Borrowed Time by Leah R Cutter

Author:Leah R Cutter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644702390
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

Chapter 25

Merilee didn’t need to read the signs directing them to the HPO—Higher Purity Oxygen—plant. She merely had to follow her nose.

The smells here weren’t great. There was a lot of chlorine in the air, as well as the stench of sewer water. At least they weren’t meeting in one of the sludge plants, which she assumed would be worse.

However, the purer oxygen content was obvious. As a human, she’d read about oxygen bars, how people got a real high from breathing purer air. As a cat, she could practically taste the cleaner air. Yes, it was carefully contained in tall cylinders scattered around the plant. There wasn’t supposed to be any escaping. She could still smell it, though.

The problem was that the scents were very distracting. There weren’t any mice in the plant, not that she could tell. Humans had been here, but the air kept their scent to a minimum.

No, it was that damned sewage that kept snagging her attention. It wasn’t merely human waste, no. It was everything that someone might send through their garbage disposal, such as orange peels, coffee grounds, egg shells, kale stems, tomato skins, rose petals, and all the cleaning chemicals.

She suddenly realized the advantage the thugs had by meeting in a place such as this. She wouldn’t be able to track either Nialto or Bennet via their scent. It would be very difficult to tease those smells out, apart from all the others.

Of course, she could do it. It would just take time, effort, and concentration. Things she surely wouldn’t have a lot of.

Merilee stayed hidden in the shadows, near one of the working consoles. She liked the way the lights played across the board. It was very soothing. If she wasn’t careful, it would hypnotize her, another distraction to take her eyes off the prize.

Damn it! She needed to focus.

There was a cold concrete floor under her tail and paws. It had been washed recently with a faux lemon chemical cleaner. The lights throughout the room had been turned down to low. The primary lighting came from the panel. Water whooshing through the tubes, swirling around the container in the center, sounded a little like the ocean. But it was too regular to be natural.

Angelina stood beside Merilee, checking her phone, of course. While Merilee understood the attraction, she also knew that it was yet another distraction. Angelina needed to be paying more attention!

Merilee shifted over and pressed one paw down on Angelina’s foot. She might have put all her weight onto it.

“They’re not here yet,” Angelina murmured. “No one has come through the door.”

Merilee gave an expressive kitty sigh.

She didn’t need to use doors. Why did the thugs?

However, Angelina turned out to be right. After just a few moments, she put her phone away.

“They’re here,” she said. “They just walked through the door. They didn’t notice the charm I had tied to it.”

Merilee had to nod her approval. Fine. So Angelina was still better at magic than she was. At least some things.

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