Summer’s End (solo)

It was a simple enough list.

Sign up for classes
Practice your powers
If you run away, come back before classes start

The last one made him cringe and smile, simultaneously. Katrina: she understood him. She also understood that she should pin copies to the wall in his Mansion room, his Sanctuary room, and the bulletin board over by Central Park (under a certain faded picture of lost cats, which no one had ever taken down). Yeah. Definitely a cringe. And definitely a smile.

So. Classes. Right.

“Conditioning? Really?” Calley asked, draped across the back of the rec room couch.

The TV made wet stabbing noises and horrible-dying-noises, in that order. The donkey shifter bashed at the controller like a kid who’d never really heard either of those sounds in real life. “Yeah. It’s with Sam.”

“Sam? Really?” He managed to slump even further. The graphics on the screen where... graphic. Calley missed his own Zelda game, in its box cartridge, with its heart meter for life and its annoying floating light-fairy, always guiding you and never shutting up. The donkey shifter was sneaking up behind a guy who, for some reason, hadn’t turned around after the last three bodies hit the floor. Calley just couldn’t get in to the newer video games.

“What? Sam’s cool. He’s just going to make us run laps, and lift some weights. Nothing us shifters can’t handle.”

You didn’t get that much blood on the knife from just one stab. For the record. It took more than that.

“Whatever.”

“So you’re in?”

“Whatever.”

“Cool. A lot of the other guys from summer school will be there, too. No girls, but it’s not like you care, right? Ha!”

Calley reached out and, with one delicate tug, disconnected the game controller from its boxy temple. Oh, the death groans from the screen, and the couch. He hit the teen with a pillow for good measure.

“See you there, ass.”

He, Caleb Swartz, was in the eleventh grade now. The eleventh grade. That was ten plus one, as any eleventh grader could easily sum. After being in tenth grade for three years, it felt embarrassingly good to be... well, not. Not in tenth grade. Because he was now in—that’s right, kids—eleventh grade.

(New Guidance Counselor may or may not have found a tin of cookies outside her office door when the summer school grades came out. They may or may not have been slightly less burned than the last batch he’d brought her. Calley claimed no responsibility for any such cookies that might or might not have been home made.)

Classes: check. Conditioning, Keyboarding, Arting, Spanglishing... he expected to see a lot of the summer school crew in a lot of his classes, actually.

So. Practice powers. He had a nice regimen worked out, for that.

Morning: calisthenics. He woke up with a yawn, a stretch, a curve of spine and tail. He continued with a nice brisk jog and/or flight over to Manhattan, where he’d either stop for breakfast at the awfully obliging 18th Precinct, or he wouldn’t. (It wouldn’t do for the detectives to get too attached to him.) Today: he did. Detective Elliot had his bite of donut awaiting him, on its usual plate on his usual window sill. She, like many of his retainers, was well trained at leaving her window open.

“Do you know who’s handling the unicorn case?” Another, lesser retainer inquired, stopping to scratch behind his ears. The little white cat with powdered sugar here and there purred benevolently.

“Probably Drake. Might be Cervantes or Clemens. Why?”

“I’ve got a report to drop off—that old sewer incident.”

“Ask the Chief.”

“Danke schön,” the guy said, with a last scritch.

Unicorn? The cat flicked its ears as it licked first one paw clean, then the other. Without so much as a glance back, it lightly leapt out onto the fire escape, and back to the ground. Unicorn. Come to think of it, it had been awhile since he’d visited a certain other well-trained retainer. The feline began training for its upcoming conditioning class with a nice stroll over to the Iris apartments, where a window on the second floor—

Was closed. There must be some mistake. The cat stood outside, and yowled. And again, and again, and again, for good measure. No one answered. The kitchen was dark, but things seemed... disturbingly messy inside. This was not how his First Retainer liked to leave things, when she went out. With whiskers angled, the feline made the short leap over to Jude’s window. Then to Kealey’s. There wasn’t even a dog inside, or a boyfriend.

Work. His First Retainer must be at work.

At the Full Circle Bookstore, he was rudely picked up and hugged and hugged and cried into.

“They’ll find her.”

“Those cops are acting like she’s dead. Like he killed her. Oh, Caylee.”

“You know Sebastian wouldn’t—couldn’t do that. They’ll find her.”

The real Caylee was under a chair not far away, staring out with baby blue eyes and slightly foofed tail at her trespassing doppelganger. Said doppelganger was unusually still as the employee holding him squeezed more tightly than a cat generally allowed.

As soon as was polite, he bolted.

It was unusual for the little white cat with black spots here and there to appear at the station twice in one day. Even less so for it to appear with its fur out of order. Detective Elliot stared at it hard for a long moment, then went back to her phone conversation. Something boring. Something unrelated. Something about a break in at a sword store, or something. Eight swords missing who cares. The cat began compulsively licking itself, its ears rapidly swiveling.

“You busy, Cervantes? We’ve got a homeless man with one boot downstairs, raving about a lion man—”

“Archer’s still out. Yeah...something about drowning in a bucket. Some stalker issue or somethin’.”

“No, the new calendar. Bone Bikini Nurse. I’m telling you, you’ve got to preorder if you want to see it before 2013— ”

Useless. Useless, useless, useless.

Who was working the case? Right—his detective retainer didn’t know. He couldn’t just wander in and search desks. He’d have to go and get Kat and she would make them invisible and they could—

But Kat was in Egypt. That’s why she’d left the list.

Right. So he was on his own. He was used to that. So he’d just... do what he did. When he was alone. He’d figure things out for himself.

Right.

The cat blinked wide blue eyes for a moment. Then it lifted one paw, and licked it; slicked it over its head. Got his chest fur back in order. And jumped back out the window, with no more sound than it had entered with.

Sign up for classes
Practice your powers
If you run away, come back with Ghost

It was a simple enough list.