The Big Kitty Read Online Free PDF Page A

Shadow’s fur. She’d just been nice—and maybe a little bit lonely. Shadow could understand that.
    It had taken all of Shadow’s bravery to make the approach to the Young One. And so far, this had turned out to be a Good Place.
    He took another deep, appreciative sniff in the doorway. A Good Place, indeed.
    *
    Sunny smiled as she came out of her room and found a gray-furred shape lurking in the hallway, his stripes making him almost blend into the shadows.
    “What have you been up to?” she asked, bending and extending a tentative hand toward the cat, an overture which he smoothly sidestepped.
    “Okay,” Sunny said, standing up and heading back down the stairs, where she started rooting around in the front hall closet.
    Mike emerged from the living room. “What are you up to now?”
    “Looking for something that Shadow can sleep on,” she replied.
    “What, the floor’s not good enough for him?” Mike shot a grumpy look from Sunny to the cat who sat at their feet, looking into the closet with interest.
    “I read somewhere that cats should sleep a little bit up from the floor so they won’t be in drafts.” Sunny didn’t mention that the “somewhere” was the Internet and that she’d just looked it up now. “I seem to remember an old pillow in here …” She got on tiptoe to rummage on an upper shelf.
    “That’s for guests!” Mike objected, but he shut up when Sunny brought down the pillow in question. It was lumpy and misshapen, and it boasted a tasteful collection of yellowish sweat stains.
    “Looks better in a nice pillowcase,” Mike mumbled.
    “Well, I think it’s fine for this particular guest just the way it is.” Sunny tossed the pillow to the ground, and Shadow immediately climbed on, sniffing.
    “Now what?” Mike demanded as Sunny began rattling hangers. She unzipped a plastic bag and pulled out an old bottle green raincoat. With a few brisk movements, she removed the raincoat’s fake-fur lining.
    Mike’s face got a little pink. “What are you doing? That’s a good coat!”
    “Dad, when’s the last time you wore it?” Sunny asked.
    He humphed for a second, then said, “I’ve been waiting for it to come back into style.”
    “For the last thirty years, the only people who’ve worn this kind of coat were flashers,” Sunny told him.
    Shadow instantly abandoned the pillow, reaching up with a paw to bat at a dangling sleeve. Sunny returned the coat to the closet and brought both lining and pillow into the living room. Wrapping the pillow in the fake fur, she arranged it in a quiet corner.
    Shadow crouched low, then sprang onto the pillow, kneading it with his forepaws and then rolling on the fake fur.
    “He likes it,” Sunny said in satisfaction, then glanced at her dad. “It’s only for a night,” she said with an apologetic grin.
    “Looks to me as if you’re making our house way too attractive to this stray.” Ignoring Shadow’s apparent ecstasies on the pillow, he returned to his couch and the program playing on the TV.
    *
    Shadow rolled until he lay facedown on the pillow, inhaling deeply. Warring scents fought for his attention, some of them old and faint, others more recent. He smelledcedar most strongly, and under that, the scent of the Old One without the taint of illness. The aromas of many heads wafted up from the pillow, and then there was just a trace of the Young One that teased his nostrils.
    Most of all, he enjoyed the sensation of being caressed by the fake fur. When he closed his eyes, the sensation brought up his very earliest memories of his mother.
    Shadow had been taken from his mother just after he’d been weaned. He’d found himself on the street as little more than a kitten, big for his age … but alone. For just a moment, he could lean against the soft fur and remember what it was to be loved.
    He snuggled down into the fur. It might not be real, but it was very, very comforting.

3
    Mike’s dire warnings turned out to be groundless. When