For Her

Everything I do is for her.

From the moment she saw me, she knew I was hers and she was mine. “Look, mommy!” she had exclaimed, waving her free hand wildly and pointing at where I watched her from my cage in the terrible land of death and despair the humans call a ‘shelter.’ Her parents looked puzzled and a bit horrified as she dragged them closer. “Look, I want this one! I want this one!”

“Cassie, honey,” her mother said gently, “you don't want that kitten, it only has one eye. Don't you think it looks scary?”

Indeed, at the time I surely looked nightmarish with my one eye and missing fur, but Cassie screamed in defiance, flailing until she had escaped her mother’s grip and shoved her face against the bars of my prison. “No mommy, you said I could have any kitten I want, and I want this one! Her eye is pink and that's my favorite color and I love her and I love her and–”

“Alright.” Her father stepped forward, silencing her and putting a hand on her mother's shoulder. “There's nothing wrong with that cat, why not let her have it? Poor thing just needs a little love.”

So they took me home. Cassie named me Ghost for my pure white fur, and because she ‘secretly did think my eye made me scary but she wasn't scared.’ The reasons mattered not, for I now had a home and a purpose when before I'd known only fear and pain. My fur slowly returned, and I grew and grew until I was larger than the annoying other creature in the house known as Spot the dog.

I hated that thing nearly as much as Cassie's mother hated me. The woman never touched me, as though she expected whatever defect had stolen my eye to come for her as well. Nearly every day I heard her whispering.

“It just stares at me, John.”

“There's something wrong with it, John.”

“A cat shouldn't act how it does, John.”

Then John, Cassie's father, would just roll his eyes. “It’s a cat, Karen.”

I did my best to avoid Karen. That's why I always had to watch her.

Fortunately, my Cassie was immune to her mother’s constant annoyance. I spent most of my days curled comfortably in her lap while she did schoolwork or read her books. Sometimes she would read out loud so I could enjoy them with her. There was one she was particularly fond of, in her younger days, one that tickled a part of my conscience that had lain dormant but sprang to life with the excitement of a demon springing forth from the fires of Hell.

Oh, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I shall start again by saying that Cassie was a peculiar child. The sort of child who would choose a one-eyed bald cat when her parents would have given her anything in the world if it could have spared her the grief of her sweet twin sister's passing. Our twin griefs spoke to each other, I think. After all, we had both lost our siblings to drowning.

Cassie had been a bit odd even before, but now her mind was twisted. What cruel fate to put upon a child who barely understood the concept of death to lose her other half so suddenly, so violently, under the ever watchful eye of their oh-so-benevolent god.

I digress yet again. Do forgive me.

Cassie had read all she was allowed at her young age about the concept of witches since she had dressed as one for Halloween the previous year. She told me, “I'm going to be a witch, Ghost, and you're going to be my familiar. That means you're going to do exactly as I say and help me with my spells and stuff, okay?”

Absolutely, my wonderful, wonderful Cassie.

You see, there has always been an ancient sort of magic at play, simmering just beneath the surface of every creature and thing on the planet. Most can never connect with it, but a select few are able to tap into an emotion so great that it gives them power normally unknown to the mortal realm. Most ‘witches’ do this for selfish or nefarious deeds, but not her. She just wanted a cure for her loneliness. Broken souls are the easiest to take.

The first time Cassie made a wish I could grant, I was elated. Finally, a task with which I could prove my unending devotion! Not that she seemed to doubt it, but all the same. Her parents argued endlessly about everything. Her, me, whose fault it had been that one of their children died, and most recently that other woman John had been seeing on the side. To this day, I must say that it was a step up for him. Words cannot express the loathing Karen and I had for each other. But in these arguments, there were two constants. Spot's incessant yapping, and my Cassie's tears. She covered her ears with her pillow, trying not to hear all the horrible insults her parents threw like knives. She sobbed to me, “I wish it wasn't all so loud.”

She hadn't yet realized the power of a wish. Cassie's words flowed up into the ether, a prayer, one could call it, and the universe had a way of answering her.

Spot the dog was larger than the prey gifts I usually brought my family, but he was a dull creature. Whoever invented the chihuahua had surely found themselves in Hell, likely listening to them bark as they burned. The very next morning, he met his early demise by my claw and was presented on the porch, as was custom.

Karen was the first to discover it with a highly pleasing screech that could have been heard for miles. I stood proudly over my gift, licking a paw as John came running. “John, that godforsaken cat has killed our dog! We have to get rid of that thing!”

“What on Earth….” John met his wife at the door, in shock. “Karen, that cat didn't do that. That's ridiculous, it's torn to shreds! Poor Ghost is lucky he didn't suffer the same fate, Cassie would have been devastated.”

The fight only escalated, the last straw in a long list of battles fought. They told Cassie that Spot ran away as they called their lawyers, finalizing the death of a marriage that really had ended with the death of their daughter. Karen got the house, and John moved in with the woman he’d been seeing for months. They agreed that Cassie would stay with her mother, except on weekends, at least until she was a little older. Unfortunately, that meant I had to stay with the woman as well.

At least Cassie got her quiet. She took everything in stride, really. It can’t be good for a kid to listen to her parents scream all day, and she had me as her faithful companion.

A few years passed, and she was growing into a beautiful young woman with an aesthetic befitting her dark witchcraft. At thirteen, she still did not quite take things as seriously as she should. Personalities are mostly decided by clothes and friends at that age, and the latter of hers weren’t necessarily the sort one might have preferred their child to have. To be truthful, even I found them… trying. Little girls that faked some connection to darkness and evil, as if wearing black and making up spells gave you access to Hell’s magic. Cassie didn’t care for the difference, though. Friends were hard to come by for a girl like her, but she found most other things came naturally. Little wishes here and there would come true for her, but mostly subtly and never in the way she expected. She always had a good heart, never wishing harm on another.

Until she did.

The thing I both hated and loved the most about Karen was, she always saw through me. Maybe she had a touch of the gift, just enough to suspect when things weren’t all as they seemed. I was never just a cat, and that suspicion made her doubt her own sanity. I can’t say I made that easier. Shadows only she could see, noises in the night, just a slight glow to my eye that vanished when she blinked. What can I say, I have a demon’s heart, after all.

After one such incident, Karen was particularly shaken up when Cassie asked to go to a party with her friends. “No,” her mother said with a sharp sense of finality. “You spend all your time with those girls and haven’t had good grades all year. Sit down and do your homework, they can go a weekend without you.”

They went back and forth for a few minutes with increasing aggressiveness before Cassie stormed to her room, slamming the door. “I hate you!” Then from inside, “I wish you were dead!”

Magic words spoken from a girl’s magic tongue, and again this was a wish I could help the universe fulfill. All I wanted was to make her happy.

The next day, Karen went off the road on her morning commute and crashed into a tree. Dead on impact. Witnesses said she just suddenly swerved like she was trying to avoid something, but there was nothing there. Who would have ever imagined a hairless, one-eyed demon had jumped on her hood?

Cassie sat with her father and his new wife at the funeral. She didn’t speak a word nor shed a tear, just stared at the casket in the church with hollow eyes. I think, for the first time, she had realized the power in words. And for the first time, I feared I had not made her happy. The demon in me rejoiced at finally procuring this soul, but the strange part of me which cared for my Cassie could see there was something wrong. She was not happy or sad, but instead felt nothing at all.

Nothing turned to anger, and finally anger to despair. She finished out her school years and never made another wish. I laid on her lap as time ticked by. My expense for being allowed into this world had been paid, but I, too, felt empty. I had taken a little girl, scarred by loss and a broken home, and made her a murderer. Her soul was condemned by a wish at least half of all teenagers make once. Such was the price of magic.

Now I am old and she is still young, but there is no life in her eyes. I watch as she stares at the picture of her family, the last one ever taken of them all together. They were smiling. She was indistinguishable from the other five year old girl holding her hand. Even their clothes matched.

I purr as she scratches behind my ears absently before turning my way. Her words shock me.

“I was never afraid of you, Ghost.” Her eyes bore into mine, as if she’s finally trying to really see me. “I know what you are. I think I always have.”

“Meow.” I stare back, and for just an instant I allow her to see what I truly am. Sickly, hairless, one red eye and a tail that ends in an arrowhead. She blinks once, then nods and takes me into her arms.

We leave her father’s home, and she walks for a long time. Past laughter and happiness, sadness and anger, all the world going by without waiting for the girl without a soul and her cat that killed it. If I could have made a wish, it would have been to take it all back.

We come to a cliff that overlooks the ocean. The waves lap eagerly at the rocks below, wind whipping Cassie’s hair wildly around her face. She looks down at the water, and a single tear slips down her cheek, falling.

Everything I did was for her.