The Language of the Dragon by Margaret Ball

Author:Margaret Ball [Ball, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781947648203
Published: 2019-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

12. The wrath of Cath Palug

Funny, I didn’t remember locking my bedroom door when I left for the seminar. I supposed I might have done so, though. Given how poorly I’d hidden that blasted notebook, locking the room would have been the smart thing to do. Darn it, I’d meant to put the notebook away in my gun safe, then it had slipped my mind. Maybe I’d been thinking about locking the gun safe and had locked the door instead? Maybe… I jiggled the key in the lock and tried hard to remember having done the same thing early this morning.

I caught my breath as the door swung open. Now that I definitely did not remember from this morning. What the hell was Michael Ryan doing there? And behind a locked door, no less. Adrenaline shot through me, making my hands shake. This was like an instant replay of our first meeting. Only worse. This time he was in my room, not in a shared bathroom. There could be no good explanation for that. And this time my gun was in the safe where I usually kept it, on the far side of the bed. And on the far side of Michael.

“What are you—” I started to croak. No sound came out. I moistened my lips and tried again. “What the hell do you think you’re—”

“And cut it out, you damn cat!” he shouted. Apparently he hadn’t even noticed me coming in; he was standing with his hands on his hips, yelling up at a yellowish-gray fur shape on top of the bookcase.

“Michael?”

He started and then turned towards me. “Your cat,” he said, almost snarling, “just peed on my bed. When I tried to throw him out, he ran through the bathroom, jumped on your dresser and slid the length of it. Knocking all your stuff over.”

He moved to give me a view of the dresser. I have to admit that considered in isolation, the top of the dresser looked a lot better than usual; no clutter.

The clutter was distributed over a couple of half-open drawers, the rag rug on the floor, and a corner of my mattress that had apparently just chugged all the water I’d planned to drink that day before I woke late and rushed off without my super-bottle.

I picked my way through the mess, retrieved some expensive cologne, and stoppered the bottle with its remaining quarter-inch of scent.

“Sorry about your perfume,” Michael said. “I had no idea the damn cat was going to react that way.”

“It’s okay,” I said absently, “Aunt Georgia gives me a bottle every Christmas. And I’m kind of tired of the scent anyway.”

“Well… sorry about that, then because I think your room’s going to reek of it for a while. But I really can’t be expected to herd that cat!”

My knees didn’t seem to have got the message that the emergency was over; they were still shaking. I sat down on the edge of the mattress.

It squelched. “How did it absorb all that water so fast?”

“Damned if I know.

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