One of the Nine Lives of Nyx: Fourth Life

I saw the bird before she did. Fat little bastard, puffed up like it owned the morning. I crouched low in the weeds, tail swerving, heartbeat steady. One jump, one breath, one quick crunch and breakfast was over.

Feathers in my teeth, warm blood on my tongue. I like the sound they make when the life goes out of them; it's quiet, but then it sounds like a sigh through wet paper. I dragged the thing home, proud as hell.

Clara says pride’s a sin. So is breathing, apparently.

Last month she whispered a man’s name into a jar of honey and left it on the sill. By morning the bees filled it with their own dead. She said that man wouldn’t be in town by sundown. Magic, she says, is only as cruel as the hand which feeds it.

Her shop sits crooked on the corner, windows fogged with incense and secrets. Smelled like herbs, dust, and whatever poor fool she’d been working on last night. Bells on the door jangled when I pushed in.

“Morning, sweetheart,” she said without looking up. Mid-forties, soft at the edges, hair tied up in a perpetually loose knot. Not pretty, not plain, it was just… Clara. The kind of woman who could disappear in a crowd and still curse half of it before lunch.

I dropped my kill at her feet. She smiled, rare as mercy.

“Good girl,” she said, kneeling. She plucked three feathers and laid them across the counter like cards and whispered something that made the air lean in to listen. Smoke curled around her hands.

The feathers twitched. Nice touch.

I stretched, licked the blood off my paw. “You’re welcome,” I said, but she never listens.

The bell above the door jingled again. Clara grunted, wiped her hands on her apron, and disappeared behind the curtain. “Mind the shop, darling,” she called.

I did.

The human reeked before I saw him. Rank with cheap cologne, nervous sweat, and the wet stink of guilt.

He touched everything. Picked up jars, sniffed candles, ran his thumb over a bone charm meant for healing and nearly cracked it. His heartbeat was too fast for someone browsing.

I caught a sound, the tiny chime of a chain. My head snapped toward him.

He’d found the locket. Gold, round, smooth enough to hold a reflection. I could smell Clara on it: sage, lilac, the faint bite of her blood. Her work lived inside of it.

He glanced around, quick as a rat. Hand jerked and opened a pocket. The locket disappeared.

The air in the shop changed. Heavy. Watching. Even the candles went still.

My whiskers trembled.

You stupid, stupid son of a bitch.

He walked out unhurried, calm. He didn't know the contract he'd accepted was a death warrant.

I padded to the back room, tail high. Clara was grinding something in her mortar, whistling to herself.

“What is it now, my Nyx?”

“Got a thief,” I meowed.

She didn’t look up. “Bring me back what he took,” she said. Her eyes met mine, gray and flat. “And a piece of him too.”

Now that’s a goddamn invitation.

Clara’s voice began after sundown. Low and patient, a smokey whisper rolling through the rafters. The sound made the fur along my spine rise for no reason I could name.

I stretched out on the counter and listened. Her words weren’t for me, but I liked how they felt; heavy, humming, full of teeth. The air thickened the way it does before rain.

Then something answered.

Not loud, not even words. It was a pulse in the walls, a sound too deep for human throats. A few of the glass jars rattled. The fire bent sideways, going blue for a heartbeat, then black as night.

Clara didn’t stop. She never does. She spoke louder, faster, until whatever she’d called decided to listen instead of eat.

When it faded, she slumped against the table, breathing hard. I padded over, rubbed against her ankle. She didn’t even look down. Just whispered, “Not tonight, love.”

I watched her hands shake as she reached for the feathers I’d brought her earlier in the day. She burned them one by one, the smell sharp and strange, like metal turning to dust. The smoke curled around her fingers, settling them.

Last time she skipped the feathers, something came halfway through. It was inside her, you know, it really wore her shadow and tried to crawl out from her gut and through her mouth. I’d never heard her scream like it before. Raw and wide, a sound no living thing should make. The walls dripped afterward with some orange tacky substance that stuck to my paws like fucking tape. It took her a week to scrape them clean.

So, yeah. Feathers help.

She stayed at the table, muttering something tired and kind of sad, until the house went still again. When she finally looked at me, her eyes were pale and hollow, but clear. “Go on,” she said. “You know what to do.”

I did.

I cleaned myself one more time and slipped out into the street.

The night’s musk hit me in layers, wet stone, gutter rot, the tang of alley piss. Nearby, a tom sprayed his claim, sharp and sour like burnt pepper. Another lingered somewhere in heat, her scent high and frantic. I slipped past all of the noise. I wasn’t out here for any of their thorned pride or alley sermons. Let them claw each other to ribbons in the dark and make more babies. I had real work to do.

The trail wasn’t hard. Humans leak scent like a busted wine cask. This guy was sour; filled with fear, cologne, and something desperate. I followed it through the cobblestones, through puddles that smelled of defecation and rain, down to the narrow rows where people forget to lock their doors.

***

He lived as cheap as he smelled. Curtains drawn, one light on, and a little glowing box humming in the corner. I watched through the window awhile. He sat there, eating from a carton, eyes fixed on nothing. There it was. The trinket was on the table beside him.

I could’ve gone right in, quick and clean. But where’s the fun in that?

