"Look, I'm awfully sorry about this," Gavin said, "but I'm afraid I'm going to have to eat you." The cat just stared up at him. "It's no good giving me that look! My father is dead, my brother has disowned me, and the only thing Papa left me in the will was a cat and a pair of high-heeled boots. My stomach is howling. I've got to eat you, and before the week is out I'll probably have to eat the boots as well." Gavin would have eaten the cat already, but he wasn't quite sure how one prepared a cat for the table. He'd asked three women how exactly one ate pussy, and had gotten slapped twice and received a rather disgusting proposition from an elderly woman down the street. Clearly, this was something he'd have to figure out for himself.
The cat wasn't making it any easier. It didn't mew pitifully in anticipation of its fate; it simply stared at him with a vaguely contemptuous look on its face. "I'm no happier about it than you are!" Gavin said plaintively. Then he paused. "Alright, I'm slightly happier, I suppose, if I were to be honest, but I'm definitely not thrilled. A week ago, I was living a life of comfort and ease, son of a wealthy landowner, and now look at me! Dusty, starving, and penniless. Papa must have been mad in his old age to think that my brother would take care of me. Or he must simply have been mad. Let's face it, when your will reads, 'I leave my youngest son the cat and the boots', the bit at the beginning about 'sound mind and body' seems a trifle suspect."
The cat blinked haughtily. Gavin sighed. It was no good, he just wasn't the sort of person who could kill an animal, at least not while it was staring him in the face. He sat down and started absently scratching the cat behind the ears. He'd just have to try to figure out how to stomach the boots. "I suppose it could have been a cruel joke of some sort," he said. "I always thought Papa doted on me, and certainly my brother thought so as well. But this...it's not the sort of behavior one thinks of as 'loving'."
"Oh, I don't know," said the cat. "He gave you his two greatest treasures in all the world, the tools with which he made his fortune. That sounds fairly nice to me."
Gavin leapt back to his feet. "You can talk!" he said.
The cat sighed. "So can you," she said, "but I don't feel any great need to shout about that."
Gavin blinked rapidly in astonishment. "But lots of people talk!" he said. "You're the first talking cat I've ever seen!"
"Yes, well, you've probably led a sheltered life." The cat got up and stretched. "Look, we've got rather a lot to get through, here, so can we simply take it as read that you've gotten used to the fact that I can talk? I'd rather not spend the next twenty minutes guiding you through the culture shock of learning about magical animals."
"You're magical?" Gavin said, his voice filled with wonder.
"I'll take that as a 'no', then," the cat said, sitting back down in a bit of a huff. "Yes, I'm magical. I'm an immortal, magical, talking cat that happens to be very clever to boot. Your father saved me from a pack of wild dogs, and in return, I promised him that I would make him and his children and his children's children wealthy and prosperous."
"But--but--I thought he kept you around the house to hunt mice!" Gavin said.
"Oh, I do that too, but that's only because he was already wealthy and prosperous. I'd rather hoped that having gotten him a big pile of money, the children and children's children could take care of themselves, but he decided that primogeniture was the way to go when making out his will, so I'm right back to square one. Well, square two. I had to help him get hold of the boots, originally."
"The boots are magical too?"
"Sharp as a tack, aren't you?" the cat said, although not too unkindly. "Yes, the boots are magical. Go ahead and stand them up, and put me into them feet first."
Gavin reached into the cloth sack that was his brother's only gift to him on seeing him out of the house, and pulled out a pair of high-heeled boots. They were quite tall, probably coming right up to the thigh of most women, but given that they looked dusty, old and cracked, he doubted that many women would wear them. Still, he didn't know much about the taste of women, or of cats for that matter, and so he stood the boots up and, holding the cat up just underneath its front paws, awkwardly put its two rear paws into them.
The resultant blaze of light made Gavin squinch his eyes shut, and so instead of seeing the cat change, he merely felt its flesh twist and stretch under his fingers as it grew. Within seconds, he could no longer feel his hands touch each other around the cat's chest. Within moments, the cat felt as big around as a human being. As the light subsided, Gavin cautiously opened his eyes.
Where he had once held a cat, his hands now wrapped around a female of a decidedly different persuasion. She still had the fur and whiskers of her former feline self, and her face had a decidedly feline cast to it, but her shape and size had become human. Very human, Gavin realized with a start as he noticed where his hands had wound up after the transformation was complete. He whipped them away with a start.
The cat pouted just a little. "I was just beginning to enjoy that!" she said. "It felt a bit like going into heat. Is that how human women feel any time someone touches their breasts?"
Gavin blushed. "How would I know?" he asked indignantly. "I'm barely eighteen, and not yet married. I don't know how cats do these things, but among humans, we don't even see those things until our wedding nights, let alone have casual chats about how touching them feels."
"Oh, my," the cat said. 'Sheltered life' doesn't even begin to cover it, I see. Well, I suppose I can educate you as we go along."
"Go along?" Gavin asked. "Go along where?"
"To make you wealthy, of course." The cat idly looked at her hands, wiggling her newly-lengthened fingers and sheathing and unsheathing her claws a few times. "I'm bound by Deepest Magic to honor my promise to your father--you're not the best material I've had to work with, but needs must, I suppose. Just try not to say or do anything too stupid. When in doubt, remain silent. You're good-looking, well-built, and you smell nice. That's probably your best asset. Well, that and me and the boots."
"But--but you can't go wandering around like that! People will think you're a demon, or a monster or something! Besides, how are you going to make me wealthy with just a pair of old boots?" Although, he noticed, they didn't look old anymore. On the contrary, the red leather looked shiny and new against the cat's white fur.
"You're absolutely right," the cat said. "I'll also need a stone with a hole in it, and a piece of string."
*****
The string didn't take long--Gavin pulled out a lace from his own dusty boots, leaving his right shoe quite a bit looser on him, but giving Puss (for so she'd insisted on being called) the string she needed. The stone, on the other hand, took quite a bit longer. But eventually, Gavin found one that had sat under a tiny waterfall for long enough that a hole had worn right through the center of it.
"Perfect," Puss said, taking the stone and slipping the shoelace through it. She tied a knot around the stone. "All we need to make a fortune. Come on, let's head down to the town."
"How will that help us make a fortune?" Gavin said as they walked. "Is it a sort of luck charm? Is it magic too? I've heard that stones with holes in them are supposed to bring you luck."
"No, that's just something people say," Puss said. "Not everything's magic, you know. You've lived eighteen years without seeing anything magic, why would you start assuming everything is just because you've seen two magical things in one day?"
