The Cats of Tanglewood Forest Read Online Free PDF Page B

beingchanged from a dying girl into a kitten wasn’t trivial any way you might stretch it. Still…
    Lillian swallowed, her mouth dry.
    “We’ve come this far,” she said, trying to keep the reluctance from her voice. “No point in stopping here.”
    T.H. nodded. “Except you go on from here on your own.”
    “W-what? Why?”
    She was going to add, You’re not scared, are you? But she didn’t suppose he’d appreciate that. Being changed into a kitten was her predicament, not his, and she couldn’t very well expect him to put himself in danger for her.
    “Old Mother Possum and I—we have some history,” T.H. said. “I ate her husband, and I don’t think she took too kindly to that.”
    “You
ate
her husband?”
    T.H. shrugged. “He was just lying there in the middle of a game trail one evening. What was I supposed to do?”
    “Not eat him?”
    “I’m a fox. It’s what we do.”
    “I suppose. But I can see why she’d be mad at you.”
    “She’s not,” T.H. said. “I’m still standing here,aren’t I? She doesn’t
know
that I ate him. But if I get any closer, I’ll bet she’ll smell it on me, and then there’ll be trouble.”
    “So I have to go on… alone?”
    T.H. gave her shoulder a nudge with his muzzle.
    “Come on now,” he said. “I thought nothing scared you.”
    “I-I’m not scared. It’s just… maybe I should wait until morning.”
    “An old witch like that,” T.H. said, “she’ll be fast asleep during the day. Probably won’t take it well, being woken up and all.”
    Lillian shuddered, and then she squared her small shoulders. “Wish me luck,” she said.
    “I do.”
    “Thanks for coming this far with me—and for catching me back at the creek.”
    “My pleasure. Like I said, I was bored. Now I’m anything but. I’ll wait here for you.”
    “You will?”
    T.H. smiled. “Sure. I want to see where your story goes next.”
    Lillian was about to tell him that he was nothing like she thought a fox would be, except she realizedthat she was only stalling again—putting off what she didn’t want to do. Aunt used to say, “There’s those that talk, and those that do. Which do you think gets the thing done?”
    It wasn’t a question that Aunt ever expected an answer to.
    “I’ll see you later,” Lillian told T.H.

    Without T.H. leading the way, she had a harder time judging where the ground was solid and where it would turn to mush under her paws. By the time she reached the hillock where the big dead pine stood, she was caked with mud and soaked right through. She shook herself, spraying mud and smelly marsh water in all directions, making the bottles on the tree clink and rattle even louder.
    There were dozens of the little bottles—dark blue and brown glass, the kind used for medicines and tinctures. They banged and clinked against each other in an eerie chorus while Lillian froze, holding her breath until they stopped moving. But she knew it was too late. The noise would have already warned the possum witch that she was here.

    What if the witch wouldn’t listen to her? She was just a bedraggled kitten. What if the witch just turned her into something even less appealing than a cat? A frog, maybe. Or a mosquito. A clump of weeds.
    She looked back the way she’d come. Should she try to escape while she could? There was no sign of T.H. No sound except for the cries of the peepers and the hum of insects. She turned back to the dead pine and her heart caught in her throat.
    Old Mother Possum was standing under its bare branches, among the bottles.



Lillian hadn’t expected her to fit her name as well as she did—neither a woman nor a possum, she was rather some odd combination of the two. She stood just under three feet—tall for a possum, short for a woman, but much bigger than the kitten Lillian was. Her eyes were so dark they didn’t seem to have pupils. There was a long possum shape to her face, and her dark gray hair was pulled back in a wispy bun. Even