Clyde put his arm around Ryan, hugging her. She was so cool, was fitting right in with this madness.

"He's doing fine," Charlie said. "Wilma's up there with Dulcie, in case they need more blood. She'll call when he's fully awake, when they know how the surgery went. Dulcie will stay there overnight. Dr. Firetti plans to sleep in the surgery, on a cot, but he wants another speaking cat near when Sage wakes, a cat he knows, to reassure and calm him. Being inside a building, in a cage, will terrify him until he's fully conscious-a wild little animal like Sage, with no other cat to talk to…"

"We have to tell Lucinda and Pedric," Clyde said. "They-"

"I…," Kit began, crouching on Charlie's shoulder, ready to drop to the floor, ready to race through the house searching for her humans, to be the first to tell them. Hastily Charlie grabbed her and held her securely.

"I'll find them, Kit," Charlie said. "You stay here. You can't talk to them out there." Setting Kit firmly on the table and giving her a threatening look, Charlie went in search of the Greenlaws. Behind her, Kit fidgeted. Clyde and Ryan rose to follow, Clyde promising to bring the cats a plate of party food.

"Heavy on the shrimp," Joe said, "and the ribs."

"And some of those little quiches," Kit said, reluctantly settling down. "Nice and fresh from the oven."

Clyde gave the two a long look, then moved down the hall with Ryan, shutting the door behind them, Ryan pressing her fist to her mouth to keep from collapsing into uncontrolled laughter.

"Am I dreaming?" she asked him softly. "Am I making this up? Have you lured me into some alternate world?"

He paused in the hall, drawing her close and kissing her. "Does that feel made up? If you think you're dreaming, come on upstairs…"

She laughed and kissed him back, then slipped out of his arms and headed back to the party, holding his hand. But all the rest of that evening she wasn't really certain they hadn't slipped, together, through Alice 's looking glass or through some other innocent-seeming portal into a startling new universe. The kaleidoscopic events, since the morning that Joe Grey had spoken to her for the first time-Christmas morning, the morning Clyde proposed to her-had left her waking suddenly in the night laughing out loud and then seriously questioning her sanity.

But then she thought, trying to steady herself, Tomorrow we'll be married, and that's real. How many women marry, for life, into the family of a talking cat?

CHARLIE FOUND LUCINDA in the kitchen setting out a plate of homemade cookies on one side of the round table that was loaded with party food. The tall, older woman was so thin that when Charlie put her arm around her, she could feel every bone-but bone covered in lean muscle. Even at eighty-some, Lucinda Greenlaw was healthy and strong; she did most of her own housework and walked several miles a day. "I need to talk with you," Charlie said softly.

Lucinda looked at her, startled.

"Nothing bad," Charlie breathed, "only private. Kit will tell it later, but she's-"

Lucinda laughed. "So impetuous you can't get in a word. Come on, Pedric's in the laundry." And Lucinda headed across the kitchen, away from the crowd. Charlie, following her, heard through a tangle of laughter Dallas 's raised and angry voice from the living room and Mike's sharp retort.

What was that about? Mike and Dallas never had words. Glancing across the room, she caught Ryan's eye. Ryan shook her head almost imperceptibly before she turned away.

On the closed laundry door hung a little sign: PLEASE DO NOT OPEN, which Clyde had posted to give the three household cats some semblance of quiet and privacy-none of the three liked loud parties. Two were elderly, and the younger, Snowball, had always been shy. Slipping the door open, they found Pedric sitting hunched on the bottom bunk, his head ducked beneath the upper bunk of the animals' bed, petting the three cats. Snowball lay in his lap, and Scrappy and Fluffy were snuggled in the blankets next to him. The cats had shared the two-bunk bed with the two old dogs until Barney, the golden, and then Rube, the black Lab, had passed away. Snowball was still grieving for Rube.

Against the party noise beyond the closed door, Charlie told the Greenlaws about Willow and Sage, then about John Firetti knowing the cats' secret. Neither of the two tall, thin, eighty-year-olds seemed too surprised; it took a lot to amaze Lucinda and Pedric.

"I always thought," Lucinda said, "that John Firetti acted a bit strange around Kit. When we first took her in for her shots, he looked at her for a long time without saying anything, and then he seemed to expect her to lie still and behave herself. He asked if she'd had her kitten shots, and when I told him we didn't know, that she was a stray, he asked where we'd found her," Lucinda recalled. "When we said Hellhag Hill, there was a sudden light in his eyes, a gleam of excitement, then he quickly looked down."

"But," Pedric said, "mostly it was his assuming Kit would lie still. Why would he think he could just look at her and tell her it would hurt more if she wiggled, and she would hold stone still for him? I thought at the time that it was his tone, that he had a unique understanding of a cat's nature, that his voice and inflection somehow told his patients he expected them to behave.

"But later," Pedric said, "we wondered."

"Apparently he does have a unique understanding," Lucinda said, smiling. "More understanding than I ever guessed. We did think it strange, though, that he never suggested spaying her. He never brought up the subject. And of course we didn't."

"Well," Charlie said, stroking Snowball, "looks like I'm more shaken by this than you two. I never imagined…"

But when she looked at the older couple, who had recently been through a frightening kidnapping that could have cost them their lives, who had escaped unharmed with great resourcefulness, she knew there wasn't much that would shock the Greenlaws-until she mentioned the hidden book.

When she told them more about the battle at the ruins, and described the old volume the ferals had found, Lucinda's eyes brightened with excitement. "Where is it, Charlie? What did they do with it?"

And Pedric was burning with even more excitement. "More tales of speaking cats! Do you think…Are there stories we've never heard?" Charlie could imagine the old man avidly reading those tales, and memorizing every word.

BEYOND THE LAUNDRY room's closed door, as the three discussed the mysterious volume, Mike Flannery and his daughter had left the crowd, heading up the open stairs to the new second floor, to the construction project that had marked the beginning of Ryan's romance with Clyde. On earlier visits Mike had seen the impressive addition Ryan had built for Clyde when they'd first met; now Ryan wanted to show him how she would add her own studio. Carrying fresh cans of beer, leaving behind the sounds of the party, neither father nor daughter glanced back to see the gray tomcat pad watchfully out of the kitchen to follow them, they didn't see him slink up the stairs behind them to the master suite and into the shadows beneath the king-size bed.

Joe ignored a twinge of guilt at spying on his friends. At breaching father and daughter's privacy. Dulcie would have said, "Can't they have a few minutes alone, the evening before Ryan's to be married? Do you have to be so nosy?"

But of course he was nosy, he was a cat. Cats were driven by nosiness, they were masters of curiosity. The investigative instinct was their finest mark of uniqueness, and who was he to go against basic feline nature? He followed. He hid under the bed. And he listened. And if the stab of guilt continued to accompany the tomcat's eavesdropping on his about-to-be housemate, Joe thought Ryan wouldn't really mind, that he could talk his way around her annoyance.