Holy hell, he was here! He was alive!
He vanished.
Another bone exploded out of the sky and bounced off my head. “Ow!” I clapped a hand to it. “Ever is now! I’m sorry. I’ll tell you I’m sorry every day for the rest of my life if it makes you feel better.”
“It will take much more than that,” came the bodiless sniff. “My knots have sprouted an entire civilization of knots that have been reproducing with the ferocity and fertility of a band of mating Ka-lyrras! I’m one big tangle!” came his anguished wail. “And I’m fat.”
“I’ll brush you. You’re not fat. Just come out. Let me see you!”
“Am, too!” he wailed. “You may only see parts of me. The slender ones.” Eyes materialized ten feet above me. “You will leave me again,” he said tearfully.
“I won’t. I’ll never leave you again.” I said something I’d never said before. A thing I’d learned to say with Dancer. “I love you, Shazam. I can’t stand living without you. I missed you so much that I went a little crazy for a time. But I couldn’t come back because the Silver took me back to Dublin—”
“You found your way home, Yi-yi?” he said tremulously. “You did it? You finally made it?”
My heart melted. The happiness in his voice was unmistakable, happy for me, because I’d finally gotten what I’d been seeking for so long. “Yes, and because of that damned infinity of mirrors—”
“Not infinite, tiny red. Four-hundred-thousand seven hundred and sixty-two,” he corrected.
“—I was trying to find a way to mark the correct one from the other side so I could bring you home with me. I’m so sorry, Shazam!”
Suddenly he manifested fully, dropping from the sky to plop fatly on the trashcan. I blinked. Good grief, he really was fat. His furry white belly draped both sides of the trashcan. I made a Jada-face to mask my astonishment. No way I was hurting his feelings now. He might vanish again.
Behind me, Mac gasped.
“See—she thinks I’m fat!” He shot an accusing glare at Mac.
“That’s not why I gasped,” Mac said, sounding oddly strained.
He thumped the trashcan with a paw and turned an accusing glare on me. “You sent it through empty. What kind of Yi-yi does that? Not a speck of food. Not an ort. Not even a morsel.” He tossed his shaggy head and scowled, then a belch escaped him and a brilliant orange feather floated up into the air. He hastily licked his paw and began scrubbing at his whiskers with an innocent expression.
My eyes narrowed. “Did you eat the tribesmen?”
He swung his great head from side to side in elaborate denial. “Not me.” He belched again and half a blue feather drifted out.
“How many of the tribesmen did you eat?” I demanded.
“You told me not to eat people. I didn’t. Well, maybe I did. But only a few. The rest,” he said, slumping a mound of fatness and foul mood over the rusted can, “decided I was too fat to share an island with.” He shot me a meek, pitiful look. “They went away.” He turned his nose up in a snit. “I have no idea where.”
“Shazam,” I said warningly.
“They took my Yi-yi away from me!” he snarled.
“How many did you eat?”
“They were going to eat me. You would probably prefer I’d let them.” He glared at me, eyes narrowed, nose crinkling. “Then you wouldn’t be bothered with me,” he added in a small voice.
“I’m never bothered by you. I adore you. Answer my question.”
He stood up, back arching into a horseshoe shape with porcupine bristles ridging his spine. “What did you expect?” he said defensively. “I ate them. Okay? I have problems. You know that about me.” He sniffed and tears began to flow. “Now you don’t want me anymore. I should just die. We’re all going to die anyway. What does it matter if I do it now? Who would care?” He flung himself dramatically off the trashcan, rolled midair to land flat on his back on the ground, where he lay like a dead thing, head lolling to the side, paws up in the air.
After a moment he squinted an eye open to make sure I was looking. Then closed it hastily and resumed being dead.
“You ate all of them?” I said incredulously. “The entire civilization? We talked about this. You said you wouldn’t do it again.”
“I was hungry. And bored. There was nothing to do. You said you would be back. You WEREN’T. Your expects. Not bars on my cage anymore.”
“Dani,” Mac said warningly behind me. “You do know what Shazam is, right?”
I shot an inquiring look over my shoulder. “You mean, like, what species?”
Shazam leapt to his feet, instantly alert, and drew up to his full height. “I have no species. I am a singularity.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Mac said.
I shook my head. “He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Because I belong to no species,” Shazam said tightly. “Don’t listen to her, Yi-yi. She lies.”
“He wouldn’t tell you for good reason. He’s a Hel-Cat,” Mac said.
“Am NOT.” Shazam reared up on his haunches, eyes narrowed to thin slits, and spat and hissed alternately.
Mac said, “They’re nearly extinct. Or more precisely, there’s said to be only one left in all the universes. They’re as mythical as the unicorn.”