Eight Lives (Match Made In Hell Book 1) Read online

  I shook that daydream away. I couldn’t afford thoughts like that.

  “We don’t need to waste money on too many clothes. One or two outfits should be more than enough,” I said. I wouldn’t be a man for long. Once we found someone who could fix whatever was broken in me, I would be a cat again, and we shouldn’t waste funds on something temporary.

  “Just enough to hold you over,” Anselm agreed.

  I nodded. This wasn’t our future. Planning for anything more couldn’t happen. The thought was sobering. I was getting caught up, but I couldn’t. I wanted Anselm to be happy, and after his reaction both times I’d turned into a man, I knew what needed to be done. I needed to be a cat again.

  We rounded the corner and found the clothing shop Anselm had mentioned. He pulled the door open, and we quickly made our way inside. I usually wasn’t invited into these kinds of stores—no pets allowed. We wandered through displays of clothes, and I let my hand move over the fabrics. They weren’t made from rough materials like before I was curse.

  Things like fashion had come a long way. I’d never paid much attention to it as a cat, and Anselm had his own sense of style.

  “What about this?” Anselm asked.

  I glanced over to see him holding up a skirt. “I don’t think my dick will fit,” I teased.

  “Let’s find out. Go try it on.”

  There was strength in Anselm’s fingertips as he guided me to the dressing room and pushed me through the doors. He threw the skirt inside and a shirt to follow. I glared at the door for a moment but sighed in defeat. I took off the jacket and pulled the shirt over my head, then stepped into the skirt before I looked at myself in the mirror.

  The skirt hardly covered anything, and it didn’t help that when my tail stood up, the back of the skirt rose as well. “No way,” I said, but Anselm still heard me.

  He opened the door and moved inside. His eyes were all over me, drinking in the outfit he had picked. I felt like he was having a go at me.

  “It’s not a bad look,” he mused.

  I blushed. “It hardly covers anything,” I whispered. It came to the middle of my thigh. If I bent over, he would see my ass.

  Anselm stepped closer, and my heart pounded. Suddenly, the room felt too small.

  “It covers enough,” Anselm said, his fingers brushing over my bare thigh. I turned my head away as heat flooded my face. He made me feel small with how close he was standing. He seemed to suck all the air from the room as he moved closer. I closed my eyes, waiting…but for what?

  Anselm stepped back. “I’ll find you some pants, but the skirt is appealing,” he commented, leaving the dressing room.

  I exhaled and pressed my hand over my chest.

  What had I thought was going to happen? What had I hoped would happen?

  I shook my head as I waited for other items to be brought in. One by one, I tried them on before selecting jeans and a T-shirt to wear out of the store.

  Even as we took the rest to the counter to pay, I blushed knowing that somewhere in the pile of clothes was the skirt I’d tried on.

  Anselm

  The moon cast a soft glow, illuminating the park. Everything shined, damp from the fresh water that had been sprayed so the plants and flora could thrive.

  Edmund walked beside me. There was a soft bounce to his steps as he looked around.

  We’d walked this path countless times before. Some nights he had weaved between my legs, dancing around my feet. He’d chased the leaves and rolled in the grass, enjoying his time outside of the house. Other nights, he’d ridden on my shoulder, flexing his claws into my flesh as his tail softly thumped against my cheek.

  More often than not, we were silent. Even now, neither of us spoke.

  I was content to be here with him, even if I was worried.

  This was the longest he had been a human since being cursed. The Med-Witch had done something, had changed him from a cat into a man, and I wondered if she had turned him into a man for good.

  If so, what did that mean for us? Would he leave to live his own life now? I didn’t want to lose him. It wasn’t fair, of course. He had a right to live his life as a man. If he wanted to be a man, I wouldn’t stand in his way, but he’d said it didn’t matter either way. And maybe to him, it didn’t. He had been human for two decades and a cat for a century. Being a man must be scary now. It probably didn’t help that this world, with its technology and modern conveniences, was so different than the one he had lived in before.

  If he decided to be human, it would be a learning process. He would have to adjust to living his life on two feet once more. I would see him through that. And just maybe, what he’d said after the first time he’d changed was true. Maybe he wouldn’t leave me—unless death took him.

  My heart squeezed, and I reached out, finding his hand in the darkness.

  Our fingers curled together, and he glanced down before lifting his neon gaze to me.

  It was different to touch him like this, but I needed the contact, the comfort.

  “Do you ever miss the life you lost?” I asked. It wasn’t something I had ever asked before. Neither of us ever talked a lot about the time before we met. Of course, I knew about his father, his mother, and his siblings—those that he had liked and disliked. I knew of the people he had left behind the day he’d been cursed. We had traced the line of his blood to the present day and knew his family was vast. It stretched across Europe and North America. But many of the small details of his life, the details I had forgotten of my own, we never discussed. It just never seemed important.

  We knew what mattered, and that was enough.

  “I haven’t thought about it for a long time,” he admitted, peeking at me before settling his gaze into the distance. The streetlights burned softly, lighting the path our feet had chosen. “But I don’t think I’ve missed it. Life was complicated even before getting cursed.”

