They whistled and propositioned her lewdly. One of the punks swaggered onto the street.

"You wanna dance?" He stood with his feet apart, hips slightly forward, and the bill of his baseball cap shielding his eyes. "C'mon, bitch." He took his hands out of his pockets. "You gonna get it whether you want it or not."

Everything conspired against her, from the squirming kitten to the clothes she was wearing. She didn't look like Catwoman; she didn't feel like Catwoman. And the punk was moving closer. Then a finger of ice skipped down her spine. Her gut shrank and the fear turned to rage.

"Not on your best day." The words didn't matter. Everything depended on the edge of her voice and the thrust of her glare through shadow to the place where his eyes had to be. "Not with all your slime friends helping you." Selina forgot where they were, what she held, and even who she was. She forgot that the costume was stuffed under the bed. Her rage spread across her face. Like a giant spark it leapt between her eyes and his.

She had him.

"You one crazy bitch," the punk murmured, retreating.

Selina ached to see his eyes, to hear his voice when his mouth was full of broken teeth and blood. Not this time. The kitten still squirmed. She'd have to be content with breaking his spirit for a few hours, and the hope that his peers by the lamppost would sense his injury and finish the job for her.

"Beat it, slime, while you still can."

He tugged on the bill of his cap. Maybe he thought he'd regain the advantage if he met the crazy lady's eyes. If he had, he was wrong. Selina was waiting for him. She showed real teeth through a real smile and started toward him, then walked on by. As she had hoped, his erstwhile companions hurled insults until she was out of earshot.

Another hundred yards and she began to relax.

Only a man can make a woman forget everything but fear.

The thought spread through her mind along with Rose's face. The punk's eyes were astonished. Like the druggers, he couldn't quite believe that a woman---a bitch---had overwhelmed him. But there was no astonishment, surprise, or disbelief in the memory of Rose's face, only fear, then a victim's acceptance of inevitable fate.

Selina let herself into her apartment. The kitten escaped before she got the door shoved shut. The locks reset automatically.

A case of tuna fish was stacked in the kitchen cabinets. As easy to prepare and serve as it was to store, tuna was one of Mother Nature's almost-perfect foods---especially when each can was certified dolphin-safe. She opened a can and, leaning over the sink, began eating the contents with her fingers.

Her hunger knots loosened; her thoughts wandered back to the mission. Selina was angry at Old MoJo and the others. They'd used her, they'd used the kitten, and they'd cheated her out of a meal. It was a superficial anger, though, and would be gone before the tuna can was empty. There was a deeper layer of anger, though, that was not so easily erased. The world was full of people who didn't like cats. Dislike could turn to hatred, but, in adults, it rarely showed itself as stark fear. Rose's fear of cats wasn't something she'd carried around since childhood.

Licking tuna slivers from her fingers, Selina set the almost-empty can on the floor for the cats to scour.

There was only one conclusion that felt right: There was a man behind Rose's terror, but somehow he'd managed to displace her fear from him to an innocent cat.

Selina held her breath as a familiar but not quite comfortable sensation passed over her. She let her breath out raggedly. The transformation from her ordinary self to Catwoman was complete before Selina left the alcove that her landlord called a kitchen. She shed clothes with every step toward the bed and was nearly naked by the time she reached it. The sleek costume fit like a second skin---as well as it should. The garment had been obscenely expensive.

In the beginning she tried using secondhand costumes from theatrical supply houses. She'd even tried making one herself. Nothing stood up to the punishment her alter ego gave it. Then one day a clumsily written letter slid under the door. The outside hall was eerily empty. The paper bore a sketch, a price, and an address where the transaction could be completed. It scared Selina witless, but she was ready to try anything. She assembled the asking price in gold and other specified substances, left it on a bench in a deserted courtyard, and found the leather costume laid across her bed one evening two weeks later.

As she smoothed the costume over her arms and legs, Selina Kyle vanished. The simpler Catwoman stood in her place.

"I'll be back before dawn," she whispered to the assembled pairs of glowing eyes. "Don't wait up." She eased along the ledge, around the corner, and was gone.

Between the tuna fish and the costume, Selina had considered other ways of resolving her curiosity. She briefly pictured herself at the mission. The doors of the mission were never closed, but the nuns weren't foolish enough to stay downstairs after dark. If Selina went there now, she'd have to explain herself to the brawny ex-addicts who ran the night shelter like a marine boot camp. Not likely. She thought of telephoning Mother Joseph directly, but Old MoJo wouldn't be in her office taking calls at this hour. Besides, Selina's phone wasn't working... again. One of the cats---she didn't know which---had developed a taste for plastic wire insulation. It probably wasn't good for the cat, but it was fatal for the phone.

And if Selina had spoken to Mother Joseph, what then? If Old MoJo had known anything useful about Rose, would she have invited Selina to bring a kitten to dinner? For all that the nuns had been in the East End much longer than Selina herself, they were women who had chosen to live without men. What did any of them know about the real world---the man-dominated world where Selina and Rose lived?

Catwoman landed between the carved stone gargoyles overlooking the mission. Her body flexed from toes to neck, absorbing the impact, keeping her balanced for whatever the next moment required. Crouched in the shadows, she listened to the city noises, straining to hear anything that meant she had been spotted jumping from the tenement to the church roof. She could have been spotted and she could have been heard. Whatever else the Catwoman was, she was not endowed with uncanny powers, but most people had no notion of the untapped potential within their bodies.

Gotham was never quiet. At best the auditory chaos ebbed to an ignorable drone from which the alert ear could always discern sirens, screams, and the occasional gunshot---four of them, small-calibre semiautomatic over by the docks. Catwoman's lips parted in an unconscious snarl. With her mind's eye she could see the lightweight, lethal, and almost certainly foreign-made weapon. She knew the hardware by sight and sound, though she shunned it personally. She'd heard the old men---survivors from the sixties---mutter about the days of zip guns and Saturday night specials that were as likely to blow up in your face as take out your opposition. Those days were gone long before she got off the bus. Since the Gulf war, a Saturday night special was an army-surplus grenade.

Though the docks were a dozen blocks away, Catwoman listened for answering fire. She didn't expect to head that way before going home, but one never knew. A wise person, no matter where they were or how they were dressed, paid attention to night sounds. The next sound she heard was a police siren screaming down Ninth Avenue, going somewhere in a big hurry, but not to the docks.