Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 1

Magic Acts

Temple awoke, sitting up in bed.

She patted the coverlet, hunting for the warm, furry bulk of Midnight Louie.

He was gone.

She wasn't surprised.

In her dream, the big black cat had also disappeared. But the dream cat had been a massive animal, a panther sprung to life from an Art Deco design--angular, with industrial-strength musculature.

She shut her eyes, visualizing the dreamscape again.

She was the magician's assistant for Siegfried and Roy, pinioned on stage in the glare of the spotlight, while huge white lions and tigers and one black panther cavorted around her. The Big Cats posed, paws raised, on a pyramid of perches painted to resemble the tops of New York City skyscrapers. At the highest point, atop the Chrysler Building's silvery pinnacle, sat the sole Black Panther gleaming as if carved from Whitby jet. All the Big Cats sparkled in the light, like giant rhinestone brooches. The white tigers' stripes were aurora borealis rainbows. These bejeweled animals even out-shone Siegfried and Roy's most glitzy jumpsuits. Both magicians sported long, Elvis-thick sideburns, Siegfried's golden and Roy's panther-black.

Temple couldn't see her own outfit, since she was the dreamer, but she knew she wore the Midnight Louie Austrian-crystal shoes, and the audience was applauding her, them.

And though everything was viewed through the bright and gleaming telescope of Dream, Temple remembered an odd ominous sense of the darkness beyond the stage lights. Feral eyes gleamed where the audience should be, untamed Big Cats waiting to pounce and take back the stage.

Then one animal on stage leaped: the Black Panther balanced on the Chrysler Building (which had somehow become an Art Deco step pyramid) soared through the thin, spot lit air into the density of the darkness beyond.

Oh, Temple had cried in the dream. That wasn't in the script. Then the darkness coalesced into a pride ofblack panthers and they all crowded onto the stage, devouring the light.

A dark magician stood atop the highest perch, a man in matte black without a face. Just before the last light went out, before the only thing Temple could sense was a smothering sound of purring, she saw him wave one arm

The dream ended. She was awake, and knew it. She wished she had photographs of the gorgeous bejeweled cats, of Siegfried and Roy in Elvis sideburns. She probably should get up and write this one down, but then she could search for Freudian symbolism and that would ruin the effect.

Temple shivered. She wished Midnight Louie weren't gone. He was warm and fairly friendly and reassuringly portable. She wished she hadn't dreamed about the dark magician. She knew she wouldn't have to look too far or too Freudian to assign the real Max Kinsella an even-more-mythic role in this dream: Death.