  From what little I did know, “complicated” was one way to put it.

  “Do you ever regret rejecting her—Charlotte?” I asked.

  She was the witch who had cursed him. I didn’t know if she had been a dark witch before that moment, but regardless, after she’d turned a man into a cat, she’d been branded, marked the way every dark witch was.

  “Hmm.” Edmund tipped his head back, peering toward the pinpricks of light that peppered the dark sky. They were faint, hardly visible because of the city’s glow, but they were there, just barely. “Not really,” he said. “I mean, I was honest with her, and I always try to be honest. I guess she just didn’t like the fact that I was more interested in William than her.”

  William—the brother. Of course Edmund was more interested in him. But being attracted to men a hundred years ago was taboo. He’d been cursed for much more than rejection, for much more than a girl’s wounded heart. It was because he had fancied men too.

  “I guess in a way I’m happy she was a witch,” Edmund said. “I could have been shot.”

  He most likely would have been hung, to be fair. The crowd had always preferred to watch a body swing in those days. Something about a body as it jerked at the end of a rope enchanted them.

  “Though I guess thinking about it,” he continued on, “it’s kind of crazy they were witches. I grew up with them and didn’t know.”

  He might have grown up with them, but they had grown up in the shadows, apart from him in their own way. People like them, like me I suppose, had always existed. We had been cast out, hunted and murdered time and time again because we were monsters—the things that went bump in the night, so to speak. Charlotte and William had probably learned to hide what they were, what they could do before they even understood their own nature. It was sad. But that had been considered living until only a couple of decades ago for anyone, anything that was . . . inhuman.

  “I wonder what ever happened to them,” he mused. “Or, well, I guess Charlotte is dead now.”

  I hoped she was dead at least. Or maybe I didn’t. If she was aliv
e still, she could re-curse him. The idea almost sounded appealing, but I would never let her be the one to sentence Edmund to life as less than a man once again. She had taken everything from him once, and even if it burned my soul that he was a man again—that he could leave me—I wouldn’t let her take his life a second time.

  “Do you want to find out what happened to William?” I asked.

  The boy had been his first love in many ways. Or his first crush, in any case.

  “Hmm. I don’t know,” Edmund said. “I mean, he did let his sister curse me.”

  “I suppose he wasn’t all pure of heart either,” I replied.

  William could have helped him. He could have removed the curse. Instead, he had let it stand.

  “I think he was just scared of her,” Edmund explained, his fingers tightening around mine as we stopped near a flowering plant. Its petals were open to the soft light of the moon and stars. “She was a bit . . . intense from what I remember.”

  “Fair enough. I remember very little from that time in my life.” But he already knew that. I had told him what I could remember of my life, the things I was willing to share. Still, there was always more to know, a memory that slipped through the cracks and haunted me for days until I forgot it again.

  “Not even the person who turned you?” Edmund asked.

  “I woke up like this,” I told him, thinking back to my death. It was empty. I didn’t know how I’d died, nor did I remember what I’d been doing when it happened. “I remember the weight of the dirt over my coffin.” I could remember pushing on the top, trying my damnedest to shove the wood away, but it hadn’t budged. “I remember screaming”—screaming so long my voice left me—“and eventually digging myself out.” I’d punched my way through the wood, bloodying up my knuckles before dragging myself from the grave into the snow and mud. “I remember how hungry I was.”

  I could call to mind the first person I’d killed with perfect clarity. The way they had screamed and fought and eventually stopped struggling as the light went out of their eyes still haunted me from time to time. Even now, I remembered dragging them to my grave, burying them in the soil I had disturbed. The blood had been so hard to wash away. Maybe I had never fully cleansed myself of that first murder.

  “That sounds scary,” Edmund said quietly, drawing me away from my thoughts.

  “I don’t remember, honestly,” I replied. I must have been scared at the time, scared of what I had done, what it had meant for me, but even that was lost to me. So much from those Dark Ages, as people called them now, was a whisper, a memory on the edge of my mind that I couldn’t recall.

  “Hey!” he exclaimed, releasing my hand as he turned to face me with a happy smile. “I just realized we have that in common. We both died once.”

  I laughed softly. He was right. We did have that in common.

  “We have to pick a day and buy a cake,” he said. “Maybe call it Happy Death Day.”

  “January 1,” I told him. It was the day he’d actually died.

  “You would remember,” he said. I reached out, my thumb brushing over his ear. He turned into my touch, his chest shaking. Of course, I remembered the day our fates had become intertwined. But it wasn’t saving him that made the date unforgettable. It was the fact that I had resigned myself to die, to finally get some fucking rest, and then I’d stumbled across him.

  “How could I forget?” I asked.

  “We were celebrating.” Edmund sighed, his blue eyes darkening as his thoughts turned back to the past, the night his life had ended in a sense. “Charlotte pulled me away from the crowd.”

  And Edmund had never returned. Well, not as a man anyway.

  “You couldn’t survive one day as a cat on your own,” I teased him. But it was true too.

  He had been kicked by a horse within hours of being cursed and had died.

  “I’d just become a cat,” he countered, his voice high. “You try crossing the street after learning something like that.”

  “It sounds less like you were trying to cross the street and more like you were trying to play in traffic,” I replied, my lips twitching as I peered down at him. Maybe he had been trying to end his new existence. I wouldn’t ask because he’d never asked why I was outside that fateful morning so close to sunrise. Even we, as close as we were, had things we did not share.

  “Even if I wanted to kill myself, I woke back up,” he countered.

  “And here we are,” I stated.

  It wasn’t such a terrible place to be. I was happy I was with him at least—man or cat.

  Edmund

  Anselm and I continued to explore the city. The lights, sounds, and smells all around us were still new and exciting. I turned in circles trying to see everything, trying to burn it all into my memory.

  Cars rushed by. The glare of their headlights was blinding. They honked their horns, screamed profanities at other drivers, and all seemed to be in a rush to get from one place to another. People paid no mind to their surroundings. Instead, they were consumed by the devices in their hands. They pushed by one another, muttering, “Excuse me,” before they hurried along to destinations unknown.

  A stench that was familiar—and yet not as overpowering now that I was human—hung heavily in the air. It wasn’t until we turned a corner that I recognized the scent of food and noticed how hungry I was. We stopped in front of one of the windows. The smell coming from inside made my mouth water. Normally Anselm and I would just walk past since neither of us could eat anything inside, but I bet as a human I could eat lots of different things.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. It was a hunger I hadn't felt since being human—a nagging ache in the pit of my stomach that told me what little I had eaten earlier wasn’t enough.

  “You want something from there?” Anselm asked.

  I opened my mouth but shook my head. What would it do to me when I returned to my other form if I ate food too rich for my stomach as a cat? I probably shouldn’t do anything that might fuck me over in the long run. I would be a cat before long, and we would find a way to keep that as my only form.

  “Come on.” Anselm opened the door. I hesitated but stepped inside of the building, and he followed. A few heads turned as we came in. Most of the humans probably thought I was just some weirdo cosplaying as a cat. Maybe a few of the humans who knew of the world that existed just below the surface would think I was a shapeshifter stuck somewhere in the middle. If there was something else supernatural enjoying a midnight meal, they could smell the magic that lingered in my blood—the curse that was fading and made me this cat-man.

  The woman who stood at the host podium looked me over for a moment. She seemed to be trying to decide if my ears and tail were real or if I was just a freak with a cat fetish.

  “Two. Booth,” Anselm told her.

  “Right this way.” She put on a fake smile before leading us in. Tables filled with people took up the center of the room. Booths lined the walls. Lights hung from the ceiling, illuminating the dining area. It was so bright it almost hurt my eyes.

  When I’d been human, we hadn’t had places like this to eat in. My family couldn’t have afforded it anyway. In the early 1900s, my family had been poor and often hungry, but more often than not, only the rich had dined out.

  Everything was so different. There were so many people, so many different smells.

  As I climbed into the booth, the bell around my neck tingled.

  “Your waiter will be with you shortly,” the woman said.

  Anselm sat beside me as the woman passed us two menus. I took mine and looked it over.

  “Oh look, they have tuna—your favorite,” Anselm teased.

  I elbowed him. “Har. Har,” I mocked, looking at the other options. I didn’t know what I liked. All I’d been eating was fish, chicken, and the occasional red meat for the last hundred years. I guessed that tuna was the safe choice.

  “Hi, I’m Matt. I’ll be your waiter tonight,” a young man with a bright smile and b
ounce to his step said when he came to our table.

  “Hello, Matt,” Anselm said before I could. “Just a mug of warm milk for him, please.”

  “And what can I get you?” Matt asked. His eyes moved over Anselm. I knew that look, the expression of desire on the young man’s face. Over the years, I’d seen the way just a look or a gesture could lure dinner home for Anselm.

  “I won’t be eating,” Anselm told him. Matt wrote something down before moving away.

  “I’m sure he’s on the menu,” I said, moving my finger down the page. “Yup. Right here. One Matt,” I teased as I pointed to something called Salmon Delight. Anselm leaned towards me, biting the tip of my ear. A shiver ran down my spine, and I swallowed the sound that bubbled in my throat. “Bully,” I muttered as I rubbed the abused ear.

  My body felt hot, and I looked away from Anselm. I remembered this feeling. And I remembered how to push it away, bury it deep within myself. Anselm was my best friend. More importantly, I was a cat. My current body wasn’t something I could keep, not if I wanted things to continue as they were between us.

  “Do you want the tuna, or would you like to try the chicken? Maybe something else? They have pasta,” Anselm said.

  I rubbed my chin, trying to decide. “Maybe the chicken,” I said, unwilling to try something that might upset my stomach. However, I was hungry and chicken didn’t sound so bad.

  Matt returned with my mug of milk. His eyes were still on Anselm as he smiled.

  “Are you ready to order yet?” Matt asked. Anselm looked at me.

  “I’ll have the grilled chicken over rice,” I said, but Matt was still entranced by the vampire. “Human and still can’t get service,” I muttered.

  Anselm chuckled; the rich sound was something I was familiar with even though it had become rare to hear in recent years. “My companion would like the grilled chicken over rice. Also the baked tuna to go, please.”