Halloween Cat's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Halloween Cat crouched under a dead bush and licked the warm charm on his chest. It glowed like a coal, and the glow was the only piece of his nine stolen lives he had left. A cursed shadow had taken the rest at his family's graveyard. He meant to take them back. But the charm could not tell him where that graveyard lay, and open ground gave him no cover. Two crows watched him from a fence. He was a black kitten alone in a flat field, and every hawk shadow made him flinch. He needed a direction. The charm pulled him, faint but real, toward a crooked house at the field's edge. Its siding sagged. Broken windows stared. He hated the look of it. He went anyway, because pull was better than nothing. The porch groaned under his paws. Inside, dust coated everything. The charm's glow brightened near a gap in the floorboards. Halloween Cat pressed his nose to the crack and smelled old earth. He dug. His small claws scraped wood, then dirt, then something hard and pale. He pulled it free. A bone shard, longer than his whole body. Fine lines covered it, cut by some careful hand long ago. He turned it with his paw. The lines were not random. They curled and forked like a path drawn from above. A map. The charm flared hot against his chest. He set the bone beside it and watched. Where the glow touched one etched line, the mark seemed to lift, pointing past the broken wall toward high ground he could not see. His whiskers trembled. This was the way. His family's graveyard was real, and now he had a thread to follow. Then the floor above him creaked. Not wind. A footstep. Halloween Cat froze, one paw on the bone. Slow steps crossed the ceiling and started down a hidden stair. He smelled something sour and cold. Whoever lived here had heard him dig. A shape reached the bottom of the stairs. A tall man, thin as sticks, skin the color of pale olive. His cheeks sank in. His hair hung in wet strings. His feet turned inward as he shuffled closer, and his shadow slid across the floorboards toward the kitten. "That belongs to the dead," the man said. His voice scraped. "Not to a little cat." Halloween Cat did not wait. He clamped his teeth on the bone and bolted. It dragged and clattered, heavy as a branch. The thin man lunged. Long fingers brushed the kitten's tail. Halloween Cat shot through the front door and off the porch into open field. He ran until the house shrank behind him. Then he dropped the bone and gasped. He had it. The map to his stolen lives lay under his paws, its etched lines pointing toward the high ground. But he was in the open again, exposed. And now something knew he had the map, and it was coming.