"Get your cat, Wilma. You are to take it home with you tonight."

"She's all right inside-she'll go out later through her cat door."

"You will take it home with you. I don't want it here at night. There's too much possibility of damage. Animals have no place in a library. You are fortunate that, so far, I have allowed it to remain during the day."

Wilma laid aside the books she was arranging and fixed Freda with a level look. "Dulcie is not a destructive cat. Her manners, as you should have observed, are impeccable."

"No cat can be trusted. You have no way to know what it might do. You will take it home with you."

Dulcie, peering from the shadows, dug her claws hard into the carpet-she'd like to tear it to shreds. Or tear Freda to shreds, flay her like a cornered rat. She imagined Freda as a hunting trophy, the woman's head mounted over the circulation desk like the deer head over Morrie's Bar.

Wilma picked up her purse. "Dulcie has a right to be here. She is the library cat. She was appointed by the mayor and she is of great value to us. Have you forgotten that her presence has doubled the children's book circulation?"

"That is such a ridiculous notion. The library is a center for sophisticated research tools, Ms. Getz. It is not a petting zoo."

"This is a small village library, Freda. It is geared to patrons who want to spend a few pleasant hours."

"Even if that were its purpose, what does that have to do with a cat?"

"Our patrons like having a little cat to pet and to talk to." Wilma gave Freda a gentle smile. "You've seen the statistics. Dulcie has brought in patrons who never came to the library before, and who are now regulars."

"Ms. Getz, the city hired me to run a library, not an animal shelter. There is absolutely no precedent for…"

"You know quite well there is precedent. Do you think the libraries that keep a cat are run by idiots? There are library cats all across the country, and every one of them is credited with large increases in circulation. Do you think the librarians in El Centro and Hayward and Hood River, in Niagara Falls, Fort Worth, and in a dozen other states would bother to keep a library cat if the cat did not perform a valuable service?"

"Very likely those libraries have a mouse problem and were forced to keep a cat. You are truly paranoid about this foolishness. I would hope your reference work is of a more scholarly…"

Wilma folded her hands loosely in front of her, a gesture Dulcie knew well when Wilma longed to punch someone. "Why don't you do your research, Freda? Library cats date at least as far back as the eighteen-hundreds, not only here but in England and Italy. There have been nonfiction books published on the library cat, a videotape is now being produced, and at least one thesis has been written on the subject-to say nothing of the Library Cat Society, which is a national organization of librarians and library cat supporters."

Beneath the reference desk, Dulcie smiled. Wilma hadn't spent thirty years putting down pushy federal parolees for nothing.

"Since Dulcie came," Wilma reminded Freda, "our children's reading program has grown so popular we've had to start three new groups-because of Dulcie. She draws out the shy children, and when new children come in to pet her, very often they discover a brand-new love for books. And they adore having her with them during story hour, snuggling among the cushions."

Dulcie wanted to cheer, to do a little cat-dance to thank Wilma-but as Freda turned away, the expression on the woman's face made Dulcie back deeper under the desk, an icy shiver passing over her.

If she had been an ordinary cat, Wilma would take her away for her own safety, because who knew what Freda might do? How could an ordinary cat fathom the lengths Freda Brackett might go to, to get rid of her?

But Dulcie was not ordinary. She was quite aware of the woman's malice and, despite Wilma's worries, she knew how to keep out of Freda's way.

Freda, turning her back on Wilma, motioned her assistant to put out the lights. Bernine Sage hurried out from the book stacks, heading for the electrical switches behind the circulation desk, her smoothly coiled red hair gleaming in the overhead light, her slim black suit describing exactly Bernine's businesslike attitude. She was not a librarian but a computer expert and a bookkeeper-a perfect choice as Freda's assistant, to bring the backward village institution into the twenty-first century. Bernine, during the exchange between Freda and Wilma, had stood in the shadows as alert as an armed guard ready to support her superior.

Bernine and Wilma had known each other for many years; Bernine was, as far as she could be, Wilma's friend. But friendship ended where her bread was buttered.

Dulcie's own relationship with Bernine was one of a fear far more complicated than her wariness of Freda Brackett. Bernine Sage had acquired her dislike of cats in an unusual way, and she knew too much about certain kinds of cats. If she got started on Celtic history and the ancient, speaking cats, and began spilling her theories to Freda and quoting mythology, she could set Ms. Brackett off in a frightening new direction. A real witch-hunt-cat hunt-focused on her; though she was neither witch nor witch's cat, Dulcie thought demurely.

But what she was could be no less terrifying to an unsympathetic and unimaginative human.

Now, as Bernine threw the switches for the overhead lights, the library rooms dimmed to a soft glow where a few desk lamps still burned, and the last patrons headed out. But Wilma glanced across the room to Dulcie, her message as clear as if she had spoken: She would not take Dulcie home-she would not give in to Freda. But her look implored Dulcie to go on out and let the woman cool down. Her gaze said clearly that she wouldn't sleep unless she knew Dulcie was safe.

Within the shadows, Dulcie blinked her eyes slowly, trying to look compliant, trying to ease her friend.

But she had no intention of leaving. Crouched on the carpet, her tail switching, she waited impatiently as Freda and Bernine, and then Wilma, moved toward the door. Bernine paused to throw the last switch, and the desk lamps went dark, casting the room into blackness. For an instant Dulcie was blind, but before the dead bolt slid home her night vision kicked in and the darkness turned transparent, the tables and chairs reemerged, and across the book-lined walls, the blowing shadows of the oaks swam and shivered.

Alone. At last she was alone.

Trotting out from beneath the desk, she leaped to its top and spun, chasing her tail, then flew to the floor again and hit the carpet running, racing through the reading rooms under tables and desks, tearing through moonlight and shadow. Around her, the darkened rooms seemed larger, as if the daytime walls had melted away into wind-tossed space. Leaping to a bookshelf, she pawed down a claw-marked volume. With a soft thud it hit the carpet.

Carrying it in her teeth, she sprang to a table where the moon's light shone brightest. Pawing the book open, she soon was wandering Africa, prowling the open grasslands, her nostrils filled with the sharp scent of wildebeest and antelope, and around her the African night reeled away to mountains so tall they vanished among the stars. Feasting on gazelle, she raced across grassy plains so vast that if Molena Point were set down there, it would seem only a child's toy village. Roaring and chuffing, she was a leopard padding among clay huts terrifying sleeping humans, leaving gigantic pawprints in the dust for unlucky hunters to follow. And when at last she was overwhelmed by Africa's immense spaces, she turned to the close, confining alleys of tenth-century England, to tales of narrow medieval streets.

But too soon those tales turned dark. Hecate wooed her. Evil beckoned to her. She blundered into stories of witches in cat-form and of cat familiars. Medieval humans stalked her, folk terrified by the sight of a cat and wanting only to kill it. Trapped by that era of cruelty, she was sucked down into darkness, unable to shake the bloody and horror-ridden images. These stories were nothing like the gentler, Celtic dramas that she liked to browse through when ancient peoples, taking cat-form, wandered down to a netherworld beneath the soft green hills, when the magical race that was kin to both man and cat could take the shape of either. When that ancient tribe of speaking cats to which she and Joe belonged-and of which they might be nearly the last survivors-had been understood and loved by the Celts. Unable to rid herself of the darker visions, she backed away from the open book, slashing at the offending volume, almost bereft of her reason.