I slipped through the open window, soft as breath. Landed behind the couch, tail down, eyes wide. The air reeked of old food and bad decisions. He muttered something to himself, and didn't notice the door creak.

I started small. Knocked a spoon off the counter. Let it ring out nice and loud. He froze, fork halfway to his mouth. “Hello?”

Yeah, sweetheart. Real quiet now.

He stood, went to the kitchen. I hopped up on the arm of the chair, watched him from there. The spoon lay on the floor, innocent as sin. He laughed to himself. “Jesus. Thought I was losing it.”

Oh, you are.

I brushed the lamp cord with my tail. Light blinked once, twice, died. The purr of the box cut off too. The room went thick. He cursed, fumbling for the switch. I could hear his heartbeat. Fast.

He turned. I was on the stairs now, halfway up, eyes shining in the dark.

He saw me and flinched. “Get out of here, you little shit!”

I flicked my tail, slow and took a step up. Another.

He followed, cursing again, voice shaking. “Crazy cat...”

Yeah. Keep talking, hero.

When he reached the top of the stairs, I darted between his legs. He stumbled, arms windmilling like a drunk on ice. There’s that perfect second where the gravity catches on. Where he knows he’s gone and fucked up, a disaster looming.

Then he fell.

Tumbling, crashing, all elbows and panic. His head hit the banister on the way down. Wet crack. Beautiful sound.

I perched on the top step, tail fluttering, listening to the air collapse back into silence. I padded down, one step at a time, careful, curious. The locket lay halfway across the floor, still glowing faintly under the lamp’s weak light. I brushed against it, felt the power of Clara’s mark: old magic, still sharp around the edges.

He was trying to breathe. I don’t think he is very good at it anymore. His chest stuttered, a wet whistle with every inhale. Eyes open. Twitching, they call it. Dying, I call it.

A dark puddle spread beneath him, slow and warm, the smell rising quick: iron, salt, fear. My pupils went wide. Everything inside me tilted forward.

See, here’s the thing about us: we don’t stop at the chase. We don’t know how. The noise of his heartbeat, the way it fluttered like a trapped moth. Well, it pulled something ancient up through my spine.

I crept closer, nose to his cheek. He blinked at me once, real slow, some sort of hope there, probably thinking that maybe I’d help him. I purred instead. Couldn’t help it.

When I tasted the blood, it was better than I expected. Rich, electric, alive. The tang of his lifeforce hit my tongue and I pressed harder, licking until I felt some skin slip under my teeth. He moaned once. Then once more, only louder now.

I bit.

Not to kill though, I wanted to feel the pulse burst against my tongue. It spattered across my face, hot and sticky. My claws found his chest, tore at the fabric, and the smell got stronger, sweeter. I wanted all of it.

By the time I came back to myself, he’d stopped wiggling and the room fell quiet. His ribs were open like a broken cage. I’d done a lot of good work.

I washed the kill from my paws before the road turned home. Blood’s for the witch, not the doorstep.

I took the charm in my mouth, still warm, still emanating. I bit at his shoulder until the blood came easy, soaked into the scrap of curtain I tore loose. A gift for Clara, she likes a little mess with her magic.

When I left, the house was dark except for the glimmer of that glow in my teeth. Outside, the air was cool, the street empty. The night smelled like rain and victory.

I pushed through the shop door before dawn with the locket in my jaws. The bell jingled once, soft and sleepy. Clara was waiting. She always knows when I’m coming home.

I dropped the prize at her feet and set the blood-soaked cloth beside it. She didn’t speak, just knelt, hands steady, eyes like wet stones. She poured what I’d brought into a glass vial, the blood sliding down in slow ribbons. She held it to the light.

“Good girl,” she whispered. “Still warm.”

She labeled it with a strip of parchment and careful handwriting: Samuel Briggs. The letters bloomed dark as the ink soaked in. She set it on the shelf with the others.

There were thirty-seven of them now. Maybe more. Each one glowing faintly from the charm-light behind the glass. Rows of reds and browns, a few gone almost black with age. Looked tasteful, honestly. Like church windows.

Clara says every vial tells a story.

The tall one near the end: Marjorie Kane. She used to come by for tea leaves and gossip. Told Clara her husband was seeing a younger woman. I remember that smell of jealousy, sour and sweet. The next week, Marjorie’s husband stopped coming home. The police found him down by the river, throat opened like a second smile.

The one on the top shelf, thick and dark: Ellen Marsh. She called Clara a fraud. Loudly. In front of customers. Clara smiled that day, just smiled, and gave her a free candle “for protection.” It burned blue for three nights before the fire took her house.

And the oldest vial, cloudy glass, label half gone, that one’s mine. She says it’s from the night she found me, half-dead in the alley with a rat’s tail still between my teeth. She took my blood to bind me. I don’t mind. There’s comfort in belonging to someone who’s strong enough to keep the dark at bay.

Clara lifted the new bottle to her lips, kissed the rim. Then she turned, placed it beside the rest, and the whole shelf appeared to sigh.

“Sleep, love,” she told me. “You’ve done good work.”

I curled beneath the counter, the smell of blood and sage thick in the air. Outside, the first light bled into the street, gray and cold.

The jars thrummed softly as they settled, whispering to one another. Some nights, if you listen close, you can still hear them breathing.