Meghan: Kitty

“Mmmm…that was good.”
“God, were did you learn to cook?”
“Haha, you haven’t even had dessert yet.”
I clasped my hands under my chin and looked at him with shining eyes, only to be deterred by Sarah’s mock-glare.
“Mine.” She said, linking an arm around his waist.
“But you could make so much money renting him out…”
“No.”
“Just for—“
We continued to bicker over pricing arrangements as we gathered the dinner dishes and stacked them in the kitchen. Her husband, for his part, was used to our strange ways, and just continued with his peaceful collection of glasses while his wife auctioned him off. It had been strange when I had first met him, to be in the same room and not stare. But now the black feline ears that slicked up from his head were as expected an attribute as Jasmine’s hair, or Sarah’s eyes. If the fact that her man could turn into a pussycat didn’t bother Sarah, then it didn’t bother me; and there were probably stranger things out there.
He called into the other room as he brought a pie and a carton of ice cream into the dining room.
“Ah, it’s cold,” Sarah said as she took the pie from him, “Meghan, could you?”
“Sure.” I replied as I leaned over to rest my fingers on the dish. Heat grew beneath my fingertips and within seconds the pie was steaming.
“Thanks.” Sarah said as she began to cut sections out of it.
I felt a touch on my arm and nearly jumped out of my skin as I turned and saw Sarah’s daughter standing next to me. She was as silent as her father, and the ears she had inherited from him dipped in apology.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Can you make me something?” her sweet, childlike voice made me want to hug her and tell her over and over how cute she was.
“Sure.”
“Don’t burn anything,” Jasmine said warningly, “remember last time?”
I winced at the memory of ‘last time’ and moved my chair even further back from the table. Grinning into the chocolate eyes of the expectant girl in front of me, I held out my palms and concentrated on the flames that kindled there. The fire licked upon my skin and I cupped my hands together in a bowl. The two palmfulls intertwined to form a jagged stem, then petals unfurled from the top, one by one, until a full bloom was formed.
“Pretty!” The girl breathed. I laughed and clenched my palms together, sucking the heat back through me to where it belonged.

Sleepy and full of pie, Jasmine and I curled up on the couch, listening to Sarah and her husband wash the dishes and watching their daughter act out Macbeth with her stuffed animals. Jasmine had read it to her on one of the times we had been watching her, and she had taken to it quite fiercely.
“She’s going to die.”
Jasmine said it quietly, so I would be the only one to hear it. I started violently and turned to look at her, but whatever I had been about to say stopped when I saw her face. Her expression was peaceful as she regarded the child in front of us, but her eyes were swirling with color. Mostly blues, greens, with hints of purple and gold, which told me all I needed to know; she was having a vision.
“Tell me what you see.”
She touched a hand to my cheek and suddenly I was there, looking with her through the many pools of time and thought that she could swim through when the visions came.
“When the girl reaches the age of five, she will die.” The Jasmine back on the couch told me. I watched as the child that I had grown to love bled and suffered in the waters of the vision.
“She will have to make a choice. And her choice will be death to save her mother.”
The vision switched to Sarah, screaming, crying, grieving, but she was swirled with a Sarah who dying of the same things that were apparently going to kill her child.
I was abruptly sucked out of the visions when Jasmine took her hand away, and wasn’t surprised to find tears on my cheeks.
“Why? No… Isn’t there something—“
“It’s all right.” The Jasmine-who-wasn’t smiled angelically at me, “The girl will live. Her father’s blood will save her. In the ways of his tribe he has nine lives to spare, and thus, so does she.”
“Oh.”
“But I leave you with this warning; breathe not a word of this to the family, for if they find out the choice will not be genuine, and someone may be truly lost.”
With a sharp exhalation of breathe, Jasmine’s eyes rolled back into her eyelids and she slumped down. I smoothed back her hair to find her asleep, as she usually was after seeing. I pulled her over so she could sleep horizontally with her head in my lap, grumbling at her unconscious form for worrying me unnecessarily.


-Meghan