Page 68 of Choice of the Cat (Vampire Earth 2)
It turned out that the soup meant the general consensus was that his ordeal was over. While he ate, Duvalier went to get him some clothes, leaving the door open to air out the stuffy room. Forty-eight hours ago, he would have run howling into the hills, but now he was content to just sip at the soup and wait for her to return with something presentable. The blood-and-filfh-smeared towel deserved a decent burial; all four corners were gnawed to shreds.
He finished the meal and got dressed, still trembling a litde. When he followed Duvalier into the brighter light of the little honeycomb of rooms that composed the toilet and washing facilities at the rear of the Hall, he put a hand on her shoulder. She, and everything around her, didn't look quite right. There was little color in her skin, and the wooden walls were ashen, like bleached-out driftwood.
"Just a second," he said. "Why do you look different? The light is all odd."
"I know what you mean. It's not the light-it's your eyes. A Cat with some medical training explained it to me once. It has to do with the cells in your eyes. I guess there are two kinds; he called them rods and cones. The rods are good at picking up low light levels. You've got a whole lot more rods now. Your color vision will return once your eyes get used to it; right now your brain is just not processing it right. That was his theory. You'll adapt. In any kind of light short of pitch black, you're going to have no trouble seeing from here on out."
"Did the doctor explain the drunken feeling?"
"That was even more confusing, and it's got to do with your ears. We have these little bags of liquid in our ears that help us keep our balance. Some animals, cats in particular, have a whole different set of nerve fibers attached to them. You know how a cat always lands on its feet, or at least nearly always? It's from these nerves. Their balance corrects as involuntarily as your leg moving when your knee gets tapped. Right now you're oversensitized again."
She walked into the kitchen and picked up a sack of flour.
"Stand on one leg. Raise the other one like a dog marking a tree. Higher. Okay, keep it there," she ordered.
Valentine obliged, noticing that as he raised his leg he barely moved. Normally he would wobble a bit.
"Now catch," she said, tossing the ten-pound sack of flour with a shoving motion.
He caught it a few inches from his chest, causing little puffs of flour to shoot in the air. What's more, his leg was still raised.
"Interesting," he said, returning his leg to the floor. He shifted the bag of flour in his hands, and quick as a flash hurled it back at her.
Her reflexes were no less than his. She snatched the bag out of the air, but while she was strong enough to halt the ten pounds of flour aimed like a missile at her head, the bag wasn't quite up to the task. Its weakened fibers opened, and a white bomb detonated full in her face.
"Mother-!" she screamed, emerging from the cloud in kabuki makeup and fury.
Valentine let out the first squawk of a laugh and then read her expression. Their eyes locked for a second, like a gazelle and cheetah staring at each other on the veldt. He ran for his life.
"Dead meat, Valentine!" she shrieked, after him in a flash. Valentine went to the stairs up to his little flat, and jumped. To his astonishment, he made it up to the top of the flight in a single bound. With only one foot down, he changed direction and leapt onto the next platform over, a jump he normally would have needed a sprint to cover.
He slipped on the landing and sprawled. Duvalier was on his back in a moment-she must have equaled or exceeded the speed and power of his bounds. He tried to wriggle out, but as he turned over, she pinned him with legs that felt like a steel trap. She nailed his arms down in a full pin. He found the situation arousing: Duvalier in the classical position astride him, the flour liberally coating her from the waist up adding its own strange zest to the moment. But her eyes were lit only in triumph.
"Okay, gotcha," she said. "Let's have it."
"Sorry," he panted. "Didn't mean to make you the monkey's uncle."
"What's that?
"A monkey's uncle!"
"Can't hear you, Valentine, speak up."
"Uncle!"
"That's better," she said, rolling off him.
He took a deep breath, still goosey with the half-drunken, half-hungover sensation.
"Ghost, how do they do it?"
"Do what?"
"Change us like that."
He shrugged. "I've wondered about that myself. Some of the Wolves used to say they were just awakening something already inside us. I was talking to a cabin mate named Pankow one time, and I remember he took a gas lamp that was barely on, just a flicker, and turned it all the way up. It hissed and roared and lit up the whole room. He said that's what the wizards do, they just 'turn up the heat.'"
Valentine wondered if he could share his fears with her, as well. He looked at the healing wound on his hand. "But the bigger the flame, the sooner the gas runs out. You swap heat and light for longevity. It worries me. I haven't met many elderly Hunters."
