclosed the square.
“Is there a problem, Miss St. Clair?”
It was the huge policemen. Aubrey began to say, No, then jerked her head. “I feel watched.”
“We’ll look around,” the policeman, Smithy, said and motioned towards the others.
“Thank you,” Aubrey said, surprised into unprovoked gratitude.
“No problem,” the others said, one adding with a wink, “Charles is inside.”
She supposed she was being rather obvious about Charles. When she arrived at the door to the office, Mr. Perry waved her to the back of the house. “He’s having his breakfast.”
Aubrey bypassed the steep stairs to the upper floors. In the shadow of the stairwell, she encountered a low doorway. Descending a few short steps, she found herself on the edge of a square scullery lit by high windows. A well of water occupied one corner. A worn table topped by a heavy pot stood in the center of a rough-bricked floor.
Charles sat at the table, eating absently from a plate. He stood immediately as Aubrey wavered on the bottom step.
“Hullo,” he said. “Your brother agreed, then.”
“After blatant manipulation.”
He smiled to himself, cleared away his plate and motioned her to sit in the opposite chair. “You’re sure you want to try this?”
“I should at least know. The claws and fangs—I didn’t ask for them; they just showed up. I’d rather that didn’t happen with an actual transformation.”
“You transformed before to protect yourself.”
“Using the bubble?”
“The bubble?”
“Something like a bubble grows inside me,” she said. “If it expands completely—I think that is where the cat resides.”
“Can you consciously make it expand?”
She hunted inside her chest for that resilient hollow ball, pulled at it unsuccessfully. Charles waited: patient and calm. She felt a sneaking need to surprise him, startle him. She closed her eyes. The ball remained smooth, beyond her reach.
“It expanded when I thought I was being watched,” she said.
“When?”
“At the park. The ball. Outside just now.” Charles half-rose, frowning. “I told Smithy,” Aubrey said, and Charles relaxed.
“Your brother will fetch you later?”
“Yes. You think it’s Kev,” the magician's stooge who had pulled Aubrey open, if Gloria was correct